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I must say that this is a well-written article, regardless of the opinion, resumed (TL;DR) here: - Requesting money to Wikipedia viewers is done so often it ge

I must say that this is a well-written article, regardless of the opinion, resumed (TL;DR) here: - Requesting money to Wikipedia viewers is done so often it gets as annoying as an advertisement-packed Wikipedia would potentially be. - If you have innovated previously (knocking down the traditional enciclopedias), you can do innovate regarding the way yourselves fund the Wikipedia foundation, instead of just implying that "the only way for us to avoid advertising is for us to loudly ask our users over and over again for donations." (author quote) As pointed out, Wikipedia is part of the Wikimedia Foundation. I find interesting that they apparently only rely on users for the source of income. On the other hand, if they go for the regular "Foundation" or "NGO" way of requesting money to institutions (which probably would include governments and big companies), this might have a negative impact on Wikipedia's neutrality, and I personally would prefer Wikipedia to stay as neutral as possible. So it's not so easy to "innovate in funding"...

JosephLark 9y ago
> Requesting money to Wikipedia viewers is done so often it gets as annoying as an advertisement-packed Wikipedia would potentially be. I wonder, do many people here agree about this? I don't keep track, but feel like I only see the fundraising messages 2-3 times a year. This is way more preferable to me than seeing (probably multiple) ads on every page all the time.
krschacht 9y ago
One of many possibility for innovating in funding: sell access to their data to companies for commercial use. Offer a robust API and clean downloads of data sets in a wide variety of forms—they can let people use this freely for research and non-profit, but I bet lots of companies would pay for it. Not only access to the user-generated content (e.g. to construct a concept graph) but also access to their traffic data (e.g. what articles are viewed most often, what articles are spiking right now, etc).

JosephLark 9y ago

> Requesting money to Wikipedia viewers is done so often it gets as annoying as an advertisement-packed Wikipedia would potentially be. I wonder, do many people here agree about this? I don't keep track, but feel like I only see the fundraising messages 2-3 times a year. This is way more preferable to me than seeing (probably multiple) ads on every page all the time.

krschacht 9y ago

One of many possibility for innovating in funding: sell access to their data to companies for commercial use. Offer a robust API and clean downloads of data sets in a wide variety of forms—they can let people use this freely for research and non-profit, but I bet lots of companies would pay for it. Not only access to the user-generated content (e.g. to construct a concept graph) but also access to their traffic data (e.g. what articles are viewed most often, what articles are spiking right now, etc).