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Wikipedia Almost Reaches $6 Million Target
An anonymous reader noted a story discussing the aftermath of the Wikipedia fundraiser and says "The writer suggests that Wikipedia can earn $50-100 million a month by a simple text ad. He also suggests that contributors should be financially rewarded and that the lack of financial reward is the reason why 98.3% of registered Wikipedia users are inactive.
What do you think? Should Wikimedia Foundation put ads on Wikipedia? Should contributors be financially rewarded? What compensation structure would be best?" Personally I think the independence of Wikipedia is great, and any advertising would not only compromise that integrity, but give contributors a sense of entitlement that the site is better off without.
The fact that a lot of good articles are getting deleted at the moment due to "not being notable enough" prevented me from giving them a penny
I don't suppose you're doing something about this, like for instance dropping by WP:AFD and commenting on discussions of articles you don't think should be deleted? Or commenting on the discussion pages of WP:N and the other notability guidelines that you think they should be more relaxed?
If a critical mass of users started doing this (and I see more than enough pissed off people _outside_ of the site to achieve this) then we could change the situation. As it is, I only see myself and one or two others. Plus the people who only seem to care about one or two articles. We need people committed to the cause of keeping all these articles.
If you want to see how they spend their money, go here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Questions/en#How_is_the_revenue_spent.3F
There's even an PDF of their 07-08 financial there with projections for the 08-09 FY.
Yes, $6mill could provide alot of clean drinking water.. but did you ever think that maybe information provided to those same people might enable them to provide themselves with drinking water? Wikipedia won't make you an expert in a topic, but it can definitely get you thinking about it.. it's a decent tool for getting a feel for the problems/solutions/etc on a topic of which you are unfamiliar... now we just need to provide useful/accessibility to impoverished persons so they can enable themselves.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
I've browsed a number of talk pages and any disputes over policy come down to a single person's complaint and a bunch of WP regulars pounding on him/her for being wrong.
Exactly. I put up what I thought was the good fight, but it came down to me versus a regular, so I lost by default. My interest in repeating the process is nil, especially since I'm powerless to have any real say in the end result.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?