On 10/25/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
By users
you mean more than just the handful of active users? If the
active users who are freedom fanatics forked, their place would be
filled by the many contributors who don't contribute now due to the
amount of bureaucracy and philosophy that gets thrown around. Users
won't abandon Wikipedia because of ads, they never abandoned anyone
else because of it, why start with the single most handy resource on
the web.
If there were two Wikipedias, one with ads, one without, which do you
think readers would go to? The only thing the original Wikipedia would
have going for it is brand recognition. It would take time for people
to learn about the ad-free version, but people would learn (possibly
quite quickly, since I can see the media jumping on the story).
But if the Foundation has to resort to ads because there just isn't
enough money coming in from donations and other sources to keep running
otherwise, how is the ad-free fork going to manage any better?
I don't support ads in general, but if the choice is between Wikipedia
with ads and no Wikipedia at all I say stash a backup of the database
somewhere safe and then go for it.
The choice is almost never that black and white, though. Other than
the bandwidth, pretty much all the portions of the budget could be cut
without having "no Wikipedia at all". It'd be slower, or less
effective, or less transparent, or less fun, or less accurate, or less
featureful, or whatever, but by the time you reach the point of "we
need money tomorrow or else the hosting company is going to turn off
power to our servers" the rest of the parts are so far destroyed that
it's already too late.