It seems that Wikipedia.org is considering taking advertising.
The founder of Wikipedia, the charitably funded online encyclopaedia, says that the website is considering carrying advertisements in a move that could raise hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenues.
Jimmy Wales told Times Online that despite widespread "resistance to the idea" of advertising on Wikipedia, "at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down."
Wikipedia would be in a prime position to exploit the current boom in online advertising. It expects to record around 2.5 billion page impressions this month and traffic volumes are doubling every four months. According to figures released this month by Nielsen/Netratings, it was the ninth-fastest growing site on the web in 2005.
Add big money like that and suddenly this "people's knowledgebase" won't seem like the people's anymore. I can't imagine that won't affect the spirit of the site -- as mediocre and biased as it can be. Do you really want to put in free work on a site that's making someone else millions (even if it's a non-profit corporation)?
And then there are the questions of how big-bucks advertising would affect content: Will topics with more profitable keywords be encouraged? Will edits that challenge concepts of corporate power or advertising run into extra barriers?
On the other hand, thinking about how such cash could underwrite other efforts....
The site has only three full-time employees. Mr Wales, an ex-futures trader who now heads the non-profit Wikimedia foundation that owns Wikipedia, does not draw a salary.
It would be big changes indeed.
[via Xeni at BoingBoing]
