Well, most of the English pages aren't worth translating. I'd like to see this project converted into an encyclopedia, but right now it's a soapbox. We'd be translating advertisements people don't want to read in the first place. I'm starting a WikiProject system to organize and convert pages from ads to articles.

As for ads - I would hate to see a banner above the title. Just let us put a few words from a sponsor into the sidebar every month. We can do that without any extensions.

MagicalTux had some donations collected for the wiki a few years back - what happened to those? Lost with Mt. Gox?

edit - as for incentivized editing; I don't think that'd be unethical or bad as long as we don't make it edit count or byte count. With post count campaigns here we see just empty, meaningless posts all over the place. I wouldn't want that to happen to the wiki. We may be better off voting/debating over who deserves what, or establishing some kind of award system. "Editor of the month" maybe.