If Wiki Foundation signs up for AdSense.

..How much will they take home?

[vibgyor79]

Just a theoritical question. Assuming, that Wikipedia signs puts 2 Adsense banners per page, what is your estimate of their monthly earnings?

How many page impressions do Wikipedia (all languages) websites get per day?

[bts111]

They would clean up.

They could always donate the money to different charities. The site would be more successful if the money was going to people who really need it.

[fischermx]

The Fair Use Doctrine has nothing whatever to do with whether a publisher is for-profit or not-for-profit.

Not true. Whether the use is for profit or not is definitely one of the criteria to be considered when determining fair use. It's not the only item to be considered, but it's an important one.

Really, trust us, has nothing whatever to do.
Must publishing business, even newpapers are based on this assumption. Imagine if a newspaper could be refrain to quote some sources under fair use, because the "bad thing of making money".

[jomaxx]

>> "trust us"

LOL, no thanks.

Quoted from the U.S. Copyright Office:

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

2. the nature of the copyrighted work;

3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Again, just to be excruciatingly clear about this, nobody's saying that non-profits can use whatever they want, or that for-profits are prohibited from using anything whatsoever. But the nature of the use is an important element to be considered.

P.S. This is quoted in reference to US laws only, obviously, but for practical purposes other jurisdictions have similar guidelines. In Canada it's called "fair dealing" and non-profits have an exemption under it as well.

[fischermx]

But that does not mean that failing point 1 will make it not fall under fair use.
Here everybody is talking like if making money of it will automatically considere it copyright violation.

[universetoday]

Non-profit companies can absolutely charge money. They just don't have shareholders who can take any profit out of the company. If the Wikipedia had unobtrusive ads and was very clear about how they spent their money, I think people would still be happy to contribute their time and efforts to write content. I think the $1M+/month revenue is entirely realistic, and they could channel much of that money into education programs, buying computers for school children in poor countries. They could set up outsource centres in some of the poorest regions of the world to help people get out of the cycles of poverty by entering public domain content.

[nonni]

Lets put it this way: Would you want other people making money off of articles that you have written?

Wikipedia is written by its users, how many people would write pages if they started to display ads?

1) there are already MFA sites that scrape wikipedia content. Perfectly legal.

2) Income and Profit are not the same thing. A non-profit can have income streams, hire staff and pay them reasonable salaries, invest in their operations, burn CDs to give to deserving poor kids, etc. It all takes money. The only difference - they cannot distribute profits to shareholders.

3) I have written several good wikipedia pages, or expanded brief stubs into well written pages. No more. The mods keep removing a link to one of my sites - my site is one of the premier informational sites on this niche, but one of the mods (an MD) insists that my site is not worthy of mention in wikipedia. He prefers links to very general articles written by 'authority sites' that all contain the same bland information, much of which isn't even relevant to this niche. OK - wikipedia can do what wikipedia wants, but they don't get my help any more.