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Wikimedia Proposes Advertising [Updated]
user9918277462 writes "The Board of the Wikimedia Foundation has announced a new partnership with the Answers Corporation, which provides the content for Google Definitions links. There is also a lengthy discussion, wiki-style for those who wish to participate." Update 10/25 18:42 by SM: An announcement has been posted on Wikipedia to help clarify the original submission (which thankfully was patently false and has since been cleaned up a bit, our apologies to Wikimedia). Answers.com will be creating their own co-branded version which will show ads and no ads will be shown on wikipedia.
Isn't it funny how people are going to advertise -- on Wikipedia -- a project to keep Wikipedia free of advertisements? Check out this section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject _no_ads#Projects
This of course, just underscores the point made by Walter Block in Defending the Undefendable how even people who ridicule persuasive (non-informational) advertising as "wasteful" take every chance to engage in it themselves. (While the no-ads project may provide information, the advertisements they plan to use for that project do not.)
And yes, if the comment about the "irony" is still there, it was me.
Anyway, I just have to say: good riddance to bad rubbish. I've always complained that Wikipedia was infected with a socialist bias (like listing "ethical coffee" as a type of coffee bean, just to get in a little plug for another left-wing cause). Now, it gets to implode from that, since as we all know, socialists hate paid advertising.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Contribute information to a project which can turn around and make money with it?
Didn't Wikipedia have a fundraising last time i checked? Why the need for advertising then?
The first priority should be keep the site clean, because that's one of the strengths of wikipedia, if i would have wanted advertising i would have went to any commercial info site.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I don't mind this at all. This 1-click software is quite useful and others should be informed about it. Anytime I see a word that's unfamiliar I just alt+click and I get the wiki. Any application. Very nice.
Here's a deal of unknown value (for answers.com it obviously has value, market cap went up $8m on annoucement).
Folks like google offer to host, but don't seem to be taken up on the offer:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting
Does the board just want more $$ to play with (in other words, hosting doesn't give them the money they want to have the pleasure of spending)?
Which is why what wikipedia needs to do is have both "stable" and "unstable" branches of wikipedia, like the linux kernel does.
Make searches default to the stable page, with the option to add in the more recent changes by clicking a button. This has a number of advantages:
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I'm writing this as an end-user of Wikipedia, not a contributor. If the ads are Google-esque, who really cares? I don't mind browsing past an ad or two if I can actually find what I'm looking for. My issue with the Wikipedia is that many times I come upon "a stub" that needs to be expanded. Now, the Wikipedia politely asks me if I'd like to add to the stub. The problem with that is if I knew the answer, I certainly would NOT be browsing the f&*^%$# Wikipedia looking for the answer. Given the inflow of dollars to fund more entries, this might make the Wikipedia more useful to everyone. I'm all in favor of that.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
I use gmail like 20 times a day, and I honestly never notice the text based ads. It should be possible to make unobtrusive ads, or even ads that are benficial. Let's say that I look up a movie on Wikipedia. Maybe I'll get an ad from a store selling the DVD for cheap? They already have external links to websites involved in an article. Maybe if those sites pay to get the ad, it'll help wikipedia.
Couldn't some people just simply mirror the stuff elsewhere and go on from there?
I agree wholeheartedly that this is a sad thing to happen. Information source of wikipedia's kind should not be mixed with business. Moreover, I was under the impression that they had received quite good money from donations.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Or perhaps you were unaware that there were already hundreds of mirrors and forks with tons of ads sitting on Google just to get their operator a few bucks for decidedly NOT nonprofit reasons. Perhaps you should scream at them loudly first, hmm?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
While this proposal is not going to lead to the introduction of ads on Wikipedia, it is a good point and one I raised on the mailing list. Hopefully it is an avoidable problem.
Here's a (probably apocryphal) story of a program on the BBC, I believe it was a car review program, who gave a bad review to a certain American car model. The CEO of the company found out about it, was furious and ordered the advertising team to pull all adverts to punish the TV station. The advertising team replied "sorry sir, but the BBC don't run adverts".
While direct comparison between Wikipedia and the BBC would obviously be flawed due to Wikipedia's open philosophy, a hypothetical situation could occur where a corporation which provides a significant contribution towards Wikipedia's hosting (in the way of loaning servers or donations) could theoretically demand that the Wikimedia Board change the content in an article to remove a link or sentence from an article which criticises them as a company, and threaten to pull funding if the Board did not. While this would be horribly hard to enforce (and would be a major PR disaster for the corporation if it were leaked to the press) it is a concievable situation and I don't think it is a stretch of the imagination to think of some organisations which would demand this.
I wouldn't describe Jimbo Wales' response to this as particularly eloquent, but I think it gives some comfort to people who hope it will never come to this.
Chris
aterr - an open source threaded discussion board.
I'm not trying to be mean... I agree with the spirit of your post... but let me say:
I think that Wikipedia is a great service.
Wikimedia is not a "service" in the traditional (economic) sense. Wikimedia is a not-for-profit organization with a charitable charter to distribute information to everyone for free. They should uphold this charter.
The people behind it should be compensated for time...
The people behind it are people like me, who write articles and fix entries all the time. The money that Wikimedia gets (by donation or corporate alliance) never comes back to the people who do the work. In fact, we (the people who work on Wikipedia) don't want the money. We do this work because it's fun and/or we believe in the ideology of making information available to everyone.
I have no problem with advertisements to fund this.
An interesting fact about this debate is that the Wikimedia board has clearly stated that they do not need this ad money in order to run Wikimedia. The donations so far have always been enough to buy servers and buy bandwidth. This extra money would thus only be used for new Wikimedia projects. These would be additional (presumably charitable) projects for disseminating information freely to others. Neither the creators of Wikipedia nor the board stand to financially gain from this deal.
I mean, it is better than paying for a subscription!
I don't think Wikimedia could ever become a subscription service. Because all the content is GPL, anyone could take a snapshot of the entire database, fork it, and thereby create their own, open and free version of Wikipedia. They couldn't call it wikipedia, but the information is forever free for others to use as they see fit.
I agree with a lot of what you have to say, and especially with the reasons behind it; but you have to consider, not only the implications of these proposals to those who would harm the Wiki, but also the implications to those who would contribute.
Removing the instant payoff for defacement also removes the instant payoff of contribution, which, to me, is part of the cool factor of the Wiki: if I contribute, those contributions go into effect now, and can be seen by anyone else immediately.
As you point out, this information would still be accessible in the "unstable" section, but unstable versions of a page are often overlooked, and this could become a serious issue when people go to contribute: a user is reading a page, and want's to make an addition or correction; now they have to check the "unstable" version and see if the change has already been made.
The simplicity of Wiki editing is a lot of its draw, and a lot of its power. This same simplicity and freedom is also its biggest flaw; but removing this simple freedom is not the answer, and more than dictatorship is the answer to quell those who would break the law of society.
There should never be ads in an information source that tries to be objective and fair. For example, if Britannica placed ads for iPods in an article about MP3s, I wouldn't want to use it. It only creates the possibility of bias. It's a very minor, subtle effect, but it is still detrimental to the cause.
Fortunetly wikipedia isn't adding advertisements, which I think would start its downfall
The solution probably isn't to have two separate branches but rather a single one with "stable" indicating some point of time in that article's history. New edits are done to the latest version and perhaps after being reviewed by an expert, voted upon or or having enough time go by (there are arguments for and against all three methods), the stable snapshot of the article is updated to be the newer revision.
Perhaps after amassing enough good edits and being rated a good contributor, someone could make changes to stable articles that themselves become stable immediately. The default view of Wikipedia would be stable unless you were logged in, say (default view would of course be customizable once logged in).
The instant gratification of changes for anonymous contributors can be retained in some sense... of course, instead of editing the stable version, they'll need to be directed to the latest when they click edit (so recent changes aren't overwritten). Once they save, perhaps a cookie could be set that would mark them as browsing unstable versions now. Then they'd see the latest versions of every article, including the one they just made (while limiting the visibility of any vandalism they might do).