[WikiEN-l] Ads on Wikipedia?

Sun Jan 1 21:07:21 UTC 2006

-- Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> With respect, this is a fairly strange line of
argument. Objectively,
> there is nothing particularly bizarre or strange
about Wikipedia as an online community. There are
other wikis, there are >other collaborative projects,
there are >other online forums etc etc. So all of that
>is not in itself a reason to say "Wikipedia >is so
different that it makes sense
> for it to continue being different by having no
ads".

I generally tend to agree with you, but 1) the issue
isnt really as fancy as that, and 2)
<sarcasm>Wikipedia is not a
community/democracy/etc./etc./<sarcasm>

Im guessing that growth projections would show that if
Wikipedia didnt have any server problems whatsoever,
it would now rank about 10 (instead of 30). So once
the server situation gets up to its optimal capacity
(theres a market cap for everything: maybe at 2x
current capacity) there will be other costs. Legal
fees, paid server techs, backpay for work (to keep
people happy), limousines, etc. With success comes its
costs. Does WP's continued success depend more on
those princples or on its financial and commercial
competitiveness with commercialist or academic/elitist
upstarts/restarts. Arent there degrees in-between? 

WP's huge demand makes it not just needing to keep up,
but it puts it in a position to make egalitarian
demands and not merely  bend to commercialist ones.
Open model success might have limits, but a high
enough degree of success makes the very notion of ads
at least [[edit]]able, and therefore feasibly
compatible with the open culture. Fastfission did a
good job of breaking down the basic 'compromise' about
how ads could work.

Stevertigo
"You have just won {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} dollars!"

__________________________________________ 
Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about. 
Just $16.99/mo. or less. 
dsl.yahoo.com 