That would be horrible. Replacing it with an ad would mean that they are now beholden to the advertiser, as opposed to being beholden to their donors. Right now Wikipedia depends on their editors to provide content, and donors to provide money. If instead they relied on advertisers to provide money, they would lose an awful lot of credibility.
Also, why would you prefer an ad to the donation banner? Ads tend to promote excessive consumption or try and manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money. They tend to be animated, or play sounds, or dance all over your content. They provide vectors for malicious code to be injected into your site.
Instead, we have the founder of a highly useful collaborative educational resource (or sometimes some editors of same) asking for donations to support that without being beholden to corporate interests. Where's the problem?
The problems you cite depend on the implementation. Wikipedia could require ads to be unobtrusive, from a diverse set of advertisers, and placed via a system (perhaps completely automated) that insulates from advertiser meddling in content. And, anyone who's truly offended by ads could turn them off at their option, just like the [X] on the campaign ad.
Such a system might generate 10X the revenues. If Wikipedia doesn't need them all, either for current year operations or a lasting endowment, they could liberally fund other free-culture projects with the surplus.
The biggest risk I see -- and what I believe to be the de facto reason ads haven't been more seriously considered -- is that a large portion of the editor community shares your (IMHO irrational) fear of ads, and this fear could become self-fulfilling if the introduction of ads drives away editors.
Even this might be addressable with careful handling, though. For example, what if there was one official Wikipedia mirror that had ads -- rather than the hundreds of unofficial ad-drenched mirrors? The default site would still be ad-free, for all editors, users who opt to visit or link-to the ad-free site, and inlinks from ad-free or primarily non-commercial sites. But, inlinks from major commercial entities (like say Google) would go to the ad site, unless that user had opted differently.
Doesn't that give everyone what they want -- lots more money for free culture projects with a large default sphere insulated from the 'corrupting' influence of money?
Many of the things you describe here would make for a more palatable experience on an ad-based website. But you completely miss the boat by assuming that people 'fear' advertisement, some people just really dislike it on principle. This is especially true when it comes to free culture projects who wish to be self-sustainable and perhaps even feel as if their efforts are validated a bit by the willingness of their users to support their project.
Wikipedia is a huge project with tremendous social value. It is sad to me that you may be right that an advertisement would bring in 10x the revenue, because it means we're in a culture in which one expects to perpetually be in commercial relationships. This makes the user more likely to purchase a consumer good than they are to donate to a service that has been consistently offering them more value.
The reason for this is that any direct donation based system is deeply damaged by the mass tendency to assume that someone else is in a better position to donate. In fact, the more valuable (and successful) a project is, the more this becomes a problem. But this problem is cultural, in an ideal world people would have a greater social responsibility without the need for assuming someone else is going to take care of important services like these. To push us in that direction, we get a giant fucking picture of Jimmy Wales to make us feel guilty and give. Personally, this has about the same negative impact on me that an advertisement would, albeit for different reasons.
I think the real solution is for Wikipedia to find a better way to fund itself in a grassroots fashion. I have trouble seeing how the Wikimedia Foundation can't come up with other ways to fund themselves. They have a tremendous amount of content and data. I'd love to see them build something they can sell that would support Wikipedia's operations.
It seems like an ad could be much more profitable than the donation banner, because ads can be targeted, even with zero behavioral history. For example, if I'm visiting a page on the new Tron movie, show me ads for the Daft Punk album! Odds are I might buy it.
Also, all of the things you said about ads could be said about in-house donation banners.
* Manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money
* Tend to be animated... etc
* Could provide vectors for malicious...
They would lose credibility because there would be a conflict of interest. Advertisers would be able to manipulate Wikipedia by threatening to remove ads unless they received favorable coverage, or negative coverage were removed.
Yes, I'm sure that ads could be more profitable than a donation banner. This is why most websites have ads instead of donation banners. However, Wikipedia is not a for-profit enterprise. It is an educational non-profit. If it were a for-profit enterprise, people would trust it much less, not as many people would contribute to it since they'd wonder why they were donating time and effort to a for-profit enterprise, etc.
And none of those things you list are true of a donation banner. Donating to an educational non-profit is not a "baser desire." I have never seen an animated banner asking for donations on Wikipedia, nor anywhere else that I can think of off the top of my head. And donation banners are coming straight from Wikipedia, not a third party; if they wanted to send malicious code, they could do so directly. The point is that ad networks are notorious vectors to allow malicious code to be injected by third parties into other people's sites.
> If it were a for-profit enterprise, people would trust it much less
You'd be surprised to learn how many people have no idea wikipedia is non-profit. A lot have no idea that you can edit articles and just assume it's a regular encyclopedia written by paid people. I have witnessed people telling me this too many times, and yes, it's pretty depressing.
Whether advertisers would have that influence depends on the specifics of the implementation; I think Wikipedia has the smarts and culture to resist any attempt at advertiser (or donor) manipulation.
The decision to make money from advertising (or other services other than charitable donations) is independent of the decision to be a mission-oriented non-profit or a for-profit. A non-profit can still make most of its budget from selling considerations; see for example The Mozilla Foundation.
You are assuming a model where they would have something like an ad sales department that deals directly with advertisers and so might try to put pressure on the editorial side to keep big ad clients happy.
There are other advertising models. For instance, why not Google ads or Bing ads? I don't see how there is much danger of those influencing editorial content.
Also, why would you prefer an ad to the donation banner? Ads tend to promote excessive consumption or try and manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money. They tend to be animated, or play sounds, or dance all over your content. They provide vectors for malicious code to be injected into your site.
Instead, we have the founder of a highly useful collaborative educational resource (or sometimes some editors of same) asking for donations to support that without being beholden to corporate interests. Where's the problem?