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The Debate Over Advertising on Wikipedia
An anonymous reader writes "Some Wikipedians have objected to Virgin Unite's participation in the Wikimedia Foundation's fund drive, calling it adverising. But there's a strong case that Wikipedia should run advertising. The funds raised could support dozens of Firefox-scale free knowledge and free software projects, outspending all but the wealthiest foundations."
"The Advertising department thinks we should..."
"We have an idea to get more hits..."
Concentrate Wikipedia, you have a long way to go.
What happens when big funding starts to demand what can and can't be placed into articles? "We're sorry, Wikipedia, but I'm going to need you to remove this, that and the other fact from the article because it might turn away our potential customers."
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I'd bet Amazon or some other online bookstore would really love it if all the books and artists pages were linked to them so you can buy the books and/or music. I use it like that sometimes anyway, reading an article, see sources list, find the ISBN of the book, and head over to a book website like alibris or amazon. This could generate revenue for wikipedia. I just would hate if they had 'recommended' books or whatever as an advertisement, just simply link ISBN numbers to amazon or another website willing to pay wikipedia to be their sole source. Sort of how like Google pays Mozilla if we use the built-in search box, but google doesnt advertise it, it's just there for your convienience. Obviously not everything on wikipedia is a product or goods, but for the articles that are talking about products/good/books, wikipedia should try to create a business deal with them, a link to amazon if they have the product available. Probably need some new code but its not hard to implement.
From what I'm aware, Google pay FireFox for linking to their search engine. Why don't Google (or one of their rivals) contribute some cash to Wikipedia in order for it to become the semi-official replacement for the god-awful Wikipedia search engine? They'd get Adwords stuff, positive publicity and they wouldn't lose much cash at all.
No blatant advertising, improve cashflow and company would get more ad revenue. Win/win.
At one point, the Spanish-language Wikipedia suffered a max exodus over what essentially boiled down to "the rumour of coming advertising" (poor translation in the dialog may have been a factor as well). It set that wiki's development back quite a ways.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
But ONLY if the advertisements were subject to the same standards and scrutiny for factualness and neutrality as the articles are.
Wouldn't you LOVE to see free and open discussion threads for each ad? No way for the advertiser to control the content or threaten to sue? I think that concept could catch on.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Wikipedia should be fine with ads as long as they draw the line DEEP in the sand and give similar guidelines as NPR and make it crystal clear to potential advertisers that there is nothing that can or will be done to alter entries on their product or company, nor is there anything that can be done to prevent their ad from showing up on a competitors entry or something like a DeBeers ad showing up in an article on blood diamonds. If advertisers are willing to take the gamble and follow those guidelines, then the advertisers can reach a large ripe audience, and the content on Wikipedia shouldn't suffer.
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One thing that gives me doubts about advertising on WP is that the free information projects people have suggested using the money for sound pretty goofy. WP already has a history of continuing to throw resources at failed projects, the biggest example being WikiBooks. If you look at the original press releases, they had grandiose plans for WikiBooks: making a college education free to everyone, producing better textbooks than the commercial ones, etc. But the truth is that its only killer app seems to be books about video games. It just never reached critical mass. If they had hundreds of millions of dollars of ad revenue, I can imagine them squandering it on a lot of other projects that won't work.
Another question worth asking is what's really broken about WP right now, and needs to be fixed? WP is a massive success in many ways, but it does have some problems, and I don't think ads have anything to do with solving those problems. One big problem is that a typical article reaches a certain level of quality, and then stagnates or deteriorates because of random, disorganized edits, and the maximum level of quality is way below the level you see in a print encyclopedia. Another problem is inefficiency: hard-core WP editors have long watch lists, and waste an incredible amount of time checking them, fixing vandalism, getting in flamewars, etc.
And finally, it seems really clear that there is a huge body of WP users who are against ads. That means that if ads happen, the consequences are pretty predictable: they would fork WP.
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