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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.
'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.
The hell he is. He's an objectivist. Objectivists practically get sexually aroused at the thought of corporations.
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.
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:
God thats horrible. Your son's school gets ad money? So you're allowing corporations to educate your child on which products they should be buying, from an early age?
Thats sick.
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?
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.
We live in an imperfect world with hard realities. Not to get political here, but since Ronald Reagan, the social conservatives have had a strategy of starving government with deficits. We had an 8 year reversal with Clinton, but it wasn't enough.
Because of this, our nation looked richer than it was. Before Reagan, we were the #1 creditor nation, since we are the #1 debtor nation. Its like we've been living off a home equity loan.
The practical upshot of this is that "lower priority" expenditures at the state and local levels have suffered. Fire departments, police departments, and schools have suffered. There may be trillions for an unjustified war, but there isn't $3,000 for text books, let alone the teachers, paper, and pencils.
Pepsi and coke have vending machines in the schools. There's always talk about more.
I don't like it, but it is better than not having books or teachers.
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).
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.
Your post doesn't convey much information content, though I do love the use of MS Paint and the novel use of the mathematical term "inflection point" to try and get your message across.
I also like how you used Google Trends, which is an engine that essentially compares for which term is more searched for, and asked it whether MSN.com or Google.com fared better. Because I'm sure the number of people who use google.com to search for google.com are representative of everyone. Everyone with the inability to realize that they are already at the website they want to be at.
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?
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?
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
Of course you can use it, you just can't cite it, because it isn't a source. It's an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia articles consist entirely of information that stems from other sources. This makes Wikipedia a useful tool to locate relevant sources of information on a subject you want to learn more about or write about.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
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 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.
I've taught composition - I encourage students to use it to find topics. How many people have gone on Wikipedia and wasted hours chasing links and footnotes? Of course, I don't let them cite it, but if you can't go further in-depth than a wikipedia entry, your paper has more problems than just sources.
"Tu fui, ego eris" - Virgil
It's nearly complete. Look at their Logo.
My other sig is funny.
http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia
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.
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?