Should Wikipedia Sell Advertising?

The Narrative Fallacy writes "The LA Times has an interesting story on the state of Wikipedia's finances and how with 300 million page views a day, the organization could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. Without advertising the foundation has a tough time raising its annual budget of $4.6 million. The 45,000 or so individuals who contribute annually give an average of $33 each, so campaigns, which are conducted online, raise only about one-third of what's needed. As Wikimedia adds features to its pages, such as videos, costs will rise. 'Without financial stability and strong planning, the foundation runs the risk of needing to take drastic steps at some point in the next couple years,' said Nathan Awrich, a Wikipedia editor who supports advertising."

Comments

obviously they should sell advertising

[circletimessquare]

it ruins the impartiality, it ruins the experience, it compromises the purpose, blah, blah, blah, zzz...

you have to pay the bills. idealism doesn't pay the bills. a "compromised" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia

there really isn't anything you can say that is more illuminating on the subject. either you can run the site financially or you can't. it really is that cut and dry

Re:obviously they should sell advertising

[ta bu shi da yu]

Rubbish. A Wikipedia that doesn't even try for NPOV, impartiality or any of the core things that make up the project now is not worthwhile at all.

Won't people stop with the stupid advertising nonsense already? Not everything is about money!

Re:Well .....

[Constantine XVI]

One of these days, I even plan to start reselling ADSL with a transparent proxy configured my own special way, so other people can also enjoy the same advertisement-free Internet experience (and I can make a few quid as a secondary consideration). Sure, as long as you don't call it the Internet. What makes the Internet so special is that the providers (the good ones, anyway) censor/filter NOTHING, and the filtering is left up to the end-user. IMHO, the second you begin denying your customers specific content/services (be it ads or BitTorrent), I no longer consider you a proper ISP, and neither should the law.

And besides, if you can filter all those ads, we don't think you would have a problem filtering out child porn either, right?

Re:Oooh.

[Bombula]

All this criticism of Jimmy Wales seems a bit silly. The guy could easily have created Wikipedia as a for-profit enterprise. It would be no different as a website or a resource, and he could be profiting immensely from it. As for me, text-based ads a la Google don't bother me much. I'm much more irked by the flashy banner ad crap like what's at the top of this slashdot page than a few text links down the right hand margin.

Funny how no one is harassing Coyboy Neil for not running Slashdot like Mother Theresa.

Just use YPN or AdSense

[dbmasters]

It would be nothing to maintain and with contextually sensitive ads they would vbe related to the pages they appear on (in theory) it would be useful and profitable.

Keep an eye on the money!

[guanxi]

Given the independence of the editors (the volunteers) from the publishers (Wikimedia Foundation Inc.), I'm not too concerned about the content. Of course that independence only lasts until Wikimedia insists on seats on the Arbitration Committee or other editorial authority.

But they need a mechanism -- beyond 'trust us' -- to keep an eye on the money. That much money is just too tempting, not only for plain embezzlement but also for things like loans and investments for personal or friends' businesses, unreasonable expenses, etc.

Who controls the money? To whom are they responsible? Ultimately, the responsible party is the Wikimedia Foundation Board. While I don't believe fame and talent are highly correlated, and have no doubts about the board members, it would inspire more confidence if someone was putting a broader reputation on the line for Wikipedia. I want some on the board who have something serious to lose if things go wrong, like Mitch Kapor, Joi Ito, and others on the Mozilla Foundation board. In fact, I wonder why don't have people like already. Certainly it's prominent enough to attract them.

Finally, what mechanisms do similar organizations use to manage windfalls of cash?

It's the opposite

[NewAndFresh]

a "compromised" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia

One of the important things that make wikpedia is that there is no advertising.
Like many people have already pointed out, there are many other options.
You add advertising and it's no longer wikipedia.
So I'll fix that for you:
a "slower" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia.

Re:It's the opposite

[h4rm0ny]

Now that deserves an Insightful mod. I dislike that questions such as this are just accepted without reservation: That you get to choose between Wikipedia and Compromised Wikipedia. Who framed those options and what did they do to reach the conclusion that this choice is inevitable.

-A Proud Wikipedia Donator

-H.

actually, every human endeavour IS about money

[circletimessquare]

money is really just an abstract expression of human interest and value. pick the most idealistic human endeavour you can think of. it has value to other human beings. therefore, it is monetized. sure, it needn't be expressed in actual dollars, but a conversion to that occurs at some point for anyone who interacts with that human endeavour. the church? marriage and love? science? they all involve cash transations at some point

why do you think you achieve some sort of higher moral ground or purpose by shunning money? all you do is hobble your own ability to properly understand how the world you live in actually functions. i'm not asking you to worship money. and money certainly leads people to do evil things. but again, money is just an abstract expression of human desires. the real evil is aspects of human nature itself, not a piece of green paper with alexander hamilton's face on it

all i'm asking you to do is grant money the proper respect it deserves for quantifying abstract human interest in such a way that it makes the world we live in a better place. yes, money is a great invention, like the wheel or the semiconductor. it makes your world a better place. bartering chickens for school books gets kind of old after awhile. thus the glorious invention of money. and no, i'm not gordon gecko. i'm just a realist. realism trumps cotton candy idealism any day. and the most sober realistic consideration of money in this world is that it makes your life better

cotton candy headed idealists can be so stupid

you view its strength as its weakness

[circletimessquare]

i trust random anonymous people than "quality" submissions by someone with an agenda to sell

random people off the street have no agenda. or rather, in a nonhierarchical structure, the overlapping agendas of random people cancel each other out to arrive at true neutrality on a subject matter. after all, you are posting anonymously and you obviously have a flawed bias ;-)

"experts" making encyclopedias in the traditional manner have a bill of goods they need to sell us. plenty of "facts" in this world are nothing more than statements of indoctrination into a given agenda. "experts" in a field of study are often champions of indoctrination, not education

true propaganda in this world never tells a single lie. it merely omitts certain unmentioned facts here and there in such a way to color people's perceptions. that's why they are called half-truths. meanwhile, a wide open encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to is the only way to illuminate those corners of propaganda that someone with an agenda doesn't want you to see

even a subconscious agenda a contributor is not aware of: their own biases they are blind to, such that they have no intent to lie to you, this is a threat to real truth

and so what you see as wikipedia's greatest weakness is in fact its greatest strength

you need to come to understand this

Re:They should, begging for money is no business m

[moosesocks]

Wikipedia's not a "business" by any stretch of the imagination.

NPR and PBS have also shown that this "begging for money" business model can indeed work successfully. If anything, Wikipedia should turn to them for inspiration and fundraising advice.

You can model it that way, sure

[NickFortune]

You can model any human activity in terms of money, certainly. But that doesn't make that model the predictor for all classes of activity. I mean you can model every human activity in terms of garbage if you want to: every human activity produces some waste materials, if only from from the excrement of those so engaged and the waste heat of the work performed. You can say every human endeavour is about anything with a little ingenuity.

But the fact that we can analyse Wikimedia purely in terms of money is not an argument for them using ads to finance their operation, any more than being able to conduct the analysis based on refuse constitutes an argument for them buying a fleet of garbage trucks.

Don't confuse the map with the territory, dude.

Re:Go Distributed

[billcopc]

I would love to see Wikipedia become the poster-child for peer-to-peer webhosting, but that would require installing a ton of crap software on Norton-loving imbeciles' machines. It opens the whole system up for massive abuses and corruption, intentional or not.

Go for Google ads, I say! Just one block across the top, where their donation banner usually sits. I see no harm in it.

Re:Oooh.

[Metaphorically]

The guy could easily have created Wikipedia as a for-profit enterprise. Hindsight's 20/20. If he had created it as a for-profit enterprise then would there have been nearly the same participation levels? It wouldn't be in the position it is today if it were created for-profit and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Re:Prepare yourself

[AvitarX]

1) What you are demonstrating is that even non-add donations can influence (or try).
2) You may repay by editing, but unless you define "us" in "most of us" as people who edit wikipedia than most do not. I will go as far as saying that I live with 2 people who have found errors in wikipedia and not fixed them (one that I remember was the date of a French author's birth, that burned 1/4 of the people in the class (the rest used the text book), and still didn't get fixed.

I would personally think the best way for wikipedia to remain neutral is for it to take advertising from something such as adsense, clearly marking it as advertising. If I go to look up info on a a game, and I get a clearly marked add to buy it, no one loses. Wikipedia would only need to protect itself from the influence of one company, and it should be easier than policing the thousands of donations they get now that may or may not be influencing them.