This blog post on ViaDigitalis.org, reacting to Florence Devouard's speech at the Lift07 conference in which she claimed that WP only has enough cash-on-hand to continue operations for three or four more months, seems to have touched off more discussion of how and when Wikipedia's ever-increasing need for cash may result in advertising appearing on Wikipedia - just as we've been predicting.


Most of the discussion seems to focus on Devouard's "fuzzy math," and from the WP'ers, how her remarks were "taken out of context." Which is to say, of course they will find additional funding... from advertisers!

The question now might be whether or not WP wants to make a semi-exclusive deal with one of the big players, most likely amazon.com, or just put up Google AdSense boxes and hope that enough people click on them to make up for their supposed cash shortfall. One thing we haven't considered here, and which I'm sure they have considered, is the fact that once ads start appearing on WP, the charitable donations will start to evaporate - as people simply begin to assume that the advertising is taking care of whatever financial needs the site might have.

Not to mention -- as it's really the least important thing anyway -- the charitable contributions of content.

Jonny

Hmm.....It has just occured to me that this might be another piece of this puzzle.....Oh, what a tangled web we weave and all of that.

It just doesn't make any sense for a humanitarian project to abandon fair use. I mean, not-for-profit academic institutions get away with this all of the time and it's considered to be perfectly normal. Why suddenly the need for "free content"?

When you have a commercial site that starts selling adspace, then the Powers that Be (ie the people who hold the copyrights for the photos, recordings, writings etc etc which have been used under "fair use" policies) suddenly want a piece of the pie, since their content is part of what's generating the ads. Since Wikipedia hasn't negociated licenses with these people, then suddenly they could have a slew of lawsuits asking for a percentage of the ad revenue.

So, my guess would be is that the new content policy for commons is another way of preparing the new era of Wikipedia ads......

Isn't it also likely that to maximize revenue, Wikipedia may stop giving its entire article database and start charging for it?

Only if they stop using GFDL.

So who is the license holder?

Everyone who's ever made an edit. Individuals retain copyright to their contributions. Changing the license on the data that's already in Wikipedia's DB is more or less impossible.

They could change the license going forward (All edits after date X are license Y) and charge for the DB from there. But that would probably fragment the community and send more people to forks like Citizendium. They'd probably survive the setback, though - at this point the Wikipedia 'brand name' is probably worth more than the support of open source principled people who'd abandon ship.

Well, they can charge for the DB right now, the GFDL doesn't care. And any attempt to change the license going forward would be practically futile. They would have to purge the entire DB of all GFDL material at that time, as including any of it -- even one (1) GFDL'd edit, no matter how small it may be -- would render the derivative GFDL licensed.

This I understand to be a transfer of license. Who then is the license holder of the derivitaive?