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War of Words Over Wikipedia Ads Continues
Willis W. writes "Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales reiterates his opposition to advertising in response to reports that Wikipedia needs a major cash infusion. Responding to Jason Calacanis' charges that he 'has a fringe, anti-corporate bent to him' that is 'holding Wikipedia back,' Wales says that running ads on Wikipedia is not his decision to make. Though he personally dislikes the idea of advertising on Wikipedia, any decision to utilize ads would have to come from the community. At the moment, he won't rule anything out. 'I can't say if I would ever support something like that,' he tells Ars, 'but I can say that I currently maintain the same position I always have: I am opposed to it.'" What do you think Wikimedia should do to shore up the financial situation of the Wikipedia?
Sell pot.
It seems to me that there would be any number of private foundations and individuals that might be willing to help. Granted that takes a lot of work, but at least you won't have to commercialize Wikipedia.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Wikipedia's problems, like Yahoo's, were predictable in that their growth rate has passed through an inflection point and is slowing...
y =wikipedia_meme
r y=search_engine_comparison
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entr
In fact, it's quite possible that we've reached a general inflection point in the IT market. Check out the search engine growth rate...
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?ent
Buy some advertising on Wilipedia to attract a better audience for Slashdot. Just a suggestion...
'has a fringe, anti-corporate bent to him'
I don't think that anti-corporate is all that "fringe". Most People feel that Mega-Corps have too much power. Making them a source of revenue, gives them control over the product. Look at the difference between PBS or BBC and most other TV networks. Or just ask your congressman what corperate sponsorship really costs.
We are all just people.
What about Google? Practically anything I google for results in a Wikipedia article as the first hit. I can't believe that pagerank alone results in Wikipedia articles ranked highly so consistently for practically every search topic imaginable. I think it would be an advantage for Google to buy out Wikipedia, as they seem to rely on Wikipedia already.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Disregarding financing and expenditures ... Wikipedia is just plain wrong. I spent the last 90 minutes tracking "recent changes" undoing a bunch of "LOL PENIS" edits. At that rate of destruction Wikipedia would be TOTALLY worthless after only a month or so if all the volunteers stopped performing "undo" operations.
/rant
Also, I think anonymous edits is just a bad idea. I understand that some folk can't attribute their identities to their edits, but too bad. Without volunteers WASTING THEIR TIME on revision edits wikipedia wouldn't even be a good STARTING place let alone reference...
And please, if you're one of those trolls adding "LOL PENIS" to wiki articles, please stop. It's childish and doesn't make you cool, it makes you an ass making work for others.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"Fringe, anti-corporate bent"? Obviously. Otherwise Wikipedia wouldn't exist in the first place. To a businessman, the market was already saturated, between MS Encarta and Brittanica. Innovative ideas don't come from businessmen. Only after something catches on can it be exploited to the point that it's just barely worthwhile (i.e. "fully monetized").
Find a different chairperson. This one would let the corps in and ruin it. Remember what happened to CDDB. Expect the same thing to happen here.
Donations continue to pour in, the staff is minimal, and the Wikipedia brand is too powerful to simply disappear into the ether if money ever does get tight.
There you have it. The brand name is what the corps want to exploit. Well if they get their hands on it, then it wil be time to create an alternative based purely on the community. Because this one will become just another "Clear Channel" of web based encyclopedias.
What?
I've now edited Jimbo Wales to make him in favor of advertising on Wikipedia, thus saving Wikipedia. You can all thank me later.
Wikipedia needs to do whatever it can to prevent the need to use corporate advertising on the site. The primary reason the service has become so popular is that there are not any ads; without ads, it feels like a more authentic source of information.
As soon as advertisements are introduced into a project like this, the number of private donations will decrease because the average joe who uses wikipedia and chooses to donate $20 here and there will feel like his money is not what is making it tick anyhow.
Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) prices bandwidth at $0.20 per gigabyte. Host Wikipedia on S3, and write some glue code so that people can have Wikipedia browsing accounts which are billed by Amazon. People who cannot have an account due to being minors or developing-country-dwellers can perhaps have their fees paid by a charitable foundation. Storage is $1.80 per gigabyte per year from Amazon, so if Wikipedia is a terabyte, it's under $2,000 per year. How big is it?
You want wikipedia to survive, you have several choices:
Your choice, what is more tolerable?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I would not be opposed to a simple 125x125 sponsor spot at the top of each page header. Wikipedia is sponsored by [corp]. Simple and effective. There could be a vote on ad approval by the Wikipedia community, only community approved sponsors or something similar to weed out undesirables.
Silulu. Hot Polynesian geek chick. Hot tech news.
Come on, I don't see the problem. Get something like google adsense and fund he project, so what? My son's school gets ad money. It isn't perfect, but neither is the world.
The hell he is. He's an objectivist. Objectivists practically get sexually aroused at the thought of corporations.
If I edit an article, we're my share of the income that my edit generates. Remember, the wikipedia has been created by EVERYONE.
What possible reason could you have to oppose opt out ads for wikipedia? If you don't like them you could turn them off and wikipedia would get lots of money it could use for hosting and potentially even enough to fund other projects.
Frankly I don't see any good reason not to put even mandatory small tasteful text ads on wikipedia. I think it's silly enough for public radio/TV not to support themselves by ads but at least they do short sponsorship bits and they at least have the argument that they need to maintain the appearance of not being influenced by corporate money but wikipedia, by it's very nature doesn't need to worry about appearing to tailor its information to advertisers.
As far as Wale's claim that the decision isn't up to him it's up to the community it is correct but may not be the right point. My understanding is the default position is that wikipedia will remain without ads and the community would have to get up and make a demand for it to change. It is Wales (and other foundation members) decision to set the default policy and I think it should be the opposite.
Still, having said all that if other people care enough about wikipedia being ad free to donate money to keep it running then that's their prerogative. At one point I donated money for wikipedia but I won't do so again. I have no problem viewing ads to keep wikipedia afloat but since wikipedia could damn well support itself with zero detrimental effect my money could accomplish a great deal more being donated to projects that actually need it.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Government / Public funding is the answer. Wikipedia offers the general public of developed countries a great resource and Wikipedia should therefor look to the governments and public institutions of various countries to contribute the (relativity) minuscule amounts which are needed to support it.
You only has to look to the BBC for proof that this would work. They seem to be able to operate one of the Internet's great resources (with multimedia features which are surely far more demanding than wikipedia's) without the need for adverts or such.
Allow companies to sponsor articles on their companies or products for PR purposes. Provide a link to the user-generated article. Will mislead some people and therefore be worth money, but will still not erase the user-generated content aspect.
The Wikimedia Board of Directors (or its equivalent) must make decisions that guarantee the long-term viability of the nonprofit organization. If they fail to do so, bad things happen.
The revenue from Google ads on the front page alone would surely guarantee the financial viability of the whole Wikimedia brand for years to come.
I see this as a board decision alone. While the community would have an uproar, the organization would survive. The vast majority of their "clients" would never realize the difference.
Also I should remark that most of the objections I have heard to ads on wikipedia center around the annoyance of seeing ads or some other supposed cost to making the visitors see ads. Now if you don't donate to wikipedia yourself even a little I don't think you really have much standing to object to ads but whether you do or not consider the following point.
The question should not be whether wikipedia is better with or without ads. Obviously no one favors hosting ads for free on wikipedia. The question is whether the cost of having ads is more than the benefits ad money can buy.
Can anyone here really say they would take a million dollars from other needy open source/content projects or other worthwhile charity (cancer research etc..) just so people didn't have to see (opt out?) ads on wikipedia? Yet a million dollars is at the low end of the ad revenue wikipedia might generate, the potential to benefit the community is huge. Can you really say that not seeing ads is worth denying the community that much benefit?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I've heard that he pays people to write in Wikipedia. Perhaps he can pay some hosting fees seeing he's all interested in education and stuff. I'm sure he'd do it no strings attached.
OK, you can stop laughing now ... but I can't.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Thanks a lot jerk. It took me three hours to do those.
How long does it take you to tear a page out of a library book? Thirty minutes?
Keep up the good work, tool.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
ok, not all of the time, but much of the time.
two examples:
- mile after mile of billboards as you are driving
- the yellow pages
in the first example you are essentially held captive and forced to see advertising.
in the second you've made the choice to look at advertising in search of products and services.
the first example is for all intents and purposes against your will (thus violent).
the second example is something you choose freely.
if the community wants advertising, my preference would be for a "yellow pages" type of advertising model.
if you are for wikipedia advertising, which example most closely resembles the type of advertising you would choose?
Get the government to fund Wikipidea. Socialize it. Make it a public service.
Additionally. with government funding, they have no right to edit content, because of the first amendment. UNLIKE a private corporation, which can ignore first amendment rights.
It's like how some cable public access channels show porn, because of this free right.
After reading this I went to donate $25 because I use this service a lot and it is an ubiquitous part of the information appliance aspect of the net for me. I had to click around and then reach for my glasses to find the little "your continued donations keep Wikipedia running" link in like 6 point type. Come one folks - ASK FOR WHAT YOU NEED!
Before turning this over to advertisers make an appeal. Put it at the top of every article that comes up on search. You can't just say donations don't work when you don't really make an effort to us know you need them.
They should make an enterprise version of mediawiki and sell it just like MySQL.org did with their GPL product.
One way would be to figure out a way to decentralise the database. Rather than living on 350 servers perhaps it could live in 35,000,000 screen savers, all communicating peer to peer?
How? Beats me. Maybe start by experimenting with moving mediawiki's change tracking to modeled on Arch? Rendering a wikipedia article would then become an exercise in gathering all the necessary changesets from the P2P network. Instead of querying wikipedia's servers, you could just query your screen saver. Editing an article would consist of making a change then publishing the changeset on the P2P network.
Any other ideas? These are just random musings. There are plenty of people who are seriously studying this stuff.
It seems to me that the best option would be to use a system much like that used for keeping the Nations roads clean. You know those signs that are all over the roads, that say that certain businesses, clubs, and other organizations have adopted certain roads. Well, what they are doing is not cleaning the stuff themselves, but paying for the road crews. In return they get to claim that they "adopted" that mile of roadway. What Wikipedia could do is allow organizations to sponsor certain pages, where they would have the opportunity to place a single small image of their logo, claiming that they are paying for the maintainence of that page. They would have no special rights to the page, and things would be maintained by the staff. The ability to have organizations bid for the most popular pages would be a terrific source of income. To maintain an image of impartiality, it must be well explained to both the sponsor and to the public that no special treatment would be given as a result, and that the only change is a small logo (not an advertisement).
What about google ads - they're small, unobtrusive, and VERY easy to block. At least one other wiki has tastefully integrated these ads (right under the search box).
There's an old story about Coleman Hawkins, a noted jazz saxophonist. Once he was assembling a band for several gigs, and decided to give a call to an acquaintance in another city, also a sax player, to invite him in. "How much is the pay?" - the guy asked. Hawkins told him. "C'mon, Hawk, that's barely enough for a bus ticket to New York!" "You know, young man", said Hawkins, "there are jobs worth saving money for". And hung up.
My point is - "what should Wikimedia do about the financial situation of the Wikipedia" is the wrong question and needs to be unasked. Wikimedia should spend money on Wikipedia. They can raise that money from whatever sources they like, but quietly. That is their purpose. Blackmailing Wikipedia and its community (and its founder) into profitability is not their purpose.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
Perhaps the debate about BBC ads has some relevance to Wikipedia.
According to The British Internet Publishers Alliance (BIPA), showing adverts to non-UK readers of BBC websites would also undermine the BBC's "worldwide reputation for integrity and impartiality."
Wiki articles are supposed to be written in the neutral point of view and while ads may not compromise that goal, it may be difficult to convey neutrality when you're writing about a product and running a related advertisement at the same time.
I'd rather see paid memberships before ads.
Everyone still has the same free access, but paid members are cited as supporters, with the length and amount of their support - creating a public log of how much they have given to support the encyclopedia. This type of membership is directly in line with the non profit purpose of the organization, so the fees are tax deductible donations.
Basically, it will tie in to the same reason why people give time and knowledge - to support the cause.
Memebers get a little "star" or a bold username of something - and membership is like $25/year.
Users who visit the site without a membership are greeted with a splash screen with the current financial information of wikipedia, burn rate, and a simple way to sign up and become a paid donating member.
As my 9th grade biology teacher Mr. Devlin used to say, "There's no such thing as a free lunch!"
As with any project of this size and scope, someone has to pay for it eventually. Whether it's through paid advertisements, user donations, subscriptions, or quasi-advertisements (sponsors) like they have on PBS and NPR these days, someone has to foot the bill.
Ads? What ads? Oh, yeah, that's right, I have adblock installed, so this (as well as the majority of other annoying advertising) does not affect me w00t!!11
Wikipedia should meter their bandwidth by country/region. They can then use the data to petition local federal governments/states/provinces to pay for their share. The funds could come from the 'library' budget.
Nothing sells like a mustache.
Companies with more than $25M in annual revenue can pay a Wikipedia Asshole Company Fee (WACF) to have fiat editorial control of their listing in the encyclopedia.
.2% of their audited annual revenue, so starting at $50K.
The WACF would be
OK twitter, so you replied to a +5 funny joke with an insult, and now someone pointing out that you->joke = ZOOM is working for Microsoft? WTF?
You must think giving advice about "frothy penis" is funny, but I really think you need to talk to a mental health professional. You're beginning to lose track of the line between reality and your conspiracy theories.
Ads won't work, since then there is the suggestion that content is not going to be neutral - that the editors may modify content so as to avoid angering sponsors. There are a few companies and organizations which are better than that - which won't pull or reduce sponsorship if factual material that reflects negatively on them is published - but only a few, and the suggestion will be there regardless.
Would it make sense to have both wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org? Both would point to the same data, the same database servers, but wikipedia.com would have ads and would have some other subtle advantage, like maybe some more bandwidth or more web servers. You'd get a slightly better response at the cost of seeing ads. I'd still choose the .org version, but many people don't mind ads and would prefer the better response time. There are a bunch of disadvantages, like the response time of .org might suffer excessively, or the page rank would be diluted, or no one would ever link to .com, meaning it would never show up on Google search results. I've never seen this suggested. Why must we choose between ads and no ads?
Mentioning PBS made me think of the way all public broadcasting gets funded--both PBS and NPR.
They adhere to a strict schedule of in-your-face fund-raisers.
I know it's easier to make an emotional pitch over a broadcast medium, but there's no reason why, for 2 weeks a year, Wikipedia couldn't go into a heavy pledge mode, with lots of interstitials, side bars on pages, maybe break every article every, say, 500 words, and include a "we need your help" link.
I mean, just steal wholesale from the public broadcasting book. Get corporations to pledge matching funds, get registered contributors to write 40 words about their Wikipedia story and randomly display them on the interstitial/sidebar adverts.
The current campaign is too hands-off.
Can someone explain to me when the Wikimedia Foundation suddenly became poverty-stricken? The latest financial statement from the Wikimedia Foundation indicates that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, they received $1,508,039 and spent $791,907 (leaving them with net assets of $1,004,216); according to the Wikimedia fundraising website they received a further $1,096,299 in the second half of 2006 and have received $275,427 so far in 2007. In order for the Wikimedia Foundation to be in trouble, they must have gone from spending $791,907 last fiscal year to spending over $2,000,000 in the first 8 months of this fiscal year.
Personally, I'm not going to make any donations or support advertising on Wikipedia until someone explains where all the money is going.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Wikipedia needs to give out their data and let others host parts or all of it. They need to think like Bittorrent. They need one place for edits but multiple places for viewing. This will reduce their costs significantly because others will share the burden of hosting. But I suspect that they just want to cash in and commercialize it. It's also likely there are interests out there that want to control Wikipedia because they want to control information. BTW - Let me ask this. How can I get a copy of all the Wikipedia data? How can I get updates?
I'm not angry at all. In fact, your wibbling bullshit amuses me. 'Being called out for bad behaviour'?! What adult actually thinks this way? "Hey guys, this guy swore at me, tell him he's mean!". If you didn't have a wife and kids I'd assume you were twelve.
:D
Instead of just leaving it alone, leaving it a bit up in the air that you may or may not have been absolutely retarded enough not to spot the joke, you try and pass it off as 'oh I knew that, it's just not funny'. Honestly, you're transparent like glass.
Really, you need to take a minute and shut that hole in your face before any other fetid wordturds fall out of it. You're stinking up the place.
P.S. If it makes you feel better, I do work for Microsoft...
PSYCHE. I wouldn't give you the fucking satisfaction, you rancid, weaselly cunt.
"What do you think Wikimedia should do to shore up the financial situation of the Wikipedia?"
Wikimedia should let Wikimedia shrivel and die.
Hey, you asked for my opinion.
They actually just did a big donation drive over several weeks. The progress bar was moving pretty steadily -- the last time I noticed it I think it was 3/4 of the way to the goal. Now if the goal was representative of what they actually needed, shouldn't they be in relatively good shape at the moment? I don't understand why they're crying about money after what looked like a very successful pledge drive.
-- Old Man Kensey
...you'd rather watch ads than donate money. That's fine, you're not alone.
Also don't forget that PBS is just a resource, the content you see is chosen by your local station from the content that PBS offers as well as other sources such as the BBC and Discovery Channel.
I don't think you have a right to complain about the quality of content on public television unless you are a major donor. If you don't like what you see, pony up so they can afford something better. Your local public station is NOT limited to showing PBS offerings.
Oh, and this is for the GP too, in case you haven't actually tuned into a public station recently (not BBC, that's a different model altogether), after just about every show there is a list of organizations, both NFP and corporations, that sponsored the show. Corporations DO sponsor public TV, just not like they on the big national networks.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
Advertising isn't wrong, its what you advertise, the deals you make, the concessions you make, and what you give up.
Before somebody hits me with the predicable Bill Hicks quote, everyone uses google, and they have advertising. They've just chosen to keep it more tasteful and less intrusive than others. The problem with the amount of specialization in our society is that people are hired because they have a really really really good hammer. The challenge is keeping people in an organzation from making decisions when every looks like a nail to them. So, you hire people who view their jobs and kills and imporant, but not the answer.
That is the ideal marketing employee. He/she knows his/her role, and he knows when being successful at it interferes with the bigger picture. Your job shouldn't be a church, it should be one of the positions on a baseball team. I have not a shred of a problem with wikipedia advertising; I have a problem when they have an employee who views that the service that wikipedia provides is less important than making money to keep it afloat. Anything less is saying you'd rather drink the bathwater than raise the baby.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Sounds like the best way to handle something like this is a large one off grant + a trust fund handled by Wikimedia (meaning, no strings attached). As wikipedia is in the interest of the international community, maybe the UN would be a good candidate for funding? The UN isn't exactly spotless in it's reputation (although the "THEY'RE A SOCIALIST CONSPIRACY CREATING A WORLD GOVERNMENT" wingnuts take it a bit far), but there are organisations that are part of the UN that do this sort of thing.
Another option is to sell compediums of content on various subjects to schools etc, but with a catagorised index that makes the information good for quick reference. Even if by subscription, this sort of value added service would be great for university libraries.
A lot of people don't want to donate but many would be more than happy to donate a few gigs of my hard drive and some small part of my bandwidth to wikipedia on occasion. I cite F@H (Folding at Home) for all those who know of it (thanks to all who do it) which I am already doing. If that concept could be applied to hosting Wikimedia then their hosting fees could drop dramatically. (possibly to zero). All those people who already use wikipedia could pay back some of the debt they owe to it by helping host it.
I have to agree. I've just spent a few hours on some articles that I occasionally update. Lo & behold, over the last six months or so, a bunch of IPs playing silly beggars (schoolkids in their lunch break, no doubt) & registered users reverting edits. It's convenient for me to edit without login, though enforced login would hardly be a chore. As suggested earlier, perhaps keep the discussion pages for anonymous users?
Give money to Wiki? I'm not, by any means, rich. My time is the best that I can afford... sorry Jimbo! Though, others should be able to give in return for tax breaks.
I don't like the idea of ads (I'd block them, anyway) & would prefer Wikipedia to be a proper charitable organisation - tax breaks for big donations, etc., to help keep the organisation ticking over.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I for one would be willing a few gigs of his hard drive as well as a small part of his bandwidth. Just leave mine alone. Anyone else with me?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I have no problem with ads on Wikipedia...as long as everyone can edit them like articles! And with AdBlock Plus it's not like I'll be seeing them anyway.
Please don't use S3. It deserves to die. It makes my life miserable.
In the worst case scenario, the Google page at Wikipedia would be locked after it was edited to say something to this effect: Glory be unto Google, our Lord and Savior, who hath bestowed upon us a great abundance of pretty good search results, text ads, and banner ads that doth not flash. We thank thee, oh Google, for thine blessings of 2.6GB email storage, feed reader that canst play YouTube, and map API which hath enabled thine humble servants to build great and most holy mashups in your honor. I'm fine with that, and it seems inevitable at this point anyway.
My other sig is funny.
I totally agree with founder Jimbo Wales and like him think that the best course of action is to wait until gnomes and elves spawn from thin air and resolve the problem with a magic incantation.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
There is currently 1 118 admins. That's the main reason I stick to smaller projects, less bureaucracy. On the other hand, without all of it I have no idea how they would scale, but still its annoying to have to hunt to find anything. The main reason I think that Jimbo is saying no to ads, is that every time in the past he has even so much as said he was thinking about it, people got really pissed, and threatened to fork. However i don't think the situation is very desperate, they've certainly denied it, and if they are running out of money, why are they hiring new employees, have lots of servers, etc. If they were running out of money, they would not be spending it unless absolutely neccesary.
yah yah don't rub it in. I noticed that immediately after posting it and don't know how to edit it (tell me if there's a way). It happened because while I was writing it it said "I would be more than happy to blah blah blah" and then I edited that part of it to make it less personal sounding and forgot about the rest of that sentence. But you get my point.
It's nearly complete. Look at their Logo.
My other sig is funny.
There was a banner on Wikipedia around christmas showing donations received by Wikipedia - they had over $800,000 the last time I looked.
How much more money do they need ?
What are they spending it on ?
http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia
People are talking as if allowing advertising would ruin the Wikipedia forever. That's not necessarily the case. It's relatively easy to add advertising, and it would be relatively easy to remove them if the funding situation changes.
You could just let wikipedia die. About.com mirrors all of wikipedia's content and clutters it up with ads anyway.
Of course, a generation of high school and college students would be up shit creek without a paddle since they have no idea how to do real research, but they'll either fail or adapt -- either way everyone wins.
Continue as you hve been.
"Freeze" articles for either paying subscribers or one-time buyers -- have a note and/or button that indicates an alternative article, based on the one you're viewing, is availible in a "frozen," fact-checked form.
Now, when people cite Wikipedia, they can attribute either verified or unverified article.
An easy (and cheap) way toward verification is to allow verification review only by paying subscribers who have done their homework to prove bonafides.
That's crazy! If Wikipedia was peer-to-peer, then there wouldn't be any security! Anybody could edit th...
oh, wait a minute.
I have to admit, I giggled at the frothy penis remark.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
I'm on Wikipedia almost everyday, and banners wouldn't bug me one bit. There is lots of free space on Wikipedia to put some simple static banner ads. Along the side of the article, under the main menu, it's all empty space. Between the space that has my username, and options, and the top of the article a wide banner can be put.
No flash. No sound. No blinking GIFs. Just static banners like in a magazine. These are the kind of ads I actually end up looking at, and click sometimes.
If your reading about comics books, chances are you have some interest in seeing the new ghost rider movie. Marvel comics can hype their movie all along the comic book section. Stuff like this isn't very invasive.
Let car companies sponsor their sections, let academic products by ads in their respective areas, etc...etc... This wasted space under the navigation menu is just begging for 1 skyscraper advertisement.
Just make sure that under no circumstances do any advertisers have any editorial control over any articles. However, if they go with annoying flash ads, or something like that, then I hope Wikipedia HQ burns to the ground.
Maybe they could do something like a bit torrent thing and individuals who adopt a certain page or section could just agree to host it forever, at least as a full seeder? Yes, this would cut down on edits, but they could change wiki around as well, once a page hit pretty much "nailed it status", a review board could say "freeze it", and then it goes to the voluntarily distributed model to share up the bandwith and server load.
.com, .net, .org domains, how about actually requiring that in practice instead of in long forgotten about theory?
Either way-no ads please. The only ads I block now are flash, I detest flash and it still sucks and doesn't work well, IMO, but I WILL start blocking all ads and sites that are all flash and javascript bogusness (that crap should be *banned* off the internet if you ask me) soon if the situation doesn't improve. I would pay a small reasonable yearly subscription for a wikipedia, and also a search engine which DIDN'T serve up commercial sites, no ads, nothing commercial. Originally, we did have the
Anyway, there is a fine line that companies always seem to want to push, ads can be unobtrusive, actually useful if they are relevant to the content on the page, and can serve several purposes. But when they take over, and most of every page on the entire site is just ads-well, that is major suckitude. Should be easy enough to parse as well, if most of the KB that your page serves up is ads-it sucks. I'd say anything more than 10% starts to suck(obvious not counting legit bona fide store fronts, you have entered a *catalog*). Like those articles we see here, 16 pages, one paragraph per huge page of ads. That's just crap, eyeball gouging sleaze. Radio and OTA are bad that way too, 1/3 airtime is all ads now, and a long time ago it wasn't that high, they just keep creeping in more and more minutes per hour of ads. Web pages for the most part are now way worse than that, on tons of sites.
And there's a nice industry "responsible advertiser" creedo that could be adopted, a compromise, 10% or less ads on a page by exact KB measurement, all things included, to get the "happy surfer" seal of approval. Be nice to see something like that. Flash and animated GIFS counts as double, automatic audio-10 times or actually outright banned unless it is designed as a full opt-in accessibility feature of course. Then we could have browser plugins that warn of sites that exceed that-BEFORE you go there. Hover over a link, red-beware, too many ads, green, 10% or less.
Normally connectivity is priced in terms of a monthly price per mbit/sec. $0.20/gbyte translated into rought $66 per month per mbit/sec. This is much higher than even the highest rates you will find for large scale connectivity. It is much more than Wikimedia is paying.
Even if we ignore the cost factors, your solution would only work if the Wikipedia content were static. If the content was actually static we could use much better ways to distribute the problem than what you have proposed.
Jason Calacanis is a pompous twit who needs to go away. I hereby "shush" him in the name of sanity. If Jimbo "Mr. Wiki" Wales is running out of cash, he'll need to figure something out. If he can keep a cashflow without resorting to more Google Ads, more power to him. Being that I use adblock, this will most likely not affect me at all. And being that Jason Calacanis doesn't even work for Wiki, I fail to see how this is any of his concern. He might be interested to know that I am having a tight month myself. Perhaps he could rant about that for a while, and drum up some PayPal donations for me. If all else fails, he can go back to trolling on Digg.
barack to the future?
Wikipedia should institute Project Wonderful ads. They're unlike "traditional" banner ads in sort of the same way Wikipedia is unlike traditional encyclopedias; potential advertisers bid on advertising spots until they reach an equilibrium point. Advertisers pay per day rather than the gameable per-click, and a significant portion of the money actually goes to the advertisee.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Considering that Wikipedia already has advertising, in the form of subject-edited articles, they might as well go full bore and post ads that will make them money. Maybe arstechnica should start paying for their little fluff-piece on Wikipedia.
While they're at it, maybe they can start paying slashdot for the news items they filch, and for being put on the short list to make the news themselves.
Google uses the Wikipedia quite heavily for many internal projects related to Natural Language Processing. Knowing this, I don't understand why google doesn't donate good amounts of money to Wikipedia, as it is a very valuable resource for them.
When you use Wikipedia (as a reader, not an editor), you are trying to get information on a given subject. Knowing that, would you not be shown discreet links relevant to what you are interested in ? I do not see what could be wrong with that. Neither, I am sure, would Google users.
Manipulative advertisement is clearly a problem. Why would mere - and optional - information be ?
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
BTW - Let me ask this. How can I get a copy of all the Wikipedia data? How can I get updates?
Download a complete database dump here.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Great. I'd wear shirts with (shortened) printouts of articles on them. Wouldn't Crushing by Elephant give a whole new meaning to an XXL shirt? I'd use the T-Shirt article, though, and buy a poster that has has the Poster one. Hope that'd be okay with the license?
Many pictures from the Wikipedia Commons would be great on T-Shirts and have licenses that allow that.
Or lets make fun ones: "Have you sold your Britannica yet?"
blow your mind already
Corporate interests are bound to influence the content - this happens all the time. The solution is a small (optional) subscription fee plus a 'Donate' button linked to PayPal. Those who use Wikipedia a lot will be encouraged but not forced to subscribe or donate. In a way, this is like tipping. If you find the service good (in this case, useful!), you contribute - if you are able too.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
80% of all accounts have never edited. 90% of all accounts have edited less that 3 times. Take a look through the user list sometime. There's tons of vandalism and trolling accounts over there.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
"Life in every breath... that is bushido"
Whose side has tripods?
Oh, war of words. Nevermind.
Jimmy needs to ask people not for DONATIONS, but LENDING THEM THEIR MONEY... instead of donating our money and watching it disappear, we give him the money for it to earn interest in a bank account for a few months, and then he sends it back, and then he uses the interest to pay the wikipedia costs.
This is what has to be done.
No ads on Wikipedia, please! Ads are a lot like cancer: Once you've got 'em, they spread. Look at /. for an example! Once you have advertisers paying your bills, they are in a position to make demands, and they will. They will offer you more money for more prominent placement, they will threaten to pull out if that hostile facts about their companies don't disappear, they will ask for animated GIFs and flash ads, they will annoy the hell out of your visitors, and once the annoyance has reached the level where people are leaving, they'll become ever more annoying to keep click-through rates up despite the loss of eyes.
Advertisement spreads once it's there. The only safe and stable level of advertisement is zero.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Interesting idea. Maybe Wikipedia could be moved into http://freenetproject.org/ I think this would be a benefit for both projects if it is done right.
"[Wikipedia has] 89 machines in Florida, 3 near Paris, 11 in Amsterdam, 23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility."
Will the 'merican government also be funding the Asian Wikis hosted in Korea. Also, I wonder if China will be willing to chip in some funding?
I think you should just leave it to the users, you could have wikipedia.org/ad/ and wikipedia.org/noad/ all articles are in sync but one raise money and the other dosn't and has no annoying ads.
if Wikipedia's current group of administrators did more administrating and less playing politics and abusing their powers to ban anyone they have a disagreement with on content.
Seriously. Look at the history of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ANI page, there are hundreds if not thousands of spots where administrators have removed comments to cover up for the abuses by their friends.
And Wales wants me to give these people money? He should go back to selling porn, he'd have all the money he wanted.
They have a number of problems, primary is constantly deleting comments to protect their fellow administrators. Check the page history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ANI.
Also on the problem market is the "CheckUser" utility, which got opened up to more users when David Gerard (who somehow still remains way on top of the project) was caught abusing it, but now rests in the hand of some of the most abusive administrators; gone is the day when an "Affirmative", "Negative", or "Inconclusive" report was given for each name submitted, now abusers of the system are slamming 10-15 names into the system and all the administrators ever write is "probable" or "likely" for the blanket lot of them.
Between that and the fact that administrators never have to follow their own rules (believe me, I've seen some of the worst abusive language from administrators, who are given a free pass while new users who write "fuck" on their user page are blocked for "incivility"), it's obvious that wikipedia needs some serious change.
It's fascinating, Jimbo Wales claims that "running ads on Wikipedia is not his decision to make". Yet, despite the fact that he stepped down from Wikipedia in November, but is still making (dictating) policy decisions in January.
Let Wikipedia run ads. Nice, unobtrusive, easily-blocked ads. Maybe someone will come along and write an article on the arcane subject of blocking them.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
I know Google donated some servers last year, but a serious partnership would be more productive. Google seem to have little problem handling a huge volume of traffic.
I think changes to the wikipedia software and architecture (are PHP and mySQL really the best solution?) would help.
Personally, I would not like to see advertising on the Wikipedia. However, funding is an issue, although I recently donated $100USD to the foundation to do my part. I have this thing about funding those efforts I derive significant benefit from, like EFF, et al.
Anway, maybe something like a click-thru fee for commercial sites that link to Wikipedia articles? After all, if you click thru to a site advertised on Google, from Google, then Google gets its little slice of the pie. This is kind of like that, but in reverse.
On the other hand, articles about some medical condition for example, could have a discreet sidebar of links (not ads) to companies with products that are related to the condition in question. Then clicking thru to the commercial site could result in revenue for Wikipedia.
Again, I DO NOT want blatant advertising in the Wiki, but I would not be averse to a simple list of links to related commercial sites that are willing to pay something for the traffic generated by their presence on Wikipedia.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
The most recent fund drive raised over a million bucks. Why is there this sense of imminent collapse?
I wonder what ratio of the equipment, colo, and bandwidth costs derive from the massive quantities of fancruft articles at Wikipedia (a rant I skimmed recently gave "list of foods mentioned in Harry Potter" as a representative article). There would be little loss to Wikipedia if *only* the fancruft pages served ads. Not the main entry on Star Wars, but the associated pages that list the length and colour of every character's light saber, or the list of epic fanfic poetry in the Buffyverse. The commercial purpose of Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Buffy's buttocks was to drive ad impressions and merchandise sales. This content would hardly be compromised by Google ad-sense any more than it has already compromised itself.
My feeling is that Wales has already figured this out, and he set up Wikia to skim the lucrative fancruft traffic. He doesn't wish to see adsense on Wikipedia, because his hope is that Wikia will alleviate Wikipedia of the fancruft burden, at great profit to himself, and for the betterment of Wikipedia at the same time.
To keep this in perspective, Wikipedia probably has about the lowest cost structure in terms of pages delivered of any major content site, and it is only a matter of time (two to five years?) before the exponential growth of Wikipedia as measured either in content size or page views delivered falls short of Moore's windfall. 90% of the Wikipedia infrastructure at their Florida colo facility is multi-core scalable (PHP/Apache and Squid servers). Only the expensive database cluster at the very center will scale more slowly than Moore's law now that it has squished sideways into more cores with less GHz.
I take complaints that the Mediawiki Foundation is running out of money with a large grain of salt. The sums are money are a mere trickle measured against the prominence of the asset. To a certain extent, the tax code strongly conditions charities/foundations toward a hand-to-mouth existence. Moreover, it might be strategically advantageous for the WF to keep themselves in poverty. Recalls to mind the line from the movie spoken to Gandhi "do you have any idea how much it costs us to keep you in poverty?" At that point in his life, Gandhi in a three-piece suit wouldn't have been Gandhi any more. I feel the same about Wikipedia. They could save a lot of money by being less broke, but it wouldn't suit the mission.
I think they should offer a way that people can opt-in to see ads. I, for one, would be more than willing to donate some eyeball-time of mine for the cause. I think i saw some projects that did something similiar, but I'd prefer it if it were official.
maybe you could make a try and publicsh your web pages on freenet. web pages are distributed all over this anonymised web.. Can't be banned that easily, be accessed securely, and storage distributed amoung those who use freenet. The only issue, is that on last release (major one) there is not that many people on this net. You'd have to use a tool to publish those web pages, so that they spread all over the freenet grid. And as far as i know, you cannot access those pages on freenet from the regular web, without install freenet.
Maybe once all people will have this facilities as plugins.. as many can have bittorent etc.. and it will not make that much a difference.
But i suspect, you need to do something now.. just like you need money now..
Well, thats just what it comes out in mind to me.. I am not rich. But i DO consider your efforts / wikipedia as a MAJOR project for good on the web. Work done, is an outstanding accomplishment, and i take this opportunity to thank you very much.
don't know how to edit it (tell me if there's a way)
You can't edit comments once they've been posted. The ability to do so would be wide open to abuse - e.g. edit comments to change what you said to make respondents look stupid, edit highly-rated posts to add/change a link to point to goatse or similar, etc.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
As someone else pointed out, complete database dumps of everything are available. I'm not sure how often they're updated nowadays. But getting just updates is not nearly as easy. In fact, if you try to run a live mirror which takes some load off their servers by caching results, they'll block your IP address.
Didn't someone once say that about letting people edit an encyclopedia?
Freeze articles and have them expertly reviewed. Experts get a (small) cut of the profits based on what they've reviewed. They have to write an article on the article to get paid. Access is via advertisements or paid; either or both can be implemented. Pro users also get access priority - if the system is loaded, their requests are served first, or at least faster.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For example you check some environment articles on Wiki which has a huge Exxon "tower" ad side of them. There are some real concerns about the "global warming debate" and they must be included in Wiki right now but if it has Exxon ad, entire trust will be gone and it will be real dead since nobody would trust it.
Thing to save Wiki is a secure p2p based system which people (general public) will still access via ordinary web browser but the bandwidth, php etc. CPU processes will be shared among "donators".
I am sure there are some developers who would manage to code such a massive application.
The article asks "What do you think Wikimedia should do to shore up the financial situation of the Wikipedia?"
Simple. Just make an entry saying they're flush with cash.
Everyone knows the Wiki contains nothing but absolute truth.
Everybody talks about selling out.
...). This could be someone completly independet. I'd vote for something like PriceWaterhouseCoopers et.al.
But you can only sell out if the content producers know enough about advertising revenues. If they don't know anything about advertising revenue, they can't be influenced at all.
So let a third party do the advertising (e.g. Google) and let a fourth party do the verification of sales und page impressions (just to make sure that Google can not do evil
With the right construction Wikipedia could profit from advertising, even profit big. They could buy licences and put stuff in the public domain and a lot of other very useful things.
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
You seem to have missed what I said. Google won't accept Wikipedia content as is. So if Wikipedia wants to go with Google, they would have to either censor their content or only put ads on approved content. I guess with the ad revenue they'd be able to afford someone whose job it was simply to designate which article versions meet Google's content guidelines. But that information will inevitably influence the "content producers".
If by the right construction you mean if Wikipedia were a for-profit corporation instead of a non-profit charity, then yeah. But...they're not...
I'm 100% sure that a site that is as important as Wikipedia could negotiate a deal with everyone. No matter if it's Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. You had a Wikipedia copy, you are not the Wikimedia Foundation, so your problems with AdSense do not mean that the "official" Wikipedia would have problems too.
Google sells advertising on MySpace for 3(?) years and paid 900 million for that. So if MySpace Content is good enough for Google, Wikipedia has to be too.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Well, I'm not nearly as sure. See, it's not really up to Google, or Yahoo, or Microsoft - they would have to in turn convince the advertisers. And Wikipedia content is quite explicit: violence, sex, profanity, drugs, gambling...and that's just the parts that aren't quickly deleted.
AFAIK the Myspace terms of service don't allow explicit photographs of male and female genitalia. Wikipedia does. In fact, the admins that run the site regularly block people who try to remove these explicit images.
Granted, these "problems" could be worked around, probably through a combination of not advertising on certain articles and accepting somewhat lower than market fees for the rest. But it's hard for me to say that couldn't cause any pressure on the content producers to change the content.