[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia public relations

Fri Nov 21 20:42:50 UTC 2003

On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 00:56, 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!
...
> 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 don't know how much ad space is worth, so this is probably way too
much effort for way too little money, but how about this:

en.wikipedia.org gets a sister site en.ads.wikipedia.org (or .com). 
This is exactly the same, except that it serves ads.  Part of the "how
to donate" links explain that you can give wikipedia a little extra
money by browsing the with-ads version.  Every page on the with-ads
version has a link to the corresponding without-ads page ("Click _here_
to see this site without the ads").  The with-ads version sets up
robots.txt to avoid search engines.

I, for one, would use the with-ads site, if I knew it was helping donate
even tiny amounts of money to the foundation.

Carl Witty