[Wikipedia-l] Donation History

[Jaap van Ganswijk]

At 2004-01-01 07:05, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>I'm sure that the foundation will receive much more
>than that. I plan to start figuring out the dos and
>don't of grant writing later in January. This may be
>an area where it would make sense to hire a
>professional grant writer but I still want to do some
>research on the subject anyway. At the very least it
>will inform us better about what we should tell the
>grant writer. 
>
>However I am confident that a majority of the money we
>get through donations will be from individual donors,
>not charitable foundations. All the better as far as I
>am concerned (foundation money often comes with at
>least implied strings attached to do certain things). 

I don't think Wikipedia should be build on grants and
subsidies etc.

It seems that paying for the hardware and bandwidth
can be done by the authors, but I don't think it should.
The readers should pay for it, either directly or by
having to lookat/ignore advertisements.

I also donated $20 to Wikipedia some days ago, but
when I thought some more about it later, I started
to see a strange irony:

I make my money with a 'Wikipedia kind-of' free
information site about chips and other electronics:

http://www.chipdir.org/

And I make that money by selling ad-space on the site.

It's quite ironic (or even 'hypocrital'?) to keep
Wikipedia free of advertisements by having it
sponsored by a site that makes it's money from
selling advertising space itself.

I think that Wikipedia should reconsider putting
advertising on it's pages. (Perhaps only on pages
about popular subjects for example.)

I make $180..$250 per month from Google's Adwords and
those ad's are half-way pages on spots that I otherwise
would have trouble to sell to individual advertisers,
so Wikipedia should be able to do much better.

For the time being Wikipedia should have enough money
but I think that this anti-advertising attitude should
be reconsidered, because there is nothing against modest,
on-topic advertising. I never got a complaint (but in
my information-intensive field on-topic ad's are
usually considered to be extra information).

Why not at least set up a test, for example on all the
Britney Spears and Lord of the Rings pages and such?

Greetings,
Jaap