Kelly Martin recently blogged about the difficulties of targeted advertising that might face Wikipedia in the future. The obvious choice if that happened would be Google Ads. Wikia is gaining some experience in that area as I've learned with a new project of mine, the Westonka Wiki. Martin points out an example, but I'll use my own that's similar to hers. Wikipedia has an article on the American Nazi Party - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nazi_Party .  Who is going to want to advertise on that page? But there can be solutions. The article might be easily tagged for no ads, but that might say something. Something like, this article is controversial, and then someone might ask, who decides which articles are? A warning could be given about the all the ads, divorcing them from any particular article.

One of her examples is the article on X-Box 360. So who gets that page? Microsoft or Nintendo? As I understand Google Ads, the one that pays the most gets it. A website owner wants the most money per click. I think the ads that run on their site, are the ones that pay the most for the keywords on that page.  There is something like an auction among advertisers for certain keywords.

This all ties back to the origins of IHateWikipedia.com. Wikipedia has a RuneScape article that drives traffic to a few selected for-profit sites. The owners of those sites praise Wikipedia, and worship it as the second coming of Christ as they spend their ad money on faster horses, younger women, and older whiskey. Lowly me, challenged that page's links policy, and lost, and hopefully learned from my mistake. Perhaps I am wiser now. (I consider myself a volunteer, and watch over my local area for Wikipedia, work a bit on the  articles, and seem to be one of the few taking an interest in it.)

What do these for-profit RuneScape websites do for Wikipedia I ask Jimmy Wales? Do they trade value for value as Ayn Rand wrote? Perhaps, but I can't see it. One model for ads on Wikipedia would be to phase it in. Pick 100 articles similar to the RuneScape one, pull those links to the for-profit sites that anyone with 4th grade education can find anyway, and let them market themselves if they want. A phased approach would give Wikipedia feed back on how the admins are really going to react? Do the admins really care about the RuneScape article? Do they really want to keep it pure? It's a video game for crying out loud. OK, no ads on the Magna Carta article, we can agree to that.

They can spend the money on servers if they want to put it that way. I have noticed the Wikipedia and Wikia pages are some of the slowest loading pages.