I'd be a bit surprised if Adsense did really well on wiki. Top SERPs aside, it's used often for general info, not buyers.

wiki is a foundation (non-profit), so it may not even be possible to have ads everywhere.

"A nonprofit organization (abbreviated "NPO", also "non-profit" or "not-for-profit") is a legally constituted organization whose primary objective is to support or to actively engage in activities of public or private interest without any commercial or monetary profit purposes."

Given the amount of money it would make with ads, it could be hard to call it non-profit.

There's an interesting news report on wiki and $$$ [detnews.com] in today's news:

"With around 300 million page views a day, the site by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn't."

...

"[Executive Director Sue] Gardner joined Wikipedia nine months ago after leaving the Canadian Broadcasting Co., where she oversaw the introduction in 2006 of advertising on the CBC Web site. She said she didn't foresee a time when Wikipedia would go that route, though she added that she should never say never."

p/g

With around 300 million page views a day

Ok, only one AdLink per page, pathetic eCPM of $0.2,
that would be still $60,000.- a day.

Around $22 million a year, several times the current budget of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia currently blocks advertising-related bots such as Mediabot:
[en.wikipedia.org...]

There was proposal for putting only one rotating ad banner for $5 million p/m; which was rejected and discussed to death on both slashdot and offical wiki pages.

Wouldn't running advertising on WP make those who have donated time/money to a NP organization look, feel and be stupid?

Maybe not, because any NPO needs cash to run it, in one way or another.

One of the 20 ways Wikepedia says you can identify a "spam" site if it has Adsense:

How to identify spam and spammers
...
7. The link is a site that has Google/Yahoo ads (AdSense/SM)..

Given that, I doubt they would ever use Adsense themselves, but who knows...

Wiki will eventually become for-profit. Greed has no boundaries. Everyone starts out fluffy clean and virgin.

I use Wikipedia all the time (perhaps 50 pageviews a day) and also contribute to the site and I'd be very happy if they just used AdLink units on each page. As someone suggests, even at a paltry eCPM they could make their budget and stop all the begging.

Even better, I bet there'd be plenty of companies willing to sponsor Wikipedia to the tune of $20m a year in return for a single graphic or text link bar per page, but hey.. sometimes the principle is worth more than simplicity.

>>I'd be a bit surprised if Adsense did really well on wiki. Top SERPs aside, it's used often for general info, not buyers.

I disagree. Many people do their research just prior to buying. My guess is their eCPM would be in the $1 to $2 range (and much, much, higher for some topics).