[Foundation-l] A modest proposal: ads on wikipedia.com

Mon Apr 23 08:24:38 UTC 2007

2007/4/23, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com>:
> You do have to consider whether irritating a non-negligible portion of the
> content-writing community will help us accomplish our mission better,
> though. As I pointed out to Gmaxwell on IRC yesterday, yes, there may be
> only a few "loud" (for lack of a better word) users that completely oppose
> advertising, but if they distribute their message properly and play their
> cards right, you could be talking about an Enciclopedia Libre-type of split.
> Wikipedia's advantage, at least on the English Wikipedia, is that it is THE
> Wikipedia, and a fork claiming that they're the descendent of the NPOV
> policy or some other claim may come back to hurt us in the longer term.

Perhaps, but in the end our goal is not to keep Wikipedia and
Wikimedia floating, but to get knowledge out into the world. And that
goal might well be served as good or even better by a forked Wikipedia
than by a single monolithic one. That's a big 'might' though, and the
effect might very well be negative, but I would not want to rule out
positive effects in advance.

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels