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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.
I would be happy to have EVERYTHING advertiser-free (including the street full of annoying billboards near my house,
If you live in california, you might just be in luck. There was a recent article in the LA Times (I think, I ran across it in google news) about just how poorly billboard codes are enforced and how a bunch of regular citizens have had to take up the slack to get illegal billboards taken down. So it may well be that some of those annoying billboards really are illegal and all it takes is bitching loud enough to get them removed.
Or, you could move to Hawaii where no billboards are allowed anywhere.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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
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
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.
I thought there could be an opt-in for ads.
People who want to support wikipedia could choose to view it with a couple ads.
Then they could show ads to the people who opted in.
They could even stop showing ads when they have enough money to pay for bandwidth, servers and whatever.
As a result, nobody would be pissed off and since the money stops pouring in when there is too much of it, we reduce the pressure to pay contributors back as the money was only to pay for the operating costs.
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
The issue there in my experience is the same problem we have with US politics - too many people who care far too much about their own interpretation of the notability policy are in positions of influence. We're talking the kind of people who live on wikipedia the same way some of us live on /. or IRC or WoW or AIM.
It doesn't matter if we're right. What matters to them is we don't agree with them. So they'll stomp on us and shit on us and delete entries anyway, out of spite or some twisted logic that what was originally founded as a public resource is somehow divinely theirs.
The wikipedia editors that push this crap are the internet equivalent of The Religious Right in american politics, and are about as open to reason. The only way to change the situation is to effectively usurp or remove the ruling influence.
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?
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