[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia public relations

Fri Nov 21 08:25:05 UTC 2003

Arvind Narayanan wrote:
>No way!! Many people, me included, contribute to wikipedia 
>because of a spirit of freedom/communist zeal/whatever that 
>would largely evaporate if wikipedia started serving ads. Even 
>a symbolic thing like the change from wikipedia.com to 
>wikipedia.org was a big motivation for me. Anyway didn't Jimbo 
>promise us long back that there would *never* be ads on 
>wikipedia? :) 

IIRC he said that there were no /plans/ for ads in the forseeable future. I 
think that that is the best we can all hope for. But donations alone may not 
be able to always pay the bills. In that case I wouldn't mind having 
something smart like Google AdSense serve ads to anons. In that scenario an 
added benefit would be to give anons another reason to log-in: no more ads! 

I think that would work out OK, because the freedom/communistic feelings you 
talk about (and I share) are far more prevalent in contributors than they are 
in readers. In fact readers expect to see some form of advertising on content 
websites like Wikipedia (some have expressed unease over the /absence/ of 
advertising, thinking that Wikipedia would one day disappear due to a lack of 
income). So if needed I think we can have advertisements if it is done right 
and it isn't distracting (ala smart Google text ads). Oh and banner ads, 
skyscrappers and especially pop-ups should be avoided like the plague. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)