Wikipedia is a major educational resource, and should remain ad-free. Many educational media producers fight difficult (and often losing) battles against advertising and the corporate influence it brings.

Through slashed state budgets, ad-supported textbooks have gained some traction in our schools. If educators saw no problem with advertising we would have had ads galore many years ago. The fact that most school textbooks are ad-free is a testament to a large number of intelligent people deciding that ads will erode the quality of information.

Scientific journals are also nearly free of ads, sometimes with a page or two at the back selling other books by the publisher. Again, advertisements would give the impression (and probably the reality) that journal content is not free of interference from interested parties.

As another model, consider PBS, which provides informational and educational programming. It, too, was once free of ads but has slipped on that front and now runs psuedo-ads before and after shows. Still, PBS runs massive pledge campaigns instead of a full slate of advertising. So again, there is huge pressure to gain revenue through advertising, but PBS has resisted.

So, many organizations seem to agree that advertising is a bad thing for educational content. And I think Wikipedia has benefitted tremendously from its lack of dependency on the corporate world, because volunteer contributors feel like their work is being used for the public good, rather than as yet another way to enrich a corporation.

Finally, Wikipedia has managed to make the volunteer/donor model work for many years. They clearly shouldn't give it up easily. Probably governments worldwide should contribute to their mission. If they are $7 million short, that's a drop in the bucket for even a single country. The gobal educational benefits of having a quality reference tool available anywhere, for free, are certainly worth national and international support.

More prior art: The television set. The program will not continue until the ads have played.

Indeed, Colbert is providing a valuable service, in that he will discourage organizations from making important decisions via public opinion polls in the future.

This happened to me, too. In September, I had a complete hard drive crash in my MacBook. It was still under warranty, so I took it to the store, and was offered the same deal (only w/o the $160 charge). The bulk of my data was backed up, but there were some things I was worried about losing and a few others I knew I'd lost. I wanted to keep the possibility of sending the drive to a recovery firm while still getting my computer back, but Apple makes no provision for that. They insist on keeping the dead drive.

It was worth it for me to just buy a new (and bigger) drive so I could keep the old one. I still haven't decided if the lost data is worth the effort of recovery, but at least I have that option now.