Jimmy Wales: prediction

Transcript context

…I’ve donated so many times And we have millions of donors every year, but it’s a small percentage of people. I would say in the early days, a big part of it was aesthetic, almost as much as anything else. It was just like, “I don’t really want ads in Wikipedia. There’s a lot of reasons why it might not be good.” And even back then, I didn’t think as much as I have since about a business model can tend to drive you in a certain place, and really thinking that through in advance is really important because you might say, “Yeah, we’re really, really keen on community control and neutrality,” but if we had an advertising based business model, probably that would begin to erode. Even if I believe in it very strongly, organizations tend to follow the money in the DNA in the long run. And so things like, it’s easy to think about some of the immediate problems. So if you go to read about, I don’t know, Nissan car company, and if you saw an ad for the new Nissan at the top of the page, you might be like, “Did they pay for this?”, or, “Do the advertisers have influence over the content?”, because of wonder about that for all kinds of media. And that undermines trust.…

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