[WikiEN-l] Re: Ads on Wikipedia

Mon Jan 2 16:46:23 UTC 2006

> Given the large number of reasons why there should not be ads (I won't
> repeat all of them), Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation should be funded
> by donations or other sources which can have no special influence over the
> content. 

While there are many valid reasons to not have ads, this is not one of them. Something like Google
AdSense uses a computer algorithm to find out what a page is about and then to serve appropriate
ads. An article about Java the coffee will have ads for coffee while an article about Java the
programming language will have ads for that. No humans are involved so no influence can be
applied. 

However, it should be noted that I am personally opposed to having ads on Wikipedia itself due to
current widespread community rejection of the idea *and* my own concerns over the possibility of
losing our soul. But I strongly believe that the community needs to base their decision on this
matter on real facts and a consideration of what we are missing out on along with the potential
pitfalls. 

I think a good compromise is to create our own mirror of stable and vetted Wikipedia content at
nupedia.org. That site would have ads so no wiki would ever need them. It would take some time
before there are enough stable/vetted articles to make that a useful place for readers to go to,
but that's fine. 

That mirror would be optimized for reading while the wikis would be as they are - optimized for
writing. The mirror will be constantly out of date but stable while the wikis would be constantly
up to date but unstable (the instant display of vandalism will need to be snuffed out though).
There would also be plenty of prominent back-links to and from each. Yin and Yang.

-- mav

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