[Wikipedia-l] anyone heard back from Jimbo Re: 100M?

Tue Nov 7 20:58:15 UTC 2006

> Again, to be clear, this has nothing to do with AOL or Jason Calacanis'
> idea of slapping banner ads on Wikipedia.
>
> This might not be a bad time for people to start mulling that over... :)

You mean, for people to start mulling over the idea of slapping banner
ads on Wikipedia?

I would expect a major, major disaster. Probably a huge fork. And
unlike the one or two forks I've threatened in the past, this one
would probably _not_ be initiated by myself, given the fact that I'm
not extremely active anymore (I'm doing more work on reconsidering
definitions for urbandictionary -- it's much clearer when something is
crap there than it is on Wikipedia because they have clear guidelines
and you can delete stuff or keep it without having to worry about
improving existing content, though I do regret their lack of
non-English versions and believe they would benefit from a more
wiki-like structure).

But yeah, do we not remember Enciclopedia Libre? That happened just
because people were thinking about maybe possibly sometime in the
future eventually having banner ads, IIRC. To actually implement
them... wow... yeah.

But if it's a sacrifice you ("we") are willing to make in the name of
the almighty dollar (even if you're going to use it for good rather
than evil), well then, whatever floats your ("our") boat.

Mark

On 06/11/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Steve wrote:
> > Liberatory 100M.
>
> A lot of good ideas of stuff we want were collected.  There is no
> further news at this time, but remember... this is not about a donation,
> but someone trying to think of sustainable business models around doing
> content liberation in conjunction with Wikipedia...  it is one thing to
> imagine someone deciding to donate that much money to the movement, but
> another thing altogether to think about someone doing something
> sustainable (i.e. where they can recoup their investment).
>
> Again, to be clear, this has nothing to do with AOL or Jason Calacanis'
> idea of slapping banner ads on Wikipedia.
>
> This might not be a bad time for people to start mulling that over... :)
>
> --Jimbo
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