Talk:Task force/Recommendations/Financial sustainability 3

From Strategic Planning

Ideas that have been proposed here

(these are moved from the recommendation page as they are not task force recommendations: please engage here in discussion)


  1. the possibility of encouraging more local fund raising events. Possibly choosing one evening each year when Wikipedians around the world organize fund raisers (dinners, quiz nights, parties, sports competitions) in order to raise money for the foundation.
    1. One coukld provide a button for the users "Also show me paid advertisements". This would be off by default, and one could offer registered users the possibility to never see this button. But many would be interested!
    2. provide a realistic estimate of the revenue that might be generated by advertising


We have two opportunities for building on the donation model:

  1. When we than donors ask them if they would sign up for a regular annual donation by direct debit or similar. Experience of other charities is that this is much more effective than soliciting new dontions each year, but would need to be accompanied with software that didn't make appeals to logged in donors.
  2. Get tax deductible/charitable status in the countries where we get most donations - in the UK alone this would be worth a five figure sum annually; More if it has the effect of reassuring potential donors. WereSpielChequers 22:42, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Publicist-written articles

Since Wikipedia articles are in the public domain, Wikimedia can't collect royalties. Users of Wikipedia probably donate less than it costs to subscribe to subcription encyclopedias. A gift mug for donations by rich people might work since it seems to work for public television. Grants from the government might be possible. Getting Wikipedia's creditors to charge less probably won't work. As far as advertising is concerned, the needs of dial-up users should be kept in mind. Banner ads don't work well. Article style ads might be a source of revenue. If an artile is about a new movie, star, play, book, video game, etc, maybe a small fee could be charged the advertising agency that wrote the article. --Chuck Marean 03:21, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well officially such articles are not written by the agencies but by fans and other wikipedians, and though spam culling is a never ending task at least we don't have to deal with people saying they bought the right to have their version of the article on "soap" or "soap opera". I'm sure lots of companies would happily pay lots of money for the privilege of writing wikipedia articles the way they want them written - but what editorial control will they expect in return? In my view turning our articles into advertorial would be even worse than accepting advertising. WereSpielChequers 20:15, 9 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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