[chaddeshon]

There are several great organizations that have no way to make money, so they rely on donations. Wikipedia isn't in that situation. They could sell ads that were clearly marked as such. A simple small text ad on each page would give them more money than they would ever need.

They're costs seem to be low enough and the value of ad space is high enough that they wouldn't have to put up with anyone trying to extort them or take away there independence.

If they are worried that the surplus of money would corrupt their organization, then they can give the surplus away or just limit the number of ads they sell (but maybe hire a couple more devs first).

That is why I will not donate.

[tingletech]

Wikipedia has enough problems with spam etc. now. I can't imagine how the dynamic would be altered if ad sales folks figured out some angle to game things.

Are you suggesting that they should do inside sales (with some sort of chinese wall); or use an ad sale agency? Would I be able to bid on specific wikipedia pages and keywords, or would it be random pages? What if I put a deceptive add on a page that was sensitive politically, in an attempt to bait people with an interest in a certain topic into some sort of targeted phising or malware attack?

I'm not familiar with web ad sales at all, is there a general rule of thumb for commoditization of traffic? Function(Unique visitors, page views, ??? ) = $x