[frakkingcylons]

That's true only if a site strictly uses a contextual advertising system. Most high-traffic sites sell specific ad space and time (AKA an ad campaign) to the highest bidder in order to supplement their normal advertising network.

Even if Wikipedia used the most unobtrusive, low-key advertising system possible, people would still react negatively because Wikipedia is known for having no advertising whatsoever.

[downandout]

Contextual alone would completely eliminate their need for panhandling, and would also enable drastic improvements to their infrastructure. Better for users, better for everyone.

[lsc]

>Contextual alone would completely eliminate their need for panhandling, and would also enable drastic improvements to their infrastructure. Better for users, better for everyone.

maybe? but compare wikipedia's uptime to, say, twitter or reddit. Advertising dollars do not always make for reasonable Engineering decisions. (I'm not saying that advertising causes twitter or reddit to go down often; but they both get dramatically more revenue per user. I mean, dramatically more revenue per user, and they both have terrible uptime vs. wikipedia.)

[shrughes]

I don't know about that, Wikipedia was down for a whole day last year.