Re: [Wikipedia-l] Begging letters on our blogs?

On 12/18/06, David Gerard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On 18/12/06, Parker Conrad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I'm curious -- what is the objection to advertising? If there was, say,
> one
> > unobtrusive text ad per page, I imagine that would cover all of the
> > wikimedia foundation's costs and allow new features to be developed a
> little
> > more quickly. Would people be offended and stop contributing?
>
>
> Because people hate, despise and loathe the idea of advertising, and a
> substantial fraction of the volunteers who write all the content would
> get up and *leave*. And that would be bad.
>
> Basically, instead of the annoyance of advertising you get the
> annoyance of slow servers on a Sunday afternoon and occasional
> downtime. And people seem to be willing to accept that deal. Jimbo has
> said in the past that downtime is our most lucrative product ;-)
>
> So we get money by asking the readers, and now that we have properly
> audited books we're going after big-time donors.
>
>
> - d.
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Someone's going to have to explain this to me. If the problem with Coca-Cola
buying advertisements on our site is that our article on them might be
perceived as not NPOV, then how is it any different if we accept a donation
from them? As far as I know, we do have a list of fairly big donors, and
some of them have articles.

Not that I support advertising on Wikipedia -- something just seems a bit
disconnected.

-- 
theProject
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