The Wikipedia Phenomenon

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

That's Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales in a Slashdot interview. Read it all for a peek inside an amazing, important free-media project surging in content and popularity.

Sounds like he's also starting to make the case for ads as an important source of foundation funding...

The discussion about advertising is really more a question that asks: with this kind of traffic, and the kind of growth we are seeing, how much good could we do as a charitable institution if we decided to accept advertising. It would be very lucrative for the Wikimedia Foundation if the community decided to do it, because our cost structure is extremely extremely low compared to any traditional website.

That money could be used to fund books and media centers in the developing world. Some of it could be used to purchase additional hardware, some could be used to support the development of free software that we use in our mission. The question that we may have to ask ourselves, from the comfort of our relatively wealthy Internet-connected world, is whether our discomfort and distaste for advertising intruding on the purity of Wikipedia is more important than that mission.

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