Fixiing Wikipedia: Wikipedia.com
by Vinay Gupta • April 13, 2008 • Everything Else • 2 Comments
So here’s the idea. Two wikipedias, sharing the same infrastructure and databases – in fact, the same site as now, with a special case.
Wikipedia.org serves the content without ads
Wikipedia.com serves it with ads
You can use whichever site you prefer, but one of them raises money for Wikipedia.
Thoughts?
I suggested this on the Foundation mailing list a while ago, but people didn’t like the idea. Far too many people amongst both the writers and readers seem to consider *any* ads the work of Satan.
Not a bad idea, but they’ve been incredibly resistant to this manner of funding models.
As for me, I type in a lot of Wikipedia addresses by hand and just wish they’d do away with the superfluous /wiki/ in the URLs (hence getting to “perfect” URLs), and while we’re on the topic of Christmas wishes, they should bring DBpedia into the fold, too