[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

Thu Mar 20 15:35:38 UTC 2008

White Cat wrote:
> We have an ongoing election in the United States. I am sure presidential
> candidates would love to use wikipedia for their smear campaigns. We have
> already seen many examples of this such as edits coming from congress IPs.
> Such attempts are reverted per [[WP:BLP]] which we will not be able to do to
> our paying customers.

I take no sides in this discussion, but I would just like to note that 
this last bit is not really true.  In the unlikely event that the 
Foundation decided to take advertising in some limited fashion on the 
search results page or similar (and I should note that this is an 
interesting discussion in the community, but not something the board is 
actively interested in or considering at all) it would be quite simple 
to accept only pre-approved ads, and to mark them quite clearly as not 
part of the content, etc.

There are grave and legitimate concerns about what accepting advertising 
would do to the perception of neutrality of Wikipedia, but it is worth 
noting that worst case scenarios are easily avoidable.

I remain opposed to putting ads in Wikipedia.  (I have to say that in 
case anyone wants to suggest the opposite.)