I personally would love to see Wikipedia sell ads. Nothing crazy, just one subtle and tasteful text ad per page, sold by auction. (The ads would be much smaller and more relevant than "a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales".)<p>The revenue could allow Wikipedia to take on ambitious projects to further its mission statement, similar to the Mozilla Foundation or NPR.<p>Unlike most publishers, Wikipedia doesn't need to worry about maintaining a firewall between sales and editorial -- so I think it's a natural fit.
As one of the unfortunate who has had to attempt to hack at mediawiki... I hope some of that cash goes towards improving their code base. It's gotta be costing them in maintenance (to say nothing of the ability to add new features).
The hundreds of millions of visitors from Google isn't enough? : )<p>Just joking, that's a nice donation. My wife was totally freaked out this week though...she had never seen the donation banner before.
Sergey's wife, Anne Wojcicki, is mentioned.<p>This is interesting because Anne's mother, Esther Wojcicki, is on the board of Creative Commons [1], which is what Wikipedia uses.<p>------------------------------<p>1. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki</a>
Unlike NPR (et al), Wikipedia could actually ask for donations and then not show the appeals for donations to people who have donated (e.g. by providing simple logins). Similarly, Wikipedia could show ads or not depending on whether someone paid a small fee. I wouldn't mind either.
It probably went down like this:<p>Sergey: "hey Jimmy, how much do I have to pay you NOT to see
your creepy face on every wikipedia article?"<p>Jimmy: "Well...."
Some small areas of Wikipedia are so toxic that no-one would want to have anything to do with them.<p>Some areas are probably not suitable for advertising. Would an ad on "Holocaust" or "Lynchings" really be acceptable?<p>And so the problem then would be the megabytes of meta "discussion" about why some page should or shouldn't have ads.
One time I applied for a software engineer position at Wikipedia. The first phone interview was with a non technical director of people or whatnot, and after a drawn out conversation of "tell me a time when..." she informed me there would 2 others to speak with.<p>Feels like a nonprofit.
I believe, a joint venture should be formed between Redhat, Canonical, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Facebook to fund wikipedia and this kinds of open source and very much needed projects with some of their yearly revenues. I named those companies because much or they are making money over free and open source projects. And this kind of venture is a way of showing good will. This could make wikipedia to survive, build more kinds of projects that could lead to more innovation and this new created innovation and brain would turn into profits for this companies. A long shot maybe, but this organisations contributors would not be harmed.
I wrote about this in my little article a few days ago. Wikipedia needs to raise money for the next 20 years, not for one year at a time. And then amaze their visitors with more interactive and engaging stuff when they take the money matters off their minds. <a href="http://www.adnanymous.com/2011/11/why-jimmy-wales-wikipedia-collect-donations-every-year/" rel="nofollow">http://www.adnanymous.com/2011/11/why-jimmy-wales-wikipedia-...</a>
Good for Wikipedia.<p>Wikipedia should consider experimenting with different business models to generate money. Mozilla makes most of it's money from Google. By placing Google.com as their start page, they split the revenue generated from ad clicks - it's around 80% of their revenue (I looked at their financial statements long ago but can't remember specifics).<p>$500k to Sergey Brin is pocket change.
<i>[EDIT: could those downvoting this please reply and tell me why? I wouldn't have thought this would be controversial, but I'm looking at this post sitting at -4 just minutes after posting and am genuinely confused as to what the issue is.]</i><p>Hrm. Obviously this is a good thing, but...<p>Wikipedia tells me that Brin's net worth is $16.7B. Very roughly, my "net worth" (in the sense of assets required to duplicate my income) is $2M. So that's the equivalent of my dropping $59 on them.<p>Obviously all gifts are good (as long as you, like me, value wikipedia). And this is a big one. But it hardly qualifies as earth-shaking philanthropy. It's the gift amount Brin would be expected to give, I'd say. Obviously there's a lot of apples and oranges here; both of the numbers above represent "tied down" assets and not disposable cash, etc...<p>But shouldn't the extremely wealthy be held to <i>higher</i> standards about what they're expected to do with their charity? Why must it be news when someone like Brin does the equivalent of clicking on "Donate via PayPal".<p>I guess one good thing came of this though: lest I feel like a hypocrite, I went to Wikipedia and clicked on "Donate $100". So that makes me a better person than Brin, I guess?