Comment Re:Advertisers are a bad idea (Score 1) 608
If Wikipedia adopted such a system, I would expect the existing community would only go along with it if strict rules were put in place to ban edits made for the purpose of affecting the profitability of the page in any way. Furthermore, there's no reason the Wikimedia Foundation would have to stop accepting donations and become a for-profit company just because they put ads on their site. They could use the ad revenue to supplement donation money, pay to keep their servers running, and divert any surplus directly to their existing initiatives to help bring knowledge and education to developing countries.
The current system seems sort of like a PBS pledge drive to me. PBS chooses to solicit for donations at certain times of the year all at once rather than selling small chunks of air time for advertising throughout the year. Wikipedia, instead of devoting a small section of their site to advertising throughout the year, is throwing up a huge banner at the top of every page to beg for money. There's nothing inherently wrong with this strategy, other than it seems to annoy some users more than a discreetly-placed advertisement would. It also seems to be mostly ineffective.