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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.
The hell he is. He's an objectivist. Objectivists practically get sexually aroused at the thought of corporations.
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.
Merchandising! Get your Wikipedia t-shirt. Your Wikipedia toilet paper. Your Wikipedia breakfast cereal (each batch is produced according to a wiki recipe -- just hope vandals didn't alter the recipe). Wikipedia the flamethrower!
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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
http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia