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Wikipedia Almost Reaches $6 Million Target
An anonymous reader noted a story discussing the aftermath of the Wikipedia fundraiser and says "The writer suggests that Wikipedia can earn $50-100 million a month by a simple text ad. He also suggests that contributors should be financially rewarded and that the lack of financial reward is the reason why 98.3% of registered Wikipedia users are inactive.
What do you think? Should Wikimedia Foundation put ads on Wikipedia? Should contributors be financially rewarded? What compensation structure would be best?" Personally I think the independence of Wikipedia is great, and any advertising would not only compromise that integrity, but give contributors a sense of entitlement that the site is better off without.
It really comes down to what Jimmy Whales and the foundation think (and can manage). Sure, me personally, I would be happy to have EVERYTHING advertiser-free (including the street full of annoying billboards near my house, all my favorite TV shows, etc.). But it really comes down to the question of whether Wikipedia can sustain itself on donations and goodwill alone. If they can, then great, more power to them! If not, I couldn't, in all fairness, fault them for allowing advertising or paying particularly useful contributors.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I have no problem with this at all. Many people choose to not "pay" for TV but in exchange they have to watch advertisements.
I would rather put up with ads and still get to use the wikipedia free of charge than to loose it all together (or have to start paying for it.) I do the same thing here at Slashdot. ;)
"Luke, I am your node.parent();"
Maybe its my cynicism but using monetary rewards to encourage contribution (however it may be regulated) will only encourage users to find ways to exploit the system.
I think they should ask users to pay 1 cent per search.
Not demand that they pay it, but simply ask them to.
Track the # of searches for registered users and display it in the corner somewhere.
Probably because they don't know anything.
I'm glad they're inactive. who would keep up with all of those crap changes?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Ads are the root of all evil. period.
No ads on Wikipedia. If they would be in business to make monies they would have done it so far.
One of Wikipedia's greatest strengths is it's non-commercialistic nature. As soon as advertisements are brought in, and money paid for contributors, the focus is lifted from the community, and brought back to money. I'd hate to see that happen. As a scientist, I find the drive to money to be a source of great impurity.
Excuse for why is your room always messy?
"He also suggests that contributors should be financially rewarded and that the lack of financial reward is the reason why 98.3% of registered Wikipedia users are inactive."
Oh! The writer couldn't be farther from truth. 98.3% of users are inactive because rest of the 1.7% users have formed a self-serving "community", and most people who are contributing in their spare time don't have the energy and will to fight their way inside this community.
On a side note, I heard that most content is generated by anonymous users. So why so stress on registered users?
I would not be surprised if such a suggestion is accepted. Community needs care! :)
Wikipedia with advertising will eventually become like MS Encarta. Good luck with that.
The article makes a perilous, and all too common, assumption - that the addition of adverts will make no difference to the way users respond to the site. It's getting 10 billion hits now, but would "a simple text advert" drive any of them elsewhere? Would the text advert drive away contributors who are basically what Wikipedia is selling? Would someone else fork wikipedia and set up an ad-free rival?
It's easy to think that massive traffic now equates to massive traffic forever, and you can monetize that traffic without upsetting people, but you can't. It's that simple. Introducing big changes (and it would be a BIG change) would have far-reaching consequences that I don't believe the article writer has fully considered.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I can understand the idea that by accepting advertising dollars, you somehow compromise your journalistic integrity.
NPR (I am pretty right wing, but NPR is the only non-braindead radio in my area) does a good job of what is called a firewall [findarticles.com] whereby editorial teams are separated from funding decisions and funding teams are not included in editorial decisions.
It's pretty reasonable that Wikimedia could do the same thing. I know, not having ads separates wikipedia from the rest of the icky for-profit websites out there...but as another /. poster pointed out: begging for money all the time isn't a business model.
THL phish sticks
I hate Wikipedia's annoying space-sucking ads. They take up a full inch of screen real estate at the top of the page.
Thank god the "campaign" is over. I visit wikipedia less often than I used to and I am going to visit even less if they keep doing "campaigns".
1. Keep them simple: no flashy "shoot the monkey and win $10,000" kind of ads.
2. Make them context sensitive but not insensitive: No porn ads on "Erectile disfuction" articles.
3. Try to use the ads for the common good: focus on open and innovative initiatives
4. Make some sort of mechanism for users to rate the ads (other than by (not)clicking on them)
Any more ideas on the subject?
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
I would say no but not for that Lame reason the author mentioned. Wikipedia is a not for profit organization (NPO), the real difference between a NPO and a For Profit Organization (FPO) oddly enough isn't profit NPO reason for being a NPO because they just account it as Excess Revenue, then treat it internally like profit. But the Excess Revenue for a NPO should go to focus on its mission. So you have excess revenue well put the money in the bank and use it for a dry spell, or to help expand Wikipedia. But giving the Profit back to the "Share Holders" makes it a for profit organization. Once they do that they will loose all their NPO advantages, as well the subconscious ones. You are not going to donate $5 - $50 dollars of a for profit organization, who makes enough to pay the people and keep operating efficiency. You are not donating to Wikipedia if you expect a monetary return form you investment. Within time you will get some investors who are so heavily invested in Wikipedia that Wikipedia will need to take strong considerations of their interests.
But for things like adds effecting the content. I doubt it... Most internet adds go threw companies ie Double Click / Google.... And bitting the hand that feeds them doesn't normally get them in to much trouble especially with public generated content. If Wikipedia was a Blog or had some ways of tightly controlling its content I would say advertisements could effect the service. However the danger is not by adds but paying the investors, who can change the direction of Wikipedia Corp. To do what will maximize profit.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would not want for myself, monetary rewards for editing Wikipedia. Also "paid for contributors" might be willing to compromise in order to keep money coming, by making their contributions more "attractive" than more "correct". On the other hand I would not object to see one or two ads per day in Wikipedia, if it would help the finances of Foundation. They can use extra money for hiring more editors, instead of only relying on contributors.
Why does everyone think as soon as you start to throw up billboards and advertisements that the organization in question has become unethical? Wiki provides a service to the community. Do you think those services are free? The internet has many services that are free except for advertising, simply because publishing information is very cheap (but not free). Even this website you're reading this comment on is supported by advertising. I don't think wikipedia should be any different from a million other websites that are supported by advertisements.
There are only a few other options here;
Micro-payments. Hahahaha! lolz. Great idea, but where's the infrastructure? In other news, where are those fleets of alternative-fuel cars? Oh yeah... On the drawing board, waiting for the infrastructure to be built.
Fee-based. Sure, charge maybe $12 a year for access to wikipedia... aaaaand 95% of their userbase says "Oh screw that" and the site tanks. This is pretty much committing suicide online to attempt this; Very few websites have survived the transition.
Subsidized. You know, like the BBC. Quality content, paid for by your tax dollars. Ah, wait... This is the United States and we ere hates dem dar communist bullshiat.
Clearly, advertisements is the best way to go for wiki.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
good idea. 1 cent for them, 40 cents for the transaction fee. You really need to jump to $5+ to make it worthwhile. So how long do you think it will take an average user to hit 500 wikipedia searches? I don't know if I've ever visited that many pages.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I personally wouldn't be opposed to a few text based ads in wikipedia. especially if it allowed the wiki to keep going.
really a few ads wont hurt its nature, however that much revenue might. if they could really be earning 100s of millions of dollars annually they could take the wiki to a whole new level.
This could be a fantastic thing increasing the accuracy and depth of the articles hiring full time writers, contributor incentives and generally encouraging its growth across the board. but if done incorrectly could turn sour and corporate.
OTOH they could donate the money above their normal operation costs.. $100 million would buy a lot of OLPC XO laptops...
I think that the writer needs to start his own encyclopedia and run it as he sees fit. I'm sure he'll make lots of money.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So some guy with a blog makes a post claiming that Wikipedia needs to change. I missed the part where there was a problem.
The facts are that the goal is within spitting distance. They're 97% of the way their. So what's the problem with this model?
As for the 98% dormant figure, it's irrelevant. Isn't what we care about if Wikipedia is expanding its coverage, increasing it's quality, and serving more people? The percentage of active people could be 1%, it could or it could be 50% and that wouldn't necessarily impact quality, scope, or number served.
(I'm also fairly sure quality, scope, and number served are increasing, but I have no evidence to support that).
AccountKiller
Wikipedia could thrive with benefits from both worlds.
Solid, intuitive research doesn't come free. Even research in colleges is based on funding. In fact, university professors spend most of their time finding funding for research projects. This is why they're not in the class rooms. It's the research project funding that keeps them at the university.
Researchers would post their studies of all different topics if they could see a financial benefit from doing so. Otherwise, they go around chasing publications who pay for the research.
I promise you, there are thousands of PHd level individuals working on projects that they intend to shop to major publishers. A majority of them will be rejected. They will hang onto their research for the rest of their lives looking for the next opportunity to sell it.
Give them the opportunity to post a topic with banners on articles and get royalties from it. If someone doesn't like what he's saying, then don't link to it! If someone disagrees with the research then write an article at how you disagree with the article.
I think putting banner ads on every page would be a bad idea, but letting the article creator decide would create a whole new level of article integrity.
They couldn't pay me enough to work on Wiki[pm]edia, on the other hand I do it for free.
in anyones book $6 million is a fortune especially for just one years running costs.
If it really costs that much to run a bunch of servers world wide (..how?) then its about time they looked into some kind of p2p hosting with each page being replicated on 100's of desktops.
$6 million a *year* - just think what you could do to provide clean drinking in Africa with that money
Restrict advertisements to nonprofit organizations?
Another solution would be to not allow anonymous contributors, and have content subject to academic scrutiny. ie. Place significant control in the hands of an academic based board. The site would be eligible for grants from the library of congress, other education oriented grants, and direct contributions from academia. Getting the "contributing community" that surrounds Wikipedia to give up that much freedom would probably be very difficult. But, balancing security and freedom can be a measure of ego.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
It's probably a reasonable assumption that at least 98.5% of the population is unfit to post articles on Wikipedia so that 98.3 number is meaningless.
It shows a very poor understanding of human psychology. Go to this page and do a text search for "drag circles". For boring tasks (such as maintaining Wikipedia), people actually perform worse when they're paid money. If you want the best work out of someone, don't pay them.
Indeed, and while we're at it, let's bring back slavery. That'll show all those lazy, good-for-nothing uppity niggers their place.
Honestly, your mentality is scary to me. Why does every thing you do have to be tied to money?
On the other hand, if I don't rely on money no one can censor what I say by threatening to take away the funding for all my "hard work."
While I would hate to see ads on Wikipedia, I would hate it more if Wikipedia were to close its doors. Therefore I would take the lesser to two evils in this scenario, and go with the ads, but again, only if it was to avoid the financial demise of Wikipedia. This is a non-profit organization, so I would think it should be fairly clear what "required" means from a financial standing. Regarding the second question, I personally don't believe contributors should be financially rewarded. Currently, people contribute to a topic they're knowledgeable about because they have a passion in that topic. If there was a monetary reward involved, people would apply far less integrity to their content.
How would that even come close to functioning currently? I could create a page for myself, and then get paid to add/edit content about my daily life.
Now I would assume that's an extreme example of how it could go badly, but I already get annoyed with their editors now for complaining about trivia sections or removing pop culture/gaming/interesting articles because they aren't relevant long term. How bad would it be if people were expecting payment, and someone decided their content wasn't relevant enough to be paid.
I think they'd succeed a lot more if the current ruling regime would calm down a bit on all the [citation needed] [trivia sections are frowned upon] [this is in-universe style of dialogue] etc etc. Sure, it makes sense for a lot of topics, but for me checking out things about TV shows or fictional books or more 'light' topics, just loosen up a bit and you'll have a lot more people wanting to contribute.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Your point is dead-on. I liked Wikipedia before the "community" took over. I remember when Wikipedia was compared to the "Hitchhikers Guide" and it was great.
Now, they try to be a "real" encyclopedia. The problem is, it will never be a real encyclopedia. Quoting Wikipedia will not be considered a valid source.
Quit worrying about content that isn't encyclopedia quality, and then maybe normal people will contribute again.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
If you only want dedicated (dare I say fanatic), young (college age, at most) posters with time on their hands, keep the unpaid model.
Face it, most people want to at least break even with their time. Few will take the time to craft a carefully throught-out entry, then watch it trashed by the ignorati almost immediately, if they are not compensated in some way.
The idea that all posters are equal, and have something valuable to provide is fine.
IF the subject is not one that people are passionate about.
That means, on topics like:
war (particularly ethnic wars)
politics
controversial area of science
educational theories
(to just name a few), Wikipedia will not be worth the effort for the more rational types.
To be honest, for me, and my students, Wikipedia is most useful for small topics, as a first starting point. It's nice for background only.
Only "reliable" and "notable" knowledge is allowed. And you know who ELSE had that policy?
Yes, Wikipedia is communism. The "vandals" were right.
I suspect that this is because most people sign up to edit or create a specific page, or just because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and don't have anything interesting or relevant to say about anything else. I know not having anything interesting or relevant to say doesn't stop all of the other 1.7%, but there you go.
One of the main reasons (if not the main reason) that people stop contributing is the lack of financial reward.
I think this is nonsense. The reason people stop contributing is because the articles they are interested in are eventually pretty well fleshed out. There is nothing left to contribute. Eventually, we reach a point where pretty much all that can be said about a subject is written.
Proverbs 21:19
Someone looking up plumbing finds an ad for plumbers...
Someone looking at the London listing finds hotel and air travel...
Someone looking up nukes gets an ad for the FBI...
A simple google ad, text only, wouldn't kill off anything that Wikipedia is trying to accomplish.
However the idea of paying people to moderate, edit, or create articles is a horrid idea. The reason I trust Wikipedia is because it's run by the commons and while they don't get everything right, they get more right than most encyclopedias and with a lot more volume.
If they start paying, I'll just branch it for the free editing.
Keep to your strengths Wikipedia. You have good information that people rely on daily. Having a small text ad wont kill that.
If I had a web site as popular as Wikipedia I'd be milking that sucker for advertising dollars hand over fist.
Wikipedia is a great service. I would not mind advertisements on it any more than I mind them on Slashdot. I ignore them, Slashdot get paid, I get to enjoy Slashdot. All is well.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
That long end of the "Free Lunch Buffet" is starting to catch up to us.
Anything sufficiently large eventually accumulates overhead costs from vendors who want to be paid.
We're all talking about ads here; Wikipedia recently went more the "Please Donate" NPR route. Other than creating another layer to manage, I'm almost smelling a fork. Maybe there's room for a Wiki variant paid for by ads, but also less strict on notability, etc. It would be known as a more rough&tumble cousin site, but if you liked Original Research blended into articles it could be interesting.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Maybe if the whole system could be aided by beta hardware or if some huge companies could help hosting the whole project? I would make a special section for those companies in some "major contributors" section or something. No real money involved, but some of the weight could be taken off.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
Presently, people effectively donate their time to write and maintain articles. They do it out of altruism, to basically get the warm and fuzzies.
Paying people money would replace a strong incentive with a weak one, and quality would go through the floor. How long would it be before cybercriminals find a way to game such a system and destroy Wikipedia overnight?
A good analogy is why blood donors don't get paid money to donate: at the moment, people donate blood to help others. As soon as you start paying people for blood donations, only junkies and down-and-outers, who are more likely to carry blood borne disease, would bother donating blood.
Anybody suggesting that Wikipedia would be improved by paying contributers is stupid, stupid, stupid.
As far as paying contributors... I don't think that Wikipedia should ever go to paying all contributors. However, I do think it might make sense to pay bounties for articles on topics that are for some reason under-represented or particularly difficult to get quality articles on. I would suggest that there be some sort of community nominating scheme to nominate an article for a bounty, to keep the community involved.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
and have come to seriously question its veracity of late, because just in the last couple of years, nearly every article to which I tried to contribute had a band of "campers" hanging around it, who were much more interested in maintaining their own version of the truth via the preferential enforcement of technicalities in Wikipedia's rules, than they were in the truth content of said articles.
If you want to insist that I cite examples, then use the example of the article on naked short selling in the stock market. If you are not familiar with that case, look it up. It is hardly an isolated case.
Wikipedia was a good idea, but it has been seriously corrupted by people like these, and the foundation has not done anything to address the problem. On the contrary, it has, in some cases, supported people who have worked hard to keep certain articles inaccurate.
They don't get any of my money until they take serious measures to address this problem. Unless they do, Wikipedia will continue to go downhill... just as it would deserve.
However, we don't do scholarly work here. Slashdot is a reasonably intelligent discussion forum, and a Wiki link to get the rawest of raw basics of something is more accurate than complete non-information we had to start with.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Theodore Sturgeon would be proud.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
There is a logical disconnect in saying just because they have some income they should pay contributers.. They should only think of paying contributers if it would make wikipedia better.
Its probably fair to assume that per contributions payments, might increase the volume of contributions, but what about the quality of those contributions.. certainly the scheme would need to be structured so that only "beneficial contributions" were rewarded, this raises the question of should those who assess compliance with the rules, also be rewarded.. and of course those who revert bad edits..
This is why I want a Wiki Cousin site that has looser rules. "Yes, it's even less valid to quote", but it would handle pages like yours. I lost a big edit a while back too. Some of the really obscure topics have a "resident captain" who will delete things for what might be subjective reasons. (Or the "right" reasons, but again you'd want your subsidiary page version on tap to express yourself".
There used to be Filenes & Filene's Basement. Filenes was staid, proper, ... and priced that way. Filene's Basement was usually a mess or worse, but had all kinds of wild things swimming down there on the racks.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm a contributor because I noticed something in Wikipedia that I could provide more details on. Now and then I've fixed typos or updated articles, in passing, as a user.
That doesn't mean I feel any obligation to roam the wikisphere and poke my nose in everywhere I can, or obsess about the details of one entry.
If most people are like me (and I'm not claiming they are, but if they are) then most contributors are going to be idle most of the time, only contributing when they notice some place they can, you know, actually contribute. It doesn't seem to me that this is a *problem*.
I have experienced that phenomena myself; it happened for a long time for the NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) article.
Eivind.
Let the Wikipediaphiles create a blind trust to manage the sales of advertising. Personally, use the Firefox extension that blocks the ads. Then, get on with your life in capitalist reality.
I've been saying this forever. Just one ad for one lucky company. Think about the hits that this site gets.
AdSense already has ad units that open a search page when clicked. Placing the encouraging text, however, might actually be against AdSense rules.
This was written directly beside an advert for Microsoft.
lololololololololololololololol
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
..if they start with ads I would not again, ever.
What is up with the Techlife blog person; why such a race to the bottom?
No, it's not a business model. It's a way of keeping up a non-profit website.
You see, most people think ads are the easy way out of a financial situation that could well be improved.
They're not. These are the reasons why ads suck:
1. Ads suck for the reader. If a user visits Wikipedia, he wants information, not ads. Ads distract the user from what he wants (granted, big banners asking for donations kind of do the same, even though they suck less)
2. The "customer" of Wikipedia has always been the reader. With ads, it's the advertisement partners. Readers would be just a means to an end.
3. Ads are one-way. Once you introduce ads, you depend on them. No one will donate money (Wikipedia can just put on more ads when they are in need of money, right?) anymore, and your structure will expand to a more expensive one. You can't just say "oops, ads were a bad idea, let's switch back to donations".
4. Isn't it great that in a world, where everyone just tries to maximize his own profit, there are projects that solely finance themselves though generous donations from people from all over the world? I really think this is great.
5. Editors will demand money. After all, with ads there is enough money to pay them a bit. And if you do that, people will just try to find ways to maximize their payment with minimal efforts (Spelling-error-fixing bots, test edits, etc.). The money gets more important than the content.
6. Editors will be really pissed. In 2002, there were rumors that Wikipedia would possibly run ads, and the result was that this false rumor made most of the Spanish Wikipedians leave and participate in an fork of Wikipedia. Imagine what would happen, if Wikipedia really ran ads. In think most editors would leave, perhaps even starting a new non-profit, ad-free fork of Wikipedia.
There are more reasons, but I think this is enough to make clear that even though not excluded ultimately, ads should be avoided if possible. And the way I am seeing it, we manage to finance ourself quite ok atm. Disclaimer: Of course, such a statement is dangerous. It doesn't mean that Wikipedia has enough money, it doesn't. It has enough money to finance the servers as they are. But that doesn't mean that additional money wouldn't be useful. With more money, we* can buy faster servers and hire developers that improve the software. So please, DO donate. (*I am a Wikipedian as well and yes, I contribute both via edits and donations)
This journalist is completely clueless.
There are a little over 8.5 million registered Wikipedia users and just under 150,000 active users (users who have a logged action in the past 30 days). In other words, 98.3% of users have become inactive.
His entire analysis is based on this ridiculous figure, which he then completely misinterprets.
Why measure "activity" in such a stupid way? It basically avoids any serious analysis of the data. Can he not look at total contributions? If he did then a power-law distribution is likely to emerge. This is the important thing to bear in mind with websites like this: the contributions are unconstrained. Go to any website like this and you'll see the same pattern: a few people with loads of contributions, and loads of people with practically nothing to their name.
However, even if we take his "oh noes! 98.3% inactive!" bullshit figure at face value, I fail to see this as a negative thing. It's like Steve Ballmer trying to abuse Linux by saying that most of the contributors only submitted one patch. Disaster! Completely irrelevant though: what matters is if that patch was any good. If I correct a typo on an article, and do nothing else, ever, people who subsequently read that article have benefited from my contribution, but this guy would see it as an unqualified disaster.
So basically what he's asking for, retaining users by paying them, won't work. It won't retain users, and it won't boost contributions -- in fact it could well drive them away by forcing people to enter their credit card details, where at the moment you don't even have to log in. Furthermore, it's less than obvious that retaining users is a good idea. There have been stories on /. before arguing that the most useful contributions to Wikipedia come from the least active users. There have been far more stories detailing the political bullshit some of these "active members" get up to, as well, which leads me to suspect that paying these guys to keep them around is the last thing Wikipedia needs.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Why not putting ads only on media content, like public domain classics and so on ? Want to check Da Vinci's Mona Lisa ? You can, but you'll have a 1/10000th probability of getting some ad with the picture.
Such content is not subject to neutrality, since it's already well-known.
Isn't it better than displaying ads with articles ?
The only problem I see is, would there be enough ads displayed each month ? I don't go and check out Mona Lisa's smile everyday...
Aashcrahin
The editor in chief has a say on what's published. Do you think he'd allow some writer to expose his biggest advertiser for running a sweatshop or poisoning the groundwater in some rural state?
Pretending that the editor won't protect their advertising revenue at all costs is simply dumb. That's why the BBC is still one of the best places to get news. It's publicly funded, so they don't care who they piss off. If an editor knows a story will break somewhere soon, he or she will run the story. But they're not going to go out of their way to allow anyone to dig up dirt on the hands that feed them.
Similarly, the truth always comes out the day after an election. Plenty of people knew about Palin's childish antics, but they wouldn't dare publish that truth until they knew who the loser was going to be. To news media, access to power is far more important than the truth.
The tech press in general are whores, cheap diseased ones. Blogs like this that aspire to being tech press are even cheaper ones. Previously whores to print advertisers, now whores to ad-banner trolling.
So unsubstantiable bullshit is the order of the day, because IT GETS THE CLICKS.
It's so much nicer dealing with the mainstream press - at least they can spell "journalism."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The value of Wikipedia is it's independence, and I am certain a blind advertising campaign could put sufficient money in Wikipedia's coffers to keep the servers serving without jeapordizing Wikipedia's independence. Wikipedia could structure advertisements in such a way that they work through a third-party ad service and Wikipedia never deals directly with the advertisers. Subscriptions could enable donors, schools, etc. to avoid advertisements.
As for rewarding contributors to Wikipedia's document base, I'd be against that - the "we all agree this is the best information on a subject" model works very well, and to pay contributors would distract them from contributing to Wikipedia out of interest for a topic, it would, I fear, turn into a money-making scheme, akin to the gold miners in World of Warcraft.
Ken
If you eliminated people whose first and most recent edits were spaced less than 30 days apart and where the last one is more than 2 months old your "percent of once-active users who are still active" would skyrocket.
I bet if you took a similar survey for any other large, several-year-old, user-content-generated web site you would see similar patterns.
There are many reasons people might register and abandon in short order. Maybe they wanted to reserve their ID so nobody else would grab it. Maybe they wanted to spruce up an article on their favorite band and didn't want their IP address showing. Maybe they wanted to take advantage of email-forwarding. Maybe they thought they'd use it but got bored after a few days. Whatever the reason, these numbers should be segregated out.
The interesting questions are:
And of course how big are each of these groups?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What if they Sponsored pre-approved sponsors? In lieu of the traditional selling of a rotating banner in the same spot every view, why not randomly create a "Sponsor week" a few times a year (or something along those lines). You would only need a few sponsors, obviously ones that wouldn't upset the integrity of the website, and you could easily afford the $6M annual budget. I think 99.9% of people are more than willing to suffer a few days a year of good hearted sponsorship in order to maintain a free and awesome online encyclopedia. Also, a per view pay would kill the site. As would allowing contributors to collect. The ONLY excuse for putting ads o the site is strictly to pay for the core support needed to run the site. And even then you only need to sell enough ads to support your bottom line.
I think you're talking of the pipe dream of the idea of Wikipedia, which is as dead as the pipe dream idea of communism or democracy (which were good ideas in theory only too).
Nowadays we have a small government, pushing their own reality to gain power.
Lucky you, if it fits with your reality.
Unfortunately, in reality, reality is relative. And I don't mean the humoristic "truthiness" kind. I mean the relativity to the state of the sensing entity. (Eg. location, environment, experience, sensory distortion, etc.)
For a more harsh way of saying it, read my sig. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
98.3% of registered users are inactive because they created an account edited something and forgot all about it. What percentage of registered Slashdot accounts are active?
About advertising, some people seem to thing of it as money for nothing. It's not, you are selling something. In Wikipedia's case its integrity.
The fundraiser seems to have met its goal, and if that is ever a problem there is some fat to cut from the foundation expenses before ads are necessary.
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Wikipedia might get $0.5 and it isn't as unrealistic as that journalist writes. People who read his article are way more likely to click an ad than people who are browsing Wikipedia.
I have $30 on one of my sites, and the ads are the only thing useful there. And it's $0.05 or less where people have no interest in leaving my site.
This sort of proves that the Internet-ad industry generally is sick and immature. Advertisers only pays for clicks, not for branding. People who see an ad on their favorite site becomes positive and start knowing about the brand, but they will not click. Which basically means that good ads end up at crappy sites and the opposite.
For many advertisers it would be better to pay sites referral rates if their customers have just passed by an ad for them. The advertisers can't of course pay a lot as it's probably not a new customer, but nowadays they mostly pay sites who cheat them by more or less generating clicks.
All I can say is that I use Wikipedia at least once per day (usually much more than that) and I did my part in donating to support a site that I find so useful (and that I don't know how I lived without in the past). There is nothing I hate more than ads all over a web page. It starts with just one banner ad across the top. Later a square one is added on the side. Before you know it, you're trying to read some complicated article and things are blinking and moving all over the place, pop-ups and pop-unders come up all over the place, you have to click through ten ads before reaching the article, and your CPU fan goes into overdrive to keep up with ads you don't even want to see. I hope that Wikipedia sustains itself through donations alone so that we can avoid such a bleak future, and therefore I did my part and I encourage everyone else who uses Wikipedia to do the same.
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that defeats the purpose of a free encyclopedia Wiki.
The only reason why I don't edit it often enough is because of the political BS they pull from other editors and admins. Their NPV is really a liberal point of view. I write true neutral point of view and it gets rewritten to the liberal point of view and I am told mine is not NPV because it does not favor the liberal viewpoint. Then my articles get deleted because they are not the liberal point of view.
Wikibooks is the same way, I wrote an article on psychology and philosophy, but I get told that self-hypnosis can reduce anxiety and other therapy in psychology is pseudoscience. That trying to think of an imaginary vacation scene is witchcraft and religion and not science at all. Despite me citing reliable sources, my article gets deleted.
That is another thing, reliable sources, if it is not a liberal web site, and more neutral like webmd it is not reliable enough to make the article accurate.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Even in magazines where no advertisement revenue tied shenanigans occur, the magazines have to put up with a lot of accusations from people who aren't happy with a particular review, or that some product didn't get reviewed, or whatever. Even with the magazines I generally trust, sometimes there's something that to me is bizarre, and I end up wondering.
Personally, I wish most media had a "pay to opt out of ads" model. As a youth pastor, I pretty much have to use myspace (outside of face to face, myspace and text messaging are the teen preferred communications media). If I could pay a few bucks a month to not have to put up with the ads, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
userfriendly.org uses this model; it seems to work for them.
No, I don't do that, why should I? If they want to delete something from Wikipedia, that's fine with me, I'll just google it elsewhere.
What the Wikipedia administrators should realize is that an online encyclopedia doesn't have to fit into a given shelf space. With disk space costing pennies per gigabyte, having any "notability criteria" at all is just stupid. It wastes time and adds nothing to the value of the organization.
RE: "98.3% of registered Wikipedia users are inactive"
98.3% of registered SourceForge users are inactive. That's the nature of
internet social networking.
Contributors should get a gift basket, and a xmas card every year.
The some the money should goto supporting the servers/support/programmers for the wiki application.
Then the rest should goto the opensource projects that are used in the wiki stack. Apache, php, perl, db, etc... all those programs can use real people payed full time to make them work and improve them. That seems like a good place for the money.
As a side note, google summer of code is a good thing, they could start one of their own.
I'm actually not a fan of paying contributors unless your hiring them as staff. Which is an option, up to a point. Perhaps if you make enough you could pay Encyclopedia Britanica to help with fact checking and things like that, another good use.
If you pay contributors your going to give incentive beyond doing the right thing, which is going to skew your current process, which seems to work better then most.
There's strong opposition to ads in the Wikipedia community. More important, though, is that Wales' attempt to run a wiki-based business is a flop.
Wikia, which was Jimbo Wales' attempt to monetize the Wikipedia concept, didn't really go anywhere. Wikia ended up as a free hosting service for fancruft, with wikis for Star [Wars|Trek|Gate|Craft] and such. There's also a "human powered search engine" on Wikia. They wanted to take on Google. The end result was a site with 1/10 the traffic of "ask.com". Wikia's current reach is about 0.2%. Wikia's traffic is dropping; Alexa says they peaked in May 2008, and they're down to half that. Wikia had a layoff in October.
As an ad-supported service, Wikia's demographic is terrible. The user base lives in their parents basement. So they can't even get much ad revenue from the users they have. Wikia had a big chunk of venture capital when they started, but that's running out. They overexpanded, with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Poland. Wales wanted to get a private jet; by now, he probably has to fly coach.
So that's what an ad-supported wiki run by Wales looks like.
They do what Gmail does. Ensure the ads are relevant to what you're browsing (to some degree obviously) and make sure they aren't intrusive to viewing. I use the (free) service, and I actually expect to view some type of ad to help pay for the hardware. I refuse to use services that shoot themselves in the feet by using 'flash'y ads which look 'cool' to 8 year olds. *ahem* Yahoo/Microsoft
If you really don't like the ads, pay the cost and get an account for a nominal subscription fee that would suppress the ads. Heck, I'm really surprise Wikipedia has gone this far already without advertising...
Of course all of the above is only relevant IF the advertising has zero affect on the quality of articles, which I doubt it would since the user base is large enough to sustain unbiased activity (usually). Do not let a big monopoly in place (like Google's payments with Mozilla) and ensure standards are enforced.
That's how I see it anyways...
Paying contributors would ruin Wikipedia, because it would give people an incentive to post uninteresting content simply to get their cut. If you look at Google search results, you'll see a surprising number of pages that don't offer anything original or useful, but are put in there to attract traffic to advertising pages.
The same kind of thing would happen to Wikipedia. You'd get trash pages, and you'd get lots of gratuitous changes to popular pages. And you'd either overload the volunteer editors, or you'd be paying editors to reject useful submissions. Bad bad bad.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
i lol'd -- classic
Indeed, the greatest utility of Wikipedia comes from being able to post on Slashdot something like "What is wrong with [you|the submitter|*] that [you|they] couldn't even take 30 seconds to read the Wikipedia entry and get the basic facts right?"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
That's the human nature and nothing can be done against it. Wikipedia could accommodate this fact in a simple way. For all the registered users it can provide preference if they wont or don't wont ads, for all the anonymous users there is mandatory ad displayed. I believe few, if any, would resist that. The other possibility is to introduce some form of subscription for the companies.
Now, it's not the complete solution. Money makes people go crazy, so whatever solution is, it has to be carefully thought out.
It's like a blood drive--the most successful ones don't give donors money. It's the cheapest way of filtering out people with bad blood who donate for the wrong reasons.
But it may be too late anyway.
In my experience, the Wikipedia community has been deteriorating for some time now. I suspect the percentage of people inactive was lower than 98.3% a year or two ago, but people have been driven away.
Most pages of any significance have a group of people that have appointed themselves overseers, and resist new additions on general principle. Often, they have a collective ideology slant and have chased off everyone who disagrees in any significant way. In this state, the odd person coming along and trying to modify the article against the views of the established mass is shouted down, accused of going against consensus, and chased off. If you took all editors of an article over all time, there would be a completely different consensus than the momentary ones that occur when a single dissenter arrives.
Adding monetary incentives would make this worse. It would make the local tribes more militant and more powerful, finally ending the principle of a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Wikipedia was an interesting and important social experiment, but I think it is past its peak and is due to decline. I personally believe that history will be more interested in the talk pages and edit logs than the content itself.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
...that a lot more people would contribute if they didn't have to learn a whole new markup language to do so, regardless of financial incentives. If they simply made a GUI to mark up the articles, I would put money that more people would contribute.
That's a pretty simplistic study with a lot of variables that could have been controlled for but weren't. It also brings us nothing new, in the sense that we already knew that hourly wages don't work properly. In real life however, lots of things simply don't get done unless someone pays someone to do it. Sometimes you can exploit social norms or a hierachical structure, combined with incessant vocal anger, to intimitate people into doing things, and it's nice if that works, but it doesn't always work. To go back to the study... Did they offer the participants the possibility to read a book of their choice instead of dragging circles? Did they offer to pay for every correctly dragged circle? Did they try to see what happened if you punished incorrectly dragging circles somehow? Did they try to see what happens if you pay the participants enough money to really mean something?
I'm not saying that Wikipedia contributors should get paid, I think there are big problems with that. There would need to be a big infrastructure to make the money reach the contributors but not vandals and such. This could then compromise its neutrality since then there would be an in-group of staff deciding what is useful and what isn't... difficult to fix that is. And since the job would probably be boring and the ones who have to do it the target of a lot of verbal abuse, almost no one would want to do that for free... so paid staff. It would be very hard to design and get accepted a working system that doesn't soak up more money than it distributes. The voice of experience in the back of my head whispers: impossible. Also, a lot of people contribute to Wikipedia for fun and that may negate the need for a monetary incentive. Unless you're convinced that people who dislike editing would for some reason be better contributors if they would actually do it.
But that wasn't really my point. I just wanted to add a few footnotes to your study.
I read the personal appeal by Jimmy Wales and decided to pass. The reason is that he says that Wikipedia aims to be a source of all human knowledge, yet, their own editorial guidelines preclude putting in more specialized knowledge. There are also some rumors of political shenanigans behind the scenes. Look, if you want to act like a corporation, just be one, and put some ads on the thing and get on with it.
This is my sig.
How many lives could be saved with $50 million per month? Is it really more important to keep Wikipedia ad-free than to save those lives?
Possibly of interest is the appeal that Jimmy Wales wrote and has been featured on one of the banners. Apparently this particular site notice was particularly effective: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/12/30/fundraiser-jimmys-appeal/
Its a web site that primarily spits out static text. Sure there is a lot of data that needs to be stored, managed and lots of bandwidth to make it avaliable to the millions of people who use it. Perhaps even some level of operator management in the form of bots to help manage abuse. Today with the ever decreasing price of water, storage and processors I just have a hard time seeing how it could be so expensive to run this site. Through automation they should have little trouble weeding whatever manual intervention is required to keep the site going. Bulk compiling static pages using gzip compression they can instantly more than halve their total bandwidth usage. It shouldn't be that difficult for the system to dynamically switch between the dynamic version and the compiled version based on the avaliability of new data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip Keep in mind that google has already donated hardware and bandwidth for this site. Sometimes I fear that if we donate too much to wikipedia the people who run it will get lazy, greedy and dependent on the extra money but maybe I am just ignorant and don't understand what it really takes to run a site of this size... I imagine managing just the access logs must be a headache :-)
Anyway please don't let ads fuck up the only real innovation on the Internet in the last 10 years. Wikipedia is the only useful general reference source left on the network... DONT MESS WITH IT!!
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I run a computer support forum (PCQandA.com ... yeah, I know, shameless plug). We have 13,500 registered users. Of those, only about 320 have stopped by in the past 3 months. That's a 97.6% inactive user rate. The inactive users are people who drifted in an out over the years possibly posting once, possibly registering and never posting, possibly posting many times and then leaving for whatever reason. I'm sure Wikipedia has its share of that phenomenon. People might sign up then never edit anything. Or they might sign up to add/edit one article and leave. Or they might be quite prolific, editing dozens or articles, until life steers them in a different direction and they stop posting. I don't see a 98% inactive rate - by itself - as a sign that something's wrong with Wikipedia. That could be just normal user flow.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
My account is innactive is because I forgot the login details and wasn't able to retrieve them.
Wikipedia is already biased enough with it active censorship. Controversial individuals can't even edit their own wiki pages to be more accurate if it goes against the bias of wiki administrators.
Advertising, I'm sure, will only make it worse.
You're absolutely correct.
But Wikipedia itself is a strange beast. They claim to be a encyclopedia with every tome of the world's knowledge available for free for all, but that isn't how the site functions.
Rather, Wikipedia functions as a place where general bits of information are available for use and debate. The beauty of this is that the information doesn't have be "Truth", but it can be close enough to give a general idea about the subject.
In my opinion, Wikipedia has done great things for helping us come to a closer consensus on issues of "Truth". Is it the ultimate source of knowledge? There's no doubt that a specialist in any specific field regarding certain articles on Wikipedia would have far better insight.
For that reason, perhaps projects like Google's Knol will become a more accurate, reliable source of information in the future..
Is the author shilling for Google as well? Remember Google takes at least 50% (maybe 80%) of the revenue associated with Text Ads.
... the man with the bog roll is king.
Which would be why some of the people who've tasked themselves with cleaning up the mess have developed such an overblown sense of entitlement.
How about making it so that the people who contribute can see an ad-free version while everyone else sees ads?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The reason I'm now an "inactive" editor on Wikipedia has nothing to do with money - it's because of their BS notability rules.
These rules seem to get passed when most editors aren't looking, and then notability Nazis swoop in and delete entire articles that many people spent many hours working on over the years.
When people complain, even when it's held to a vote and the vast majority of users want the article to stay, it winds up deleted anyway due to these notability rules.
yes. volume is high enough that the smallest, single line of google ads (for example) would still yield good revenue, despite being the lowest yield per ad. they can be made unobtrusive, and the better ad networks really can often provide genuinely relevant ads these days.
no. it's a nice idea, but in any work with unverified quality, you'd end up rewarding quality only. alternately, you'd have to invent a QA regime, which is entirely doable, but costs money and would be a huge cultural mismatch with Wikepedia. even then, finding a fair compensation scheme is very difficult in a multi-author work where the authors can revise each other; with the number of authors involved in wikipedia, it may well just be impossible, and would certainly be a huge time sink.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Wikipedia gives you the right to fork. If you feel that the community is beyond all help/whatever, do better. If this was a piece of software, this entire thread would be much different.
I think its about ideia itself, if its gonna be paid it will become a commercial encyclopedia not a free one anymore. Well I like the way it is, I dont think that contributors should get money for publishing information
A while ago I wrote an article. People worked on the text, making additions and deletions, but at some point the text was simply deleted. The original idea of Wikipedia was that anyone could participate, but this is now far from the case. Only Wikipedia specialists can participate. Those who wish to actually write articles must go through a in depth training process; otherwise their input is deleted.
So whatever; not going to support them by funds or effort. My life doesn't revolve around Wikipedia. If they really wanted the input from me or others they would be less hostile.
I suppose I am concerned that what is becoming a source of authoritive information is being controlled by a bunch of egotists.
Wikipedia does not need another $100 million. Check there financial statements Wikipedia is generating more than enough money from donations to run its operations.
Wikipedia is better off with less money.
....is the long-term success of the organization. If I were on the Wikimedia Foundation, and knew that a Google Ad (or whatever) could raise anything like $600 million a year for the Foundation, I would have a difficult time justifying a non-advertising stance in my vote.
Once the Foundation endowment reached a level where the entire operating budget (plus 10-15% for inflation and growth) could be managed from the interest, I would vote to eliminate advertising in good conscience.
Long-term sustainability of the organization should be the foremost goal of a nonprofit board. With that much potential for endowment growth, I would urge immediate implementation of advertisements.
At least, that's the way I see it today. My opinion reserves the right to outgrow itself.
which was: when some people worship rules over truth, it behooves the honest person to ignore the rules... not the truth.
There are too many people on Wikipedia who are camped out on articles, jealously guarding their own version of "reality", at the expense of actual truthful content. That is a corruption of the whole purpose of Wikipedia.
but even the existing giant Wikipedia is having trouble making ends meet... do you have the time, money, and effort to invest? Do you think I do?
So it's really not that simple.
The deletionists have ruined Wikipedia. There should be a rule allow you to delete only as much content as you contributed. Oh, then girls couldn't participate, could they? They only know how to destroy, not to build
I do get paid when I contribute to Wikipedia, by having other people improve on my contributions. So, more contributions is my payment for my own contributions. I don't see why anyone should consider paying contributors with money or putting advertisements on Wikipedia. Such a move whould attract professional writers who do it for the money and drive amateur writers who do it for the love away. But in the end it is the love which produces the best product, not the need or want for money. So, ads would drive out the best contributors.
I was and am not "whining". I am explaining why Wikipedia -- which at one time had an accuracy rating rivaling that of Encyclopedia Britannica -- is no longer very credible, because certain abusive behavior has been allowed to flourish. Unless and until they fix this issue, its credibility will continue to slide, as it has in the last couple of years.
And that's probably one of the reasons they were quite solvent a few years ago, but have to beg for money today. People just don't trust them anymore. Their system is corrupt.
is that you are referring to the article as it currently exists. Did you read about its history, in the news? That is where you will get the interesting information.
does it do some good, yes, but when I posted a reference to my band on it a long time ago, it was banned by someone that no longer works there and it cannot be "unbanned" because my entry was the only one posted in 5 days on wikipedia- since then I am all over the place, but I am permanently banned
I for one believe wikipedia deserves government backing. In many ways it is truly more important than NASA.
I remember when /. was ad-free and everyone said that banner ads were going to ruin its integrity. It is hilarious to hear Mr. Taco saying this. Chin up, Rob, you can dry your tears with all the money you've made.
And, on a related note, I think /. should go to text ads because frankly, I block the annoying flashing banner ads. They drive me completely nuts, and I never liked you adding them to the site, at all.
Perhaps they should make the contributors pay, as is done for some scientific journals.
It might help to keep the noise down and force writers to be a little more thoughtful about their contributions and editing.
What would be more effective--paying per edit or per word?
Slashdot is a reasonably intelligent discussion forum.....
you are deluded.
For large values of "reasonably". We're smarter than digg.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Don't do it!
Obviously, as soon as Wikipedia begins running ads, it will be forked, and the audience will move to the ad-free fork.
I can only hope that Jimbo is smart enough to see this eventuality, and avoid the inevitable fragmentation this would cause.
~~~~ AC
Seriously, why? It's a farce as a legitimate encyclopedia. It will never be as trustworthy as traditional encyclopedia for exactly the reason(s) most of you the internet will be our savior "no one should be allowed to make money or market in any way" freetards think it is so great. Why do so many of you people think something is the new order because it is community based & on the internet? OH, and you don't have to worry about paying for it directly out of your own pocket. Bunch of cheapskate idiots you are! I agree with the person that said wikipedia is past its time. This was shown as soon as evidence came out about manipulation of the content by biased individuals. Slashdot & wikipedia share many of the same failures. I wonder why I ever come around anymore. The quality of the linked content has gone through the floor as well as the comments/commentors. Oh wait, I only come around when there is nothing else to do.
People arrive and leave. Even if the number of stable users stays static, or grows at a rate slower than that of new people arriving, the proportion of active users will drop. Hell, look at Slashdot--total contribution volume by commenters is larger than it was, but the vast majority of accounts are dead.
You may as well say that the percentage of dead projects on SourceForge and Freshmeat mean that nobody's contributing to those sites.
If you took all editors of an article over all time, there would be a completely different consensus than the momentary ones that occur when a single dissenter arrives.
Well, yes. That's what consensus means. People who join Wikipedia and intend to "fix" an article that they see as unfairly slanted are invariably disappointed, as I think you were.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I had quite a bit of enthusiasm for Wikipedia a couple of years ago, but soured a bit over the deletionist thing.
I support the notability standard. I just happen to think that deletion is fatally flawed from a systems theory perspective. Deletion returns the system to the same state which caused someone to start the article in the first place. Why would you return the system to a state whose outcome, as you already know, was to incite the creation of a non-notable article you don't wish to include on present merit?
IMO the non-notable articles with the potential to become notable articles should be kept around, but delisted from major engines and the site search indexes, nor should they be linkable from main article space (links from talk space would be OK).
You don't want to pour janitorial energy into maintaining non-notable articles, so non-established editors would not be permitted to edit these. Maybe these semi-cloistered articles would have no written text, just a collection of annotated citations, until as some juncture the notability threshold is passed.
Just about any low-maintenance alternative to deletion would be better in my opinion. Of course, there would be a hue and cry about censorship, whatever editorial limits were imposed, by those who define freedom of speech as the right to drive a Blues Mobile down a crowded sandy beach.
That's the only virtue of deletion as I see it: it's a narrow battle front with a crowd who is going to find a reason to detract and complain regardless. Any of my cloistered non-deletion alternatives would certainly widen the battle front with this draining segment of society.
It's depressing sometimes how much energy can be squandered on the born quibblers of the world by expressing any well-meaning rule a word longer than "shoot on sight".
I've come to suspect this is the world order the quibblers wish to achieve. Whatever the surface agenda claims to be, the outcome that seems to result from the social skirmish is polarization and brinkmanship.
Whatever its defects, it is indeed hard to break a lance against "404 not found".
The oversight of which you speak consists of lunatics, zoophiles, pretend theology scholars, Serbian nationalists, and sixteen-year-olds. Thanks but no thanks.
The entire purpose of Wikipedia is to get Jimmy Wales speaking gigs that pay him tens of thousands of dollars. Anything which would threaten that will be stomped upon with Jimbo's spiked boots.
i hope they can keep it ad-free but if they really think they HAVE to i hope they can keep the ads down to a 'slashdotlike' format , ads on this site never get in the way, they don't pop up, and you never get those ghastly 'click to move on to the real website' type-o-things ... AND what's more, if the money would be put to good use, and not be used for personal profit i think i could look the other way on that personally
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
Some people might view this person's commentary as "tin foil hat" material, but in fact it is not. He/she demonstrates knowledge of the mentioned systems greater than the typical user. PLEASE stop modding down non-mainstream views, unless you have actual evidence they are incorrect. We are supposed to be adults here! Without warranting absolute correctness, I claim nevertheless that there is real insight in this post.
$50-$100 mill a month? I use Wikipedia regularly, and would be glad to see improvements that would spring up from kind of money! (If you want to know how they managed the fundraiser, what it gets spent on and whether it could do it again, see this excellent post http://blog.heebie.co.uk/wikipedia-fundraising-real-truth from WikiLog.)
So glad it's saved!
Exactly. Wikipedia has not deleted this genuine article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandalampadu
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Why can't Wikipedia raise funds through IPO?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPO
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga