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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."
Okay! That's it. A show of hands please, who wants cake they can't eat?
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
to a user looking up a definition for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthymeme?
fortune -s -o
WikipediAds, the advertisements anyone can edit! Who better to make the ads than the customers?
Since, according TFA, they just moved offices from FL to San Francisco, and are renting 3000 square feet there. That cannot be cheap. If you're a strapped non-profit, why on earth would you go to one of the most expensive places in the country to run your internet-based business?
I'll just say this, I'd rather have an ad-supported wikipedia than no wikipedia at all.
If the video feature costs more than donations can support, I'm ok with no videos on wikpedia. Perhaps another seperate wikisite can have video with advertisements, while wikipedia itself could maintain its adfree status.
OK, a broken business model that based on begging for money every 6 months or so.
... Gazillions good ideas come to mind. Buy out books to the public domain.
Go for advertising. Buy out books to the public domain, give back some money to wikepedia authors (e.g. give money to proven authors for writing additional articles),
But no money means no money for good ideas. And Wikipedia will stay vulnerable to attacks from someone with money (think Google Knol).
Yes yes, money changes people. Articles may get flawed to get more money. If you think, Wikipedia must stay independent, make it independent. Create a Wikipedia-Ad-foundation, that tries to get as much money as possible, but give them absolutly no control over Wikipedia-The-Content-Organisation. Both orgs should be absolutly independent.
And so you'd have a lot of money *and* complete seperation of concerns.
And there are *so* many unbelievably good ways to spend money.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Not banners.
Something that adds to the value of the site would be good - paid-for "related" links to commercial sites.
Data recovery - link to services. Bridge construction - links to firms building these. Encryption - encryption software. Every single pharmaceutical - online pharmacy. Every single book or movie - amazon.com or other such. So if you're willing to pay for what you've just learned about, you know where to go to buy it or have it done, or learn more about it.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
> 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).
I take it you won't be advertising your service?
And besides, if you can filter all those ads, we don't think you would have a problem filtering out child porn either, right?
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Or do the gods behind /. use a different browser to me.
/. are the banner ones, and they're fine, but sometimes they are those nasty square ones that block off half the story summary and require multiple reloads to get rid of.
I'm not really going off-topic: my point is that ads really aren't a problem in these high-bandwidth times - at least they're somewhat targeted and they don't intrude.
The problem is, though, that they do. Sometimes the ads on
I have no problem with ads - but they should be tested to see if they work on the 'most-popular' (depending on point of view) browser. Otherwise, don't be bitchin' at me cos I flashblock your ass.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
The cake (or pie chart) is here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Planned_Spending_Distribution_2007-2008
Not sure what happened to the 2006 one.
What wikipedia should do is try to hit up the private sector for some rich sponsors looking to make donations to a tax-free charity.
Maybe a single link on the front page to link to the top 1000 donations of all time and top 1000 donations in the last 12 months will be a nice compromise.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Funny how no one is harassing Coyboy Neil for not running Slashdot like Mother Theresa.
A-Bomb
I think we're discussing putting Google ads on Wikipedia pages, not selling the whole thing to Google.
And Google Ads hardly gives Google control over your servers.
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.
dB Masters
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?
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.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Scenario: "I'm young, I'm idealistic. I haven't got a credit card, I haven't got paypal, but I do have a website with at least some few visitors. And I really like Wikipedia."
Think this is uncommon? I certainly don't.
So. How do we "monetize" this resource? Let them run ads generating income for Wikipedia.
Someone(tm) in Wikipedia, or some trustworthy foundation, should set up an account somewhere, and then volunteers will make a few widgets to easily add ads to your site, a Wordpress plugin, banner rotation so you can donate a certain percentage of page impressions... I'm sure more things will come up.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
The idea of Wikipedia - a freely available online encyclopedia that anyone can edit - I believe is better if it is impartial and independent. It becomes encumbered, compromised, by advertising incentives. There is added value in advertisement free - vis-à-vis Consumer Reports.
The question is: Why is Wikipedia so expensive to maintain? If it is bandwidth and servers, is the HTTP client/server model the answer? Is there an efficient model to share Wikipedia entries peer to peer? Or perhaps share costs between Universities or other institutions that act in the public interest?
Additionally, if Wikipedia does go to a peer to peer model, can it integrate projects like FreeNet to ensure that the information remains free and accessible.
If you think the complaints about edits, arbitrariness, capriciousness and bias with Wikipedia are bad now, wait until it commercializes. In my (limited) experience, this will change the paradigm of its management. Wikipedia will cease to be a gift to humanity. It will be owned.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Allow advertising that anyone can edit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
more of the same on Twitter.
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.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
[Citation needed]
There's a larger problem with advertising than "people don't like it." I am closely related to a nonprofit organization, one that could also make a butt-load of cash if we were to strategically place advertisments on our web site.
There's a reason we don't and it's not that our visitors would object. IANAA and IANATL, but I do speak to them on occasion. Advertising revenues are what is known as "unrelated business taxable income". Notice the word taxable. It complicates life for a non-profit. Taxable income over a small threshold means that the organizations tax returns must be made public. If contributions and government support fall below 33% of total income, the organization no longer qualifies as "publicly supported." In essence, too much advertising income can jeopardize your status as a non-profit.
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