[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia public relations

Fri Nov 21 18:01:52 UTC 2003

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Nov 21, 2003, at 00:25, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> IIRC he said that there were no /plans/ for ads in the forseeable 
>> future. I
>> think that that is the best we can all hope for. But donations alone 
>> may not
>> be able to always pay the bills. In that case I wouldn't mind having
>> something smart like Google AdSense serve ads to anons. In that 
>> scenario an
>> added benefit would be to give anons another reason to log-in: no 
>> more ads!
>
> The last time this was suggested we lost most of the Spanish-language 
> contributors to an acrimonious fork.
>
> If you want to set up your own Wikipedia mirror with ad banners and 
> send the money to the foundation, go for it; but the day there are 
> advertisements on the main Wikipedia site we'll lose a lot of people, 
> including me. 

I expect that this trial balloon will come up from time to time, and I 
agree wiith Brion that the results could cause more harm than good.  I 
support the view that the project should eventually become financially 
self-sufficient without being dependent on one single person, but any of 
us who have been here for any length of time are bound to have an idea 
about what annoys the public.

> Our primary resource is people, not money; we'd be better off with not 
> enough cash donations from people who care (plus offers of technical 
> help and free hosting) than rolling in dough without people. One of 
> the benefits of the license model after all is that it explicitly 
> allows the content, and thus the project, to live on if the current 
> host folds. 

Not having the money .makes people more creative and inventive. 
 Depending on a single source sounds like an argument for Wiki-Welfare. 
 Cutting off the stable funding (whether in cash or in kind) would be 
disruptive.  The content would survive, but the project itself would be 
severely set-back while waiting for new hosting to be established and 
publicized so that people would know where to find it.  NPOV could be 
the biggest victim.

> To bring a little extra cash into the foundation without pissing a lot 
> of people off, we might look into merchandizing. An actual usable 
> CD-ROM version could sell at least some token copies (think in 
> particular of those folks in countries where internet access is 
> largely limited to pay-per-minute dial-up), and hey, who doesn't want 
> a Wikipedia T-shirt? :) 

Yeah!  Who's working on the 1.0 project?  The VfD debate showed that we 
have a lot of people who might be better suited to the kind of 
atmosphere that that project requires.  Going through all the articles 
to determine what is suitable is going to take a lot of work.  Those 
editors will also need to call on Wikipedians to write articles to fill 
in what is missing; that too will take time.  A 1.0 editorial board that 
started meeting to-day, would likely still be at least a year away from 
having a marketable product.   20,000 CDs with a budgeted profit of 
50cents each is $10,000 net.

T-shirts with the new logo would also be a great marketing device.

> (Which reminds me -- Jimbo, do you still have a hojillion Nupedia 
> coffee mugs lying around as was once rumored?)

These seem a little dated now. :-)

Ec