[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form NewPartnership

Mon Oct 24 18:15:23 UTC 2005

On 10/24/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > With people saying they could lead to an income of $26m a year, or pay
> > for all of our normal hosting costs in a fortnight, I'd like to know
> > what these other reasons are!
>
> It's purely speculation to imagine the income would be that high. From
> my experience with Wikicities, $26m seems an exaggeration. Also, would
> the number of people visiting stay as high if we had ads? Would there
> still be the same level of motivation to use Wikipedia.org<http://Wikipedia.org>as opposed
> to a much faster loading mirror?

 Wikicities certainly doesn't have the quality content that Wikipedia has.
>From my experience running a mirror site of Wikipedia, I'd say it's a good
ballpark estimate. I'll also say this: my CPM rate is more significantly
higher than the $1 in the ballpark estimate. I'd be more specific, but
that'd violate the terms of service of Google Adsense. Granted, Wikipedia is
going to have a different traffic profile from a mirror, but still, we're
talking about a lot of money.

The threats of forking and boycotts over the last day highlight one of
> the biggest reasons for not doing this, or certainly for not rushing
> into it - Wikipedia.org <http://Wikipedia.org> would be nothing without
> the community behind
> it. Would they still be behind it if AdSense was used on the site?
> Even if for just two weeks a year? Would we be jeopardising our
> non-profit status? What effect would turning Wikimedia into something
> commercial have on the project? Would it make people less likely to
> donate / less likely to use Wikipedia / less likely to edit?

 If the ad revenue were kept to solely paying for the maintenance of the
website, and regular donations and grants were used for everything else,
then you wouldn't be jeopardising non-profit status and furthermore you
wouldn't even be taxed on the earnings, because the website upkeep would be
deductible against it. The potential problem would come into place if you
want to go beyond that, but I don't see how that's any different whether
you're doing the ads yourself or you're doing them through a partnership
with someone else.

We also need to bear in mind that covering the basic costs is only the
> beginning. Our goal, of providing free knowledge to every person on
> the planet, is a much larger aim than buying servers for Wikipedia,
> and 2 weeks AdSense isn't going to cover it. Would those 2 weeks
> prevent us getting the grants, donations, corporate sponsorship, and
> volunteer effort, needed to attain those wider goals?

 Seems to me the answer to all these concerns is that it'd help us get
grants and donations, because those grants and donations would be going
toward new projects as opposed to maintaining the status quo. I think a lot
of donators are more likely to donate to a company that's willing to help
itself. Would you donate to a bum who refuses to get a job? I wouldn't.
 Most of this could be avoided by simply making the ads opt-in, anyway.

These are more questions than reasons at this stage, but the fact that
> so many questions exist is a reason in itself not to even consider
> this until they can be answered.
>
> Angela.

 Most of the questions are hypotheticals, and can't be answered with any
amount of certainty until it's actually tried.