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Should Wikipedia Just Accept Ads Already?
Hugh Pickens writes "Large images of Jimmy Wales have for weeks dominated each and every page on Wikipedia, making Wales arguably the single most visible individual on the planet. Now Molly McHugh writes that Wikipedia is once again pleading for user donations with banners across the top of its site with memos from purported authors and this week, Wales stepped up the shrillness of his rallying cry by adding the word 'Urgent' to his appeal. Wales attempted the same request for donations last year, and failed to meet the company's goal until Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar donated $2 million and Google stepped in with another $2 million gift to the foundation. This time around the foundation is approximately $7 million short of its 2010 fundraising goal, and Wikipedia analysts are saying the site would be better off with a marketing scheme as Alex Konanykhin of WikiExperts explains that the donations-only, no-commerce model restricts Wikipedia to relying exclusively on free volunteers, losing opportunities to involve qualified professionals who charge for their time in addition to the thirty staff members already on the Wikimedia payroll. 'Advertising is not cool. You're not as cool if you have advertising. But you know what else is not cool? Begging,' writes Jeff Otte. 'We do not care if there is advertising on Wikipedia, so long as it is not ridiculously invasive. So please, replace your sensitive mug with a Steak 'n' Shake ad or something, and start making advertisers pay for people to have stuff for free and not feel bad about it. It's the Internet's way.'"
Don't set up an admin system that shits all over people who disagree with you. Maybe then your appeal for donations would be considered by a larger number of people. I've been sending SomaFM at least $50 per year for most of this decade and even /. gets $5 from me every now and then. I bought one Wikipedia coaster set back in '03 before I discovered your incompetence and now I quickly close your 'appeals' without reading them. Some may consider that I'm being too picky, but when I saw that Barack Obama had less criticism on his page than Ghandi or Jesus Christ, I knew your system was still flawed, and the Climate Doctor debacle didn't work in your favor, either - and hey, that was, like, 12 months ago, and now you're running out of money - coincidence? Fix that shit and I'll kick down a Ben Franklin.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Isn't there a big empty space down the left side of most pages? What is the difference between it being blank or there being an advertisement there.
Replace Jimmy Wales with someone hot and you'll get many more donations.
No, it shouldn't. At that point it loses trust - I can no longer consider the information to be free of commercial conflicts of interest.
There's already enough problems with the editor model - let's not add more.
Cheers,
Ian
That's the whole point.
It's the People's encyclopedia, not the elitists' encyclopedia. It is grown out of the generous volunteerism of billions, rather than those who are like Ebenezer Scrooge - only care about the money.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Wikipedia would have to pay a lot of people to edit it because a huge number of their volunteers would probably revolt and quit working on the site if there were ads on it.
They will end up with editorial control, and that would be a very bad thing. That's a big part of why our modern news media is so awful.
Maybe they could go to a model in which people could contribute resources to handle traffic load instead of directly contributing money? The big problem here is the raft of centralized servers and databases needed to keep Wikipedia fast and responsive.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Look, PBS has ads now. They still require donations, but they have ads. Just keep the bar very high, and the disclosure very clear. Maybe you make it so that companies can advertise, but cannot advertise with any product specificity, and that all images must carry a small (a) sign to signify it's an ad? It's not impossible. Look, many companies advertise on PBS to improve their image. Wikipedia can position itself the same way... as an image builder. Just get past the begging though. It's old. If your idea is *that* good, you shouldn't have a problem getting ad money.
The conclusion presupposes three boxes, and I think you're artificially limiting your thinking by having those three boxes.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Every year I used to donate what I could, £5, £10, or £15 but I got so pissed off with the deletionist attitude of the last year or two I just won't give anymore. I'm sick of remembering articles, going to check them and they're gone and yet stupid shit like "List of Catgirls" manages to stay.
The most annoying thing with deletionist attitudes is that it doesn't even make sense. The less popular an article is the less resources i.e. bandwith it uses
I was just telling my friend the other day - a giant picture of Jimmy or 'random blogger' is pretty much the same as an advertisment.
If they put ads, they should do them themselves (no giving it out to other companies who will track me) - and they should instead sell spaces in articles. So you look up "mopping" and you get an ad of a mopping company.
I heard Encyclopedia Britannica wants to buy the first ad...
There is information.
Then there is commerce.
Whenever commerce touches information, information has a way of getting warped.
It's really as simple as that.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For one thing, it would exclude Wikipedia from certain sources of funding.
For another, it would introduce conflicts of interest that would seriously tarnish Wikipedia's credibility (a topic it already has to fight for).
Third, it would demotivate certain contributors who want to work on a free encyclopaedia but have no interest in developing a product placement platform.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I'm sure Jimmy Wales doesn't need half a million a year for a website he doesn't even write himself. I don't know how much the other people make, but if it's anything like Jimmy's salary it could use some cuts.
Advertisements on the web may be the most common way to turn a profit online, but it's certainly not the universe anyone really wanted except for advertising firms. I would gladly pay $5 a month for wikipedia to exist without ads. In fact, I would almost always pay money rather than see ads for any service (as I eventually did on slashdot, incidentally). So perhaps wikipedia should adopt the slashdot model: No ads for special or paying members- everyone else gets non intrusive ads (by special, I mean long term members, frequent contributors, etc.). You could even adopt a system where contributors get "points" which allow them to not see ads.
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
Give it time. They are still tuning their message.
Someone had to do it.
Ok, so what are the other options?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
As much traffic as Wikipedia enjoys, it seems they could have a single large advertiser / benefactor that could be promoted in a subtle, unobtrusive manner because their "ad" would be visible on every page. To me that would be preferable to context sensitive ads (Google adwords type stuff) or rotating ads which have to scream for attention and thus are a constant distraction.
PBS and other non-profit entities have been able to do similar "advertising" in a very tasteful manner for many decades (between programming - "the following is made possible by donations from..."). That seems most fitting for Wikipedia as well, which is different than flat-out commercial advertising.
Better known as 318230.
I thought about donating some money. I use wikipedia pretty regularly and I'd like to support it. The only problem is I don't think they need any money. Their financial statements are available and it looks like they've got enough cash on hand to run for the year without any more donations. I don't see the need to add to their cushion.
From TFA's summary:
> Wales attempted the same request for donations last year
Dude, it's an end of year fundraiser! (And it worked very well, they raised plenty of money.)
It's about as surprising as trains being cancelled in Autumn because of "leaves on the tracks".
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
... hopefully they do subscriptions, too, that would allow for no display of ads (sure, adblock, etc, would take care of that - but I'd still buy a subscription just on GP).
Check your premises.
Can't these wiki assholes just set up a trust and over time use it to fund the site?
How about ads on the main page. Ads for free use and no ads if you donate. Ads shouldn't be related to the page you are viewing.
Well.....
The "ad model" doesn't work that great either according to NBC and FOX Broadcast executives. They've lost a lot of money these last two years, and now they are moving to a subscription fee model (~50 cents per cable home) instead of providing free programming.
Trivia: Most Viewed Networks (Sept2009-August2010):
#1 FOX
#2 CBS
#3 ABC
#4 NBC
#5 CW
#6 Univision
#7 MyNetTV / Ion (tie)
#8 Telmundo
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I agree if it's a survival issue, but I don't think they should make such a major policy decision based on some highly vocal people being annoyed. If begging for money works, it works. It doesn't have to be wildly successful, it just has to work barely enough.
Just waiting for it to happen again... where they purposefully cut back on bandwidth and make Wikipedia really really slow. Nothing quite like wanting to read all about every MLB earned-run average champion ever but having it take more than 5 seconds to get there to make people feel like donating.
It's always confirmation bias!
I've been considering donating, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Perhaps partly because it's not entirely clear to me why exactly they need all the money they are trying to gather. Right now, my "local" donation page says that half of the money would go to the Wikimedia Foundation and half of it to Wikimedia Sverige, "which, in Sweden, acts to make knowledge freely available to everybody."
I'd happily help keep the servers running, but how much of my money would end up helping that part of it all? I guess I will end up donating some small sum anyway in the end, though, because I do use wikipedia a lot.
Sell books.
No seriously -- have an Amazon referral account for Wikipedia. Let users link articles to books on Amazon with more information. Link every footnote to a book to a "buy now" button. It's value-added, not random advertising, and Wikipedia would get a cut. In return for all the traffic, have Amazon serve the site for free. Then the only money needed is for the salaries of the full-time staff, which the book sales would cover.
Since there aren't ads everywhere, you can even continue asking for donations with a straight face.
How isn't the big splash banner with Wales mug all over it already advertising? They are just advertising themselves.
Another snippet from the summary:
> failed to meet the company's goal until
Until. So, they *did* meet their goals. What are you complaining about??
(This is just the stupidity from the summary. There's nothing there to suggest it would be worth clicking through to the actual articles.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
If Wikipedia included ads, would I even know? I regularly visit a number of sites that I know have ads, but I know only because of the occasional user comment that a particular ad is offensive. I don't see the ads because my browser blocks them. I started blocking ads not because I found them objectionable, but because waiting for six different overloaded servers to deliver the d*mned things slowed things down a lot. Is there reason to believe that Wikipedia's ads would be resistant to blocking?
How about a hybrid? Sell ads, but offset with user donations. As the user donation pool grows, the amount of advertising available, goes down.
Similar to what WBUR does. They schedule a week long fundraiser with a goal. Then before the fundraiser they start telling people "the fund raiser ends when we reach our goal".... now they are starting to even let people donate towards that goal before the fundraiser starts!
Ever since they staryed doing this, maybe 2 years ago? The fundraisers have been... reaching their goals and getting shorter! I think, at this point, they have nearly cut them in half!
Could create paid subscriptions with a value add. Maybe some new features that are a bit server intensive or require storage... like letting you keep a set of private annotations on pages, or a real time chat feature.
Look at OKCupid. There are many "A-List" members, even though the majority, and indeed the most important basic functions of the site, are all available for free.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
And all the negative press that Wikileaks has been getting recently does not help their cause.
Remember, a lot of people do not know the difference between Wikipedia and Wikileaks.
For one, I think they could pull in some money by working on regular "static" releases - probably on CD or DVD. They could even do these for specific levels; for example elementary school library releases might not have entries on anal sex. Something like that could be useful for establishments who either don't have good internet connectivity, or don't want to allow completely unfettered access to things like wikipedia in its current form.
I think they could also look into allowing companies to "sponsor" ads. This could be done intelligently if they try, so that sponsors can't change the message referring to their own entries. For example, they could allow McDonalds to sponsor entries on space exploration, but not on food or food-related matters. The sponsors could pay the professional editors directly for work on permitted entries and then be recognized at the end of the entry.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You don't even have to track users. Just display relevant ads depending on the page they're looking at. So simple. There's nothing wrong with a few banner ads. And if they add an option for users to "donate/subscribe" to get rid of the ads, then they'll have all the money they need. If people wont donate for such a wonderful, free product then just unleash ads until they start donating.
Wikipedia wants cash, advertisers want eyeballs to look at their ads and many would dearly like to advertise on Wikipedia. Surely bringing those two things together is an obvious fix. The caveat is that the content must remain neutral, even if ads are running on it. But heck, many other publications manage to have an NPOV while accepting ads!
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Ad revenue doesn't really have to mean loss of privacy, especially in Wikipedia's case. You could easily sell ads for each individual page. Some of them (like those which are history related) won't have any ads at all, while others (like those technical/networking terms) will probably be very competitive. Put in place a bidding system and an ad scoring system and it could actually work.
right...
But then the economy crashed and I lost something like 60 percent of my wealth.
Ill start donating again once I have achieved complete financial security. Until then, altruism is for the rich.
1. Take ads. Lots of ads.
2. Hire real experts, real writers, professional editors. Toss the agenda-driven wankers and college kids.
3. Regain Credibility.
4. Profit!
But we use Wikipedia so we don't have to read books.
I got so fed up of the endless begging banners that I stuck in my Adblock
||wik*.org/w/index.php?title=*:BannerController
I'm sorry, but don't bang on about something being free and then pester me for money. The moment I pay is the moment it stops being free for me.
Since Wikipedia is a community driven project, put it on community resources: Freenet.
- no ads
- guarantees Wikipedia's wealth of information won't be lost for financial reasons
- helps to further Freenet adoption
Disclaimer: I've never used Freenet.
A personal appeal to Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales (Dear Jimmy: fuck off.)
Also, was I the only one to notice that Jimbo is calling himself the Founder (ie not Co-Founder) in his Personal / Urgent appeals?
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Page hits and ad clicks aren't extrapolated from a few people filling out a Neilson rating for the week.
Wikipedia's bias issues are deeply rooted in its structure, as noted elsewhere. I find it very hard to believe that being ad-free makes Wikipedia neutral; in fact, it's not neutral, especially with regard to controversial issues, and these political issues dwarf the potential ad ones.
Surely the sort of oversight and openness needed to correct the editorial problems could target ad revenue as well. I'm afraid a donation model -- which I call a "tax on the nice" -- penalizes people of good intentions (over the 99% who grab freebies and run) and doesn't provide reliable revenue. Wikipedia has proven its point that it can be a critical resource -- if one is researching ball bearings and not some politician. Wikipedia deserves our investment.
Now if Wikipedia is going to start tracking which articles I read, screw them. :) Again: Transparency, accountability. I don't think they're there yet, funding or no.
I prefer ads to begging.
I think the concern about advertisers having editorial influence is overblown. Certainly if they're using an outside placement network, like Google, then there's a nice buffer between the advertiser and the site.
One thing that I think would be really cool is if they would accept ads, but only if the ads to not include cookies.
Lost money? I doubt it. Not made as much as they anticipated, that I'll buy.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
IMO, Wikipedia shouldn't go after classic banners and such, but instead allow for paid "related services" sections of articles. Say, a technology, a product, a branch of art or such is shown. Allow for links to companies that sell this kind of product, offer or heavily utilize this technology, to people who produce this kind of art on sale, and so on. Page on hot-stamping print? Add a company that does it. A page on some rock band? Add a link to a shop that sells their albums. Some book? Amazon link to this book's purchase page.
This would actually add to the value of the site.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I don't donate to Wikipedia. I won't donate to Wikipedia. They are spending $9.8 MM/year to pay 58 people. That's an *average* of $168K/person. That's simply absurd. I'm not "donating" to an organization so that their management can live like royalty. If they were truly interested in their mission, there's no reason to pay themselves such outrageous salaries.
I don't respond to AC's.
The thought of content aware ads on wikipedia cracks me up. Too many people take wikipedia as the singular universal truth, and now for a low low price of 0.005 cents per page view advertisers can append their own versions of the truth on there.
Don't like a person/political party/country/nation/race/ideology/historical event? Easy! Just put up a banner ad that says "This article is full of filthy lies" on their wikipedia article.
I am hesitant to contribute to Wikipedia because I don't want them to get paid editors. If they succeed in their fundraising goal, then we should consider forking the project just in case it goes bad. This sounds like a case of taking something that works perfectly fine, then hiring a CEO with a "vision" that is completely different from the intended purpose of the project. If Jimmy Wales wants to become CEO of a commercial encyclopedia, then go register JimmyWalesApedia.com.
No.
I think a lot of people have grown annoyed with Jimbo Wales over the years, myself included, over his reactionary tendency toward censorship. All it takes is for one semi-famous person to criticize some aspect of Wikipedia, be it drugs, sex, or religion, and Jimbo would go in and radically truncate a bunch of pages. Nevermind that he was redacting factual information, he just wanted to "save face". Quality of information seemed to matter less than it's potential for scandal, which is a fantastic way to piss off the liberal-leaning intellectual elite (and by liberal I don't mean the imbecilic U.S. political label).
From day one, he's treated Wikipedia like his own politically-correct version of the truth, alienating countless key supporters in the process. Take him off those freakin ads and maybe, in a few years, people will forget that this megalomaniac took a big crap all over their masterfully crafted articles.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Commerce is not the only thing that can warp information. It can also be warped by individuals willing to spend their time pushing their own opinions, and excluding others.
Wikipedia editing has become increasingly bureaucratic and exclusive, which IMO is one reason that they are having trouble raising money. Personally, I'm not going to give to Wikipedia as it exists now: the personal playground of Jimmy Wales and his anointed administrative minions.
Wikipedia is already serving ads--they feature Jimmy's puppy-dog eyes begging for money. Broadening the ad base would do a lot to make the organization grow up and break out of the near-cult it has become.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Add a <blink> tag to show how urgent and important your plea is. People love that.
No really... NBC and FOX Broadcast are both losing money due to a lot of empty ad slots. Their cable channels are profitable but not the "free" broadcast channels, which is why they started charging Comcast, Time-warner, etc for access. (Or else pull the plug.)
Also Nielsen does track page hits & DVR viewing too, and reports back the results to ABC, CBS, CW, etc.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Google has shown us all how advertising can be done so that it's not intrusive and even occasionally useful. Wikipedia could provide article-relevant text-only ads that would really be a lot less bothersome than the huge beg-banners and would give them all the money they need. They could also use the slashdot model and suppress the ads for users who make a small annual donation.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You want to see what Wikipedia will look like if they start accepting advertising and basing their revenue model on that? Go to about.com. No Thanks,I like Wikipedia just the way it is.
There is information.
Then there is commerce.
Whenever commerce touches information, information has a way of getting warped.
It's really as simple as that.
No. There is commerce, politics and personal bias. All three of these warp information. Wikipedia is already warped by 2 of the 3 to some degree. Its unclear as to whether letting google or some other third party feed ads is more or less warping than politics or bias. Also all the arguments made about the corrupting influence of ads can also be made for non-anonymous donations, especially those big ones that currently save wikipedia from financial collapse.
... honestly and completely reveals his salary, other compensations, and expenses. Non-profits are supposed to report expenses but his are hidden in vague, general categories.
P.S. I posted a similar message on Huffington Post and they deleted it.
Okay, I get that Wikipedia doesn't run for free. But plastering a big picture of "Jimbo" at the top of every page is precisely the wrong way to go about it. If I'm going to donate money, it won't be because Jimmy Whales himself asked, it'll be because Wikipedia is a mostly-reliable resource of knowledge.
This should have been a "We, Wikipedia, need money" campaign, not a "I, Jimmy Whales, want you to give money to Wikipedia" campaign. And showcasing the unpaid contributors doesn't make me want to give money either. Personal appeals for money work if the person is a celebrity, and they don't actually run, or work for, the charity they want you to support. Otherwise, stick to appealing to ideas, principles, and projects, and leave the individual out of it.
The ad model is working extremely well for Google, Facebook, and others.
Is it bad that this actually sounds like a good idea?
Well obviously those billions weren't generous enough to keep the site running without asking for more. What Wikipedia needs is to get lucky with a handful of really large donors, who are the kind that usually finances most free public institutions, museums, galleries etc. Universities are in part financed that way too. They might wanna put their name on it through, so it will be known as "Wikipedia courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Scrooge".
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
This is what the Sports Reference pages do(like Baseball-reference.com). Sponsor Albert Pujols page with your own personal message or with your business if you're in the sporting goods business. Seems to work for them
Sell books.
I, for one, felt Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit was quite thought-provoking.
This is a great suggestion! Wish I had mod points today.
I don't care if they play unobtrusive ads, but it's the tracking that worries me -- Google already knows enough about me, I don't want them tracking every article I visit on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia runs their own ad network I'd be fine with them playing ads. If they use someone else's ad network I'd probably block the ads.
I think ads would do quite well on Wikipedia -- often I'm browsing Wikipedia when I don't have anything else to do -- if I was looking up helicopters and saw an ad for model helicopters, I'd probably click over to it and check it out.
Wikipedia occasionally makes unlicensed use of copyrighted works under fair use (17 USC 107), such as using an image that identifies the subject of the article if the subject is a non-free work of authorship. A use is more likely to be considered a fair use if it is non-commercial, and if there's no ad, Wikipedia qualifies as "non-commercial".
Maybe the donation requests are just to get us used to having huge, annoying banner ads at the top of Wikipedia pages.
Sent from my CR-48
I'd pay for a yearly subscription that would entitle me to full access. What full and free access would be is up to them, but I'd happily throw down a $5-10 fee. Of course, adding in a fee system adds cost in and of itself, so it's not a fix-all solution. I don't like the idea of ads, either. Wikipedia is distracting enough with all its links distracting me from my original research goal which was... Oh ya, so flash, gif, audio, and video ads would just make it worse. If they could allow some charity/non-profit banner ads only (Red Cross, Child's Play, etc.) with a guarantee of no flashiness, I could support it.
There seems to be a few 3rd party services that rely on Wikipedia's data. I'm sure there are many commercial services too (I've seen many pay-per-click sites simply barf wikipedia content surrounded by ads).
Instead of ads, could Wikimedia charge for a it's APIs to allow access to Wikipedia's data? Like most services, you get your developer key for a limited number of queries, but as the request volume goes up, you pay more. Bulk-exporting several pages? Pay a small fee. If the fees are low and reasonable, maybe businesses would pay for them and not result to screen-scraping?
The data itself is still covered under CC/FDL licenses; the charge is just for friendly access to it.
Just a thought.
The pretentious quality of Jimbo's vanity shots rankles me every time I see them on Wikipedia since I am at best ambivalent about Wales himself, and some of the ways he uses Wikipedia. At least they are mixing it up now with images of other folks (all of them lacking that pretentious quality).
If Wikipedia had logins and subscriptions like Slashdot, that would make pictures of Jimmy Wales disappear forever I'd been in on that in a heartbeart.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
If ya don't like it, just Adblock it. Hope they won't get desperate and turn to those nasty persistent cookies. By the way, Wales looks a bit like Daniel Craig from an angle, no?
(professional you-get-what-you-pay-for like with Microsoft)
You mean I could pay more, and get a less stable product? Where do I sign up for that?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Its unclear as to whether letting google or some other third party feed ads is more or less warping than politics or bias.
The question is irrelevant, since adding commercial bias through ad-dependence wouldn't eliminate personal bias ("politics" and "bias" aren't, contrary to your presentation, two separate sources of distortion, its two different ways of referring to the personal biases of editors) unless it also involved eliminating community editing completely.
So it doesn't matter if advertising is, on its own, more distorting than the existing sources of distortion, since advertising adds to, rather than replacing, those sources.
That's funny. Didn't Amazon.com just announce something similar to this? Granted, Wikipedia doesn't get a cut from that deal, but maybe Jimmy Wales should be talking to Jeff Bezos?
Look, PBS has ads now.
PBS uses underwriting, which is a rather limited form of advertising. Non-commercial television and radio stations are limited to giving sponsors underwriting spots in the U.S. You can call them "ads", but they really aren't as obnoxious (although some I've seen recently push the distinction to the limit), and they only appear at the beginning and end of a program.
Wikipedia's article on underwriting is okay, but not really good. The PBS information is clipped from elsewhere, and there is no mention of specific restrictions for non-commercial radio.
In any case, I just donated $35, seeing as how the plea is now urgent. Personally, I usually ignore the banners when I see them, as I assume a lot of people are donating to Wikipedia as something that is of interest to everyone. I generally make my donations to organizations that serve niche interests that don't see as much traffic. A lot of people probably take the same approach. If Wikipedia really needs the money, I hope they have a plan to make it quite clear to these people. This /. article did the trick for me.
....No.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Let users opt in to advertising, as a conscious choice to support Wikipedia..
Hell, let them choose which ad network(s) to serve. Do it by IP address, no authentication necessary, but make the choice persistent. In exchange, the Jimmy Wales appeal goes away. An upgrade, seriously, and one which neatly avoids many ethical issues, as it's at the whim of the users, not the Foundation or editors, which products get advertised. As a result, it's harder to see how the advertisers would have leverage on the content creators.
Wikipedia is a reference, not a source.
I think the whole appeal for donations would work way better if not jimmy's face plastered all over wikipedia
So what? What if I want a book about something that I am interested in, but do not need to be an authority on. Let's say I want to read an overview of Civil War battles. Wikipedia is fine for that.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
It's like the TSA choice, do you want to be radiated and be seen naked or do you want to be groped?
Here is like: do you want ads or do you want to be constantly bombarded for donation pleas. I don't see a big difference between ads and donation pleas, oh and if you donate you'll still see the pleas in about one year...
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Link every footnote to a book to a "buy now" button.
This would have unfortunate consequences for citation spamming.
But overall I really like the idea. I think you have to charge for the links, as well as take a cut via Amazon. Wikipedia creates a paid placement box on every article, full disclosure, with a max of three books in it, and auction the locations at runtime, adwords style. Desirable articles (Argentina tourism) would have an arms race to keep Lonely Planet on top, while the rest will take smaller cuts across the VERY long tail of Wikipedia traffic.
I would give generously, but Wikipedia blocked my website and removed all links to my research articles, so why should I bother?
My web domain.
I often stumble across some product on Wikipedia that I'm interested in buying (album, book, etc.). I actually would find it very convenient if such pages had a "Purchase this Item" link. I'm sure Amazon would kick in a few million for that privilege, or you could use their pre-existing referral program. I think most users would view those links as added value to Wikipedia.
You're right, but if you're writing a paper on the subject, it would be useful to not have to copy + paste the source links at the bottom into google, and just be able to click them and hit up an Amazon preview.
Am I the only one here amazed of what the spendings are ? According to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report page 4 :
There are 45% of technical spendings, including technical staff. But 20% to Management, Finance, Administration.
And 10% for "Fundraising". That's 1 in 10 you donate that's wasted in making you spit that money. I wonder if this is regarded as a sustainable business plan for a foundation ?
micro payments are the way to go.
register with your paypal account.
charge your country's equivalent of $.01 USD per article read.
even let students opt out with a valid .edu email address if you're feeling especially nice.
it's cheap enough that no one will give a shit. wikipedia usage will not drop.
divide half of that money amongst the article contributors, in amounts relative to their contribution.
the other half goes to wikipedia.
Most of us don't care deeply enough to follow the sources; we're after the compilation of knowledge, so that I can find out what the heck the Gunpowder Plot was, or the Monroe Doctrine (well, OK, that I knew), or how soap works. We want to do this without feeling we need to go read a dozen pages, or a hundred pages, or make a trip to a library. That's the entire point of an encyclopedia: Vast breadth of deep-enough-for-most-people knowledge.
In theory, perhaps.
In practise, it's more the encyclopedia for obsessive/compulsive agenda-driven basement dwellers who love to play politics over what is and isn't allowed in 'their' encyclopedia.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
...that subconsciously thinks it's Jimmy Wales that wrote each article whenever his pleas are at the top? For some reason, having a giant image of him at the top instantly makes me interpret it as an image of the author, just as you'd see pictures of authors at plenty of publications, and I start to think of the articles I read as being written by him. It's very weird, and I keep having to snap myself out of that thinking every time they run these requests for donations. That may also be why I've had this nagging feeling that Wikipedia is suddenly a whole lot less respectable and authoritative than the used to be, now that I think of it...
We do not like what you wrote about us concerning the latest events. Edit it or we take away your site in 20 minutes.
Signed:
Amazon Management
(19 minutes and counting)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Isn't that advertising for Amazon. Not saying its a bad idea, just that it fits in one of the boxes
I would argue that many people do think about the money. The money it would cost them to buy an equivalent encyclopedia, or contribute a fraction of their time in an area they are good at to gain access. Or more likely to just read and not contribute anything.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
I would consider donation to Wikipedia if you didn't treat us like shit over on Wikia. Serving spyware via drive-by downloads is one thing, you can claim you didn't know about it, but disabling the accounts of wiki editors when they talk about moving off Wikia because of it? Making malicious edits to the new wiki after they move? Playing games with Google to keep wikia's pagerank above the pagerank of the departed? That's childish and immoral. You can make WIkia the "Roach Motel" of wiki if you like, but remember, eventually the motel is full and gets thrown away.
As far as I am concerned you can't go bankrupt quickly enough. It's a pity that wikipedia must die with you, but I absolutely refuse to feed your ego or reward your dishonest behavior.
They could probably make enough money off of Google ads for "mesothelioma" on their mesothelioma page to give books to millions of children.
Problems arise when advertisers ask Wikipedia to censor content to suit the position of the advertisers. No doubt that would happen.
If ads to show up on Wikipedia, and you don't like it, Google the topic and click the links below Wikipedia -- that's where the Wikipedia editors probably scraped the content from in the first place.
Maybe they should stop wasting all the time and resources hosting their own systems and move to Amazon EC2. I'm sure Amazon can promote this as a strong gesture of philanthropy, too.
Kriston
That's a pretty interesting idea. I wonder if Amazon would go for it. But I wouldn't want them to become dependent on an advertiser for free hosting. That would be like running your home business out of the spare bedroom in your friend's house.
What are you talking about? It already has adverts on it. For the past month or so, they've been running a huge advert for this "Jimmy Wales", which as far as I can tell is a sex offender registry or something.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The donation system isn't working out because it's not INTEGRATED with the Wikipedia workflow. What is it with the pleading picture that pops up everyone once in a while? How stupid can you get? Just give users the opportunity to become "paying members" while they are going about their normal business. Put a link for "become a paying member (it's cheap!)" at the header of every edit page. Make the cost small, like $5/month, and automatically recurring. You wouldn't need to offer any privileges to being a paid member other than allowing users to show it in their status. I bet you nearly every single one of those 1%'ers that do most of the work would member up, and many more besides.
Terrible idea. If Wikipedia starts running ads, the better volunteers will quit. Who wants to work for someone else for free?
Look what happened to Wikia. It was supposed to be the commercial version of Wikipedia, with ads. So what's on Wikia? The Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft] wikis. The "Cocktails" wiki. The travel wiki. The coffee wiki. Wikia does junk culture. Nobody serious goes there, and it doesn't make much money.
Wales thought he could take the Wikipedia concept and monetize it. He was very wrong. He thought he'd get a private jet out of the deal. He was wrong. He thought that Wikia Search would rival Google. That shut down in 2009.
Everybody else who's tried to monetize this idea has failed, too. Citizendium, Google Knol - all flops.
It takes an incredible amount of volunteer effort and organization to keep Wikipedia from turning into junk. Lose those volunteers and you're toast.
Ads on Wikipedia wouldn't concern me if:
1. The ad network was separate from Wikipedia, so there would be less likelihood of advertisers asserting editorial control. This is how most online ad networks work anyway, so it's not hard.
2. The ads were non-tracking, non-obtrusive, non-interstitial, etc. A simple Google-style text ad, or non-animated image. This is probably the hard part. The wrong kinds of ads on Wikipedia will turn it into another About.com. Whenever I get an About.com result returned in a search, I ignore it because I know that it will be full of obtrusive ads, with one page chopped up into 10 to increase pageviews.
3. That reminds me. Don't chop up articles to increase pageviews. That would be, as they say, not very encyclopedic...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How about a hybrid? Sell ads, but offset with user donations. As the user donation pool grows, the amount of advertising available, goes down.
Similar to what WBUR does. They schedule a week long fundraiser with a goal. Then before the fundraiser they start telling people "the fund raiser ends when we reach our goal".... now they are starting to even let people donate towards that goal before the fundraiser starts!
Ever since they staryed doing this, maybe 2 years ago? The fundraisers have been... reaching their goals and getting shorter! I think, at this point, they have nearly cut them in half!
Could create paid subscriptions with a value add. Maybe some new features that are a bit server intensive or require storage... like letting you keep a set of private annotations on pages, or a real time chat feature.
Look at OKCupid. There are many "A-List" members, even though the majority, and indeed the most important basic functions of the site, are all available for free.
-Steve
What? turn down opportunities for more money?
that I know of to run an organization with a purpose other than making money is to have it run, as much as possible, by non-professionals and user donations. Otherwise, the amount of bloat within the organization goes nuts and, of course, the money starts influencing the editorial process. Just look at the difference between traditional AA-like programs vs. the Catholic Church. How much of what a cardinal or whatever does is about helping people with their spiritual lives and how much is meta-crap about the organization itself? Whereas, in AA, all of that shit is kept to a bare minimum since there's very few people who are part of AA infrastructure professionally. And yet, there are millions of AA members in hundreds of countries.
There is no reason why they should need THAT MUCH MONEY on an annual basis.
I lovew the idea behind Wikipedia, and I love the site itself - but it's grown increasingly political as far as editing goes - other posts have made that point already.
I think ads are a bad idea, it would just compromise the site faster than size, egos, and donors with agendas already have.
It make Wales arguably the single most ignored individual on the planet...
After so many years of being blasted with side & top ads all the time, most surfers have an ability to not notice them anymore. I know a lot of people like this...Not to mention the ad blockers...
I don't have an intelligent phone, so I need to be.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I won't see them, because I use AdBlock, and therefore have no reason to care.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Instead, Wikipedia is outsourcing the book selling. I don't know what financial arrangements are currently being made between PediaPress and the Wikimedia Foundation, but there has been some arrangement which has been made and it is at the moment an exclusive arrangement so far as publishing a "book" containing Wikipedia content in a book form (and they are also doing this with the other Wikimedia sister projects as well).
I do think that some kind of more formalized book preparing volunteer group could be organized to separate out the spam from the quality materials on Wikipedia and to prepare what I think would be a high quality book of Wikimedia material... where the results would be to have something of a "product" that people would be willing to buy. Publishing content is much more than simply throwing some random text on a web page and throwing on a picture or two. You may even need a professional coordinator or two for the effort, but the main end-task would be to set up something that would be of comparable quality to something like say the CRC handbook or some other non-fiction reference guide.
My largest problem with trying to get an effort like this going has been trying to find a proper forum to present my ideas. I've tried to propose this idea on the Wikimedia Meta website and the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, but those who happen to be regular readers of those forums are not really interested in being involved at that level. The Wikipedia Village Pump has also similarly fallen flat with any sort of response to setting something like this up. I know that efforts like Distributed Proofreaders exist that are somewhat similar and seem to bring in people with talent and abilities to do the "post-editing" document preparation that would be needed to turn quality Wikipedia articles or featured Wikibooks into a finished book, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do that either.
Another issue is that there seems to be a group that wants to automate the process of creating books entirely. While I applaud that effort so far as something is better than nothing at all, I think something is missing when the whole process is automated. The books I see are certainly of inferior quality to books which are hand-made with a little extra TLC which has been put forward into its preparation... and I've seen some amazing quality books based upon Wikimedia project content which has been put together. The question is how to set that up, and for those parts that could use some assistance through automation perhaps could be used but also there should be the ability to "step in" and tweak that automation as well to refine the process and make it better.
On the whole, I do think this is a missed opportunity for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Call me slow today, but Jimbo Wales is the same guy started/ran the old Bomis.com site... As I recall it was mostly populated by webrings devoted to mostly... ah... artistic photographic content (and I use artistic in the most base sense). Funny to see such a great thing as Wikipedia come from such a sordid background. I guess porn does drive innovation.
-- $G
Call the advertisers "sponsors".
Do you think Amazon would be happy about an article like this?
Problem is, when you get a big sponsor you lose some independency. You lose credibility. Random ads showing up on the pages? Fine. One big company that has the power to shut down the entire site? Maybe not a very good idea.
A conflict of interest is bad not only because what could happen, but because of what you suspect could happen. Maybe Amazon would tolerate the negative article, but let's say it got changed or removed for some reason. It could be perfectly legit, but everyone would suspect Amazon had something to do with it, so Wikipedia would lose credibility.
I think if Wikipedia decides to do ads, it needs to do it in a way that doesn't in any way compromise the integrity of the articles.
Riiiiight..... and the book publishing business is falling apart now that we have computers, where there is no need at all for something written down and put on dead trees with a cover of some kind.
There will always be a demand for quality books, which is exactly what is being proposed here. If anything, the advent of computer technology has been a blessing to the book publishing industry by both making it cheaper to print books and to print them in smaller quantities (print-on-demand publishers) as well as to increase the number of titles and the number of authors who are available to publish.
I don't know how something like the Kindle is going to change the book publishing industry, but even that requires something a little bit better prepared than some of the tripe that sometimes gets put into Wikipedia articles. That requires some real effort. Besides, e-books have typically failed to pan out with their promise, where e-books were predicted to completely replace paper books several decades ago yet seldom seem to ever happen.
I donated, for the second time this year.
And for you "anti-elitists," tons of Wikipedia article contributors and editors are college students, grad students, and some professors (like me).
I was thinking about that, but also have a box at the bottom with relevant products. Let's say that you are looking for specialized tools then show where you can get them. If you have very in depth articles, then yeah.. books. I wonder how would that work for diseases (I hate drug related advertisements), but plants may also link to seeds or gardening, etc.
If something, Google would envy such an opportunity, because each article is already contextualized: it's what people is looking for. So there is an advantage placing ads on those pages.
Sounds good. But I would not limit it to one book store. Amazon will make a lot of money with this. And this after some people in Germany stopped shopping at Amazon because they removed wikileaks from their servers.
Then again, maybe others do not have the option to buy from other online book stores as we do. I do not know, do you have other book traders than Amazon in the US?
This will never happen because BOTH amazon and wikipedia make money off the deal. Simply put, shit people say in wikipedia matters less to Amazon than Amazon selling books. Capitalism is real reliable that way.
They can't have it both ways.
Either be independent and (theoretically above the fray) and survive on donations or become a fully commercial entity and give up that independence,
If they can't generate enough value to survive on donations then perhaps there's not a lot of real value there. If so, why bother doing it?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
I can live with PPL begging for money for a few weeks if it means no ads for an entire year.
The problem of annoying Wales ads is easily solved by taking all of his ads out of rotation and keeping Lilaroja :)
Once you need the ad money, they will start to want you to make changes. Like, let them post their own articl;e, sanitize discussion of complaints and so on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why not take ads that only appear to the freeloaders? If you get a paying subscription or donate, they can set it up so you won't see the ads.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Amazon was (presumably) making money off hosting Wikileaks, but they had no problem killing that.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
...to donate to Wikipedia!
He should write a biography about Wikipedia and Whales as a companion piece for his book The Professor and The Madman.
There's a whole corner of Wikipedia, a science subject, that owes almost its entire existence to over 20,000 of my edits contributed over a 3-year period. I learned a lot during that time, which I think is reflected in the quality of the articles I worked on, but sadly Wikipedia did not. In the end I was spending way too much of my time defending the way those articles were written from complete debutantes who had less of an idea what they were doing than when I started. I felt like a blade of grass in somebody's lawn: wanting to grow higher, but regularly being cut back down to size.
I suppose one of my main problems was that there has always been considerable public interest in the subject I was writing about, but at the same time there has always existed a lot of fear and misunderstanding. Consequently, after I had carefully researched the subject of each page, filling it with facts and tagging every sentence and paragraph with one or more references, others would often come by and, totally unimpeded by any knowledge of the subject, just start making changes as they saw fit. I could argue with them, typically regarding the quality of their sources, but they were often stubborn and refused to understand. I could point out that they were not following Wikipedia's own guidelines, but they didn't see it that way. The administrators and arbitrators didn't have any knowledge of the subject either and figured we just had to remain civil and reach a consensus.
It's been almost two years since I stopped contributing and many of the articles I worked so hard on are now steadily decaying, reflecting less fact and more public ignorance. The admins should be looking for better ways to preserve good edits and prevent bad ones. However, not only does Wikipedia lack an effective mechanism to counter quality deterioration, they aren't even looking for one. The current approach was probably more correct five or six years ago, when any information was better than no information, but now they need a new strategy, or else they stand to lose as much as they gain.
Oh, I still visit the site often enough, as most of us probably do, but as a result of my experience I no longer have the respect for Wikipedia that I once did. If Jimbo thinks advertising on Wikipedia's pages would be degrading, I don't see how that would be worse than the way the project is currently being managed. So go ahead, rent out some banner space; it won't make a difference to me anyway.
I might've been looking at the 08-09 annual report, that's all they've got up: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report But saying they need $16M urgently, when their expenses were only $5.6M in 08-09 seems sketchy.
The technical, legal, and administrative costs of Wikipedia are not the problem. There's plenty of funding for that, and if the site were truly in jeopardy there would be a long line of institutional donors ready to support it.
The problem is that there's a bloated global administrative organization that doesn't actually help the core projects, and which drives up costs immensely. There are people in charge of partnerships who fly around the world looking for the next great thing, trying to get the foundation's foot in the door so that the empire will expand. There's money spent handling administration, legal matters, and software maintenance for projects like WikiNews, WikiBooks and WikiSpecies that, after using up more runway than Wikipedia did before it went aloft, still don't show meaningful signs of growth and relevance. There is money and effort being spent to maintain an egalitarian spirit and level playing field by supporting Wikipedia projects in dying languages, even though there is ample evidence to show that beyond the top 100 or so languages worldwide (maybe fewer) there aren't going to be enough contributors. There is money being spent on international staff travel that serves no useful purpose beyond demonstrating that the staff is globally engaged.
Perhaps these are all laudable projects and the effort is worthwhile. But the major institutional donors don't agree, and so the money isn't coming in.
If a foundation were created with a mission limited to supporting the largest 10, 20, 50, or 100 Wikipedias plus the commons image hosting platform, using a small administrative and technical staff in a single location with a token travel budget, there would be plenty of money. There would be enough money to build an endowment.
The smaller Wikipedias, the side projects, the partnerships, the in-country "chapters" could all be spun out to succeed or fail on their own merits. But that's not the way the foundation wants it. They want something bigger.
As though Wikipedia isn't enough of a success to be worth maintaining.
That's fucking brilliant. We need a +6 interesting.
There's a caveat of choosing which books to shill though. A bidding system sounds like a good idea, as long as you're ok with re-enforcing the status quo. Something like Project Wonderful.
No, we use wikipedia so we don't have to schlep down to the sity library to look something up, and we use wikipedia because it has more information than you'll find in the library (try finding a track listing for Razamataz in Britannica), and unlike books, it's up to date.
I'd wager that most slashdotters are bookworms. I know I am. But guess what? I still use wikipedia.
Free Martian Whores!
Ads would be the final straw for me to leave Wikipedia behind. Right now it's still useful for a quick overview of most mainstream culture or geeky topics, and an easy way to get a rough idea of most other topics.
Ads would drive me away. But so does this huge banner. Maybe it's timing, because right before the holidays you are drowned in fund drives all around. Suddenly, everyone digs out starving children (are they not starving the rest of the year?), disabled dogs, disenfranchied plants or whatever this years guilt-ridden topic is. And Wikipedia right now looks a lot like that crap.
A less in-your-face attitude, like the "progress bar" thing they had last year (or the one before?) would have better chances with me, but maybe I'm strange.
But ads? Yeah, sure. Write "we sold out" all over the site while you're at it. As far as I'm concerned, if you run ads, you have given up all pretense of being objective. Because sooner or later, someone will offer you a really nice deal if only...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you are comparing TV broadcast ads to online ads you are doing apples-to-oranges comparison however: with sites, adding ads has negligible cost increase so even with low revenue it is very hard to actually lose money, as compared to not including ads. My blog for example earns just couple of dollars a month via adsense, but adding those ads does not add cost to site hosting, so it is "extra" money, if a very low amount.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
This idea conflicts with fair use (17 USC 107), such as using an image that identifies the subject of the article if the subject is a non-free work of authorship. A use is more likely to be considered a fair use if it is non-commercial, and if there's no ad, Wikipedia qualifies as "non-commercial".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NFC
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"But we use Wikipedia so we don't have to read books."
Wikipedia cannot do everything yet, and many free books on Wikibooks are incomplete or are not that great.
I keep finding myself on Wikipedia for information that's readily available elsewhere, because it the first/second link in Google. It might be time for them to either see if they can get Google to help them down the rankings a little, or start trimming information that's easily found elsewhere (e.g., TV show episode listings).
Sort of like the Maxwell House "brew some good" ads. Which don't really advertise coffee, they just show a can of coffee with a backdrop of some charitable work that the company donated to going on in the background. I'm sure the cost of airing the ad exceeds the cost of the charitable work by a huge amount, but at least they're doing something. There's plenty of other ads like that airing on TV right now with the same theme.
I'd say let companies do the same sort of thing with Wikipedia. If a company donates above a certain minimum amount, let them have an unobtrusive ad display every so often where they can brag about donating to the site. Let them show a cup of coffee, box of KD, a server rack or whatever the company's product is, let them make a small reference to their product, etc... but the main theme of the ad has to be "We donated to this place.". Clicking on their ad wouldn't bring them to their site, it'll bring them to a page within Wikipedia which has more information about the donation(s) they've made.
If I logged in and saw a small "Wikipedia runs on Dunkin' - Proud supporter of this site." image in the upper right corner of the screen, I'd honestly be pleased to see that - while I've never donated to Wikipedia, and feel somewhat ashamed about it because I do spend a fair bit of time on there, I've got huge respect for people and companies that do. And unlike the aforementioned Maxwell House ad, 100% of their advertising cost goes to Wikipedia. Can't knock that.
But if I saw a "Announcing the new MochaLatteChocoChino from Dunkin Donuts!" image in the middle of the screen, halfway through an article, I'd be seriously pissed off at that.
For all those that want wikipedia to serve adds instead of begging
Why not make a GreaseMonkey plugin that replaces the beg add for a real add for the page.
and donate the add money directly to wikipedia
Beg add gone and money coming in, all problems fixed.
and adds will only be shown to people who want them, no add block needed.
No time to make it myself, but it should be easy to make.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
I love Wikipedia, used it all through school and that information was correct and up to date, seems to me instead of ads Google should take over funding, a few million is nothing to them and it would be a great public relations.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
They're not "moving" to anything since they're still showing ads. They're charging subscription fees to cable companies because they can, because they know that the cable company would rather not have to tell their own subscribers that they need to watch their regular channels with an antenna. And they'd do it whether they lost money or made money, because they see money on the table and they're grabbing it.
why exactly they need all the money they are trying to gather
Jimbo Wales needs a salary raise.
$2 meg. from Ebay founder
$2 meg. from google
Where'd it blow^H^H go? Seems like 4 million should be enough to last a while. They're not doing DARPA research for chrissakes.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I'm always surprised that it takes 3 clicks to get from an article on a book to the Amazon page for the book (ISBN -> Booksellers -> Amazon.com). It really should only take one, though I appreciate all the resources for people who want to find the book elsewhere!
If an incredible resource like Wikipedia cannot even raise 16 tiny millions then the world can burn for all I care.
And what is this WikiExperts thingy? Keep your crappy suggestions to your crappy site/business and please stay away from Wikipedia's future.
In theory, this is a great idea, but as a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization, it is unlikely they could enter into a deal like this with a major book retailer and maintain their tax-exempt status. At the very least, doing such a thing would risk a prolonged court battle that they would only have a marginal chance of winning.
Now, in theory, they could adopt this model and simply forfeit their 501(c)3 status (or fight to keep it, but the court battle might actually cost more than simply paying taxes), but they would have to take into account that their donation revenue (I'm not sure just how large it actually is) would be impacted. People who donate the fatter checks to places like Wikipedia do so expecting to be able to receive a tax deduction, which requires that the receiving organization be a 501(c)3 organization.
Yeah, it's the secret truth of the internet: people like to imagine that they (the crowd) are more generous than they really are. The fundraising goal this year was 10.4 million dollars, and 4 million of that came from EBay and Google. That's 6.4 million from everyone else. For comparison, the Encyclopedia Britannica had revenue of $650 million in 1990 (their peak year). That's a hundred-fold more money than 6.4 million.
Seems to me this could be win-win for everyone. Let owners or manufacturers of a given product buy links at the bottom of relevant articles (limit of one link per company per page). Charge them by the impression, so much per link per impression, or if that's too open to fraud or cost uncertainty, let a link on each page be charged by a flat rate based on the previous year's worth of hits for that page. That way costs are proportional to benefits.
Then I can immediately find vendors of whatever product I just looked up in Wikipedia, the vendors might make some sales, and Wikipedi gets ad revenue -- all without annoying users at all, since the only ad is an ordinary link to an external site, at the bottom of the page where you don't have to look at it unless you want to.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I propose (and I presume I am no where near the first):
wikipedia.org = like today, but without Jimmy's face in your face.
wikipedia.com = ad supported, for those, like me, who don't mind supporting Wikipedia with ads
Everyone wins: Jimmy does, Wikipedia does, the Internet does and the advertisers do.
QED
But what if you want to donate to Wikipedia... only you don't have a credit card, you wouldn't piss on PayPal if it was on fire and Jimmy Wales has apparently never heard of cash drafts, international money orders or even plain old postal orders?
http://donhall.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-fundraisingadvertising-model.html Jeffe Otte, begging maintains dignity and is infinitely cooler than selling out your principles. It's called laziness when you don't want to fundraise yourself. Our society is forgetting the human aspect of a public cause. Administrative work can be outsourced, but what is lost is integrity and neutrality of the organization. Moderators may have biases, but no organization should have a dominating influence on an encyclopedia, the largest repository of knowledge in existence. The above link shows why a bunch of theatre companies in Chicago would rather say great things about a bank they know very little of by having their logo on their Facebook page for a measly $20,000 award to the theatre group with the most votes. Instead of theatre groups asking for donations themselves, it became about Chase bank at every theatre group in Chicago that participated. Suddenly, off-loop theatre seems a lot less soulless. That was one little idea. I'd rather stare at Jimmy Wales's face for an urgent appeal than listen to advertisements abuot how great such and such product is when there's 20 wikipedia entries of better products. Guess which entries would be removed if such an organization bought rights to those pages? Does it happen elsewhere? Certainly Could it happen here? Certainly.
humans are by nature, sharing. however, if you force them into a scarcity economy through capitalism, and place them in a place in a dog-eat-dog hierarchy of income, with the futures of their children, their lives 2 months after, their food, their shelter, depending on how much they keep to themselves, then they will have to act selfish. else, they cant get by.
its as simple as that. its just like how all people become bellicose and warlike in a situation they are forced to fight for their lives in an arena.
Read radical news here
I love Wikipedia because it's free. I also love Slashdot because it's free.
Why do I pay Slashdot $5 every once in awhile? Because of the cool benefits! I mean, I get a special asterisk, am allowed to see things a few minutes before they're actually posted to the rest of the site, and it just feels cool to donate money to a geeky/techie site. If everyone here donated $5, it would change the face of Slashdot, or something.... I like supporting a community that I believe in.
Why do I not pay Wikipedia anything? Well, I just don't see the benefit. To me, Wikipedia is a community managed product. We're already spending our time keeping things accurate and up-to-date. Why pay to work?
While editing an encyclopedia feels like work, moderating Slashdot actually feels like I'm accomplishing something important. I'm helping other people filter junk, and they are (conversely) doing the same thing. Everyone loves power, but as we know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So if you give a BUNCH of people a little power, they'll enjoy it, but not really be able to abuse it in any real sense.
If Wikipedia wants my money, they should consider adding cool features like Accomplishments, and making it easier to "moderate" the content. Anyway, more important than all that: Rob Malda is simply more cool than Jimmy Wales. What Mr. Wales needs is a cool name, like CmdrTaco, and then we'll talk. Also, just gut feeling, if I had to choose a guy to fix my computer, or hang out and geek with, it'd be Rob. I wonder if Jimmy is a PC, and Rob is a Mac? Just saying!
"politics" and "bias" aren't, contrary to your presentation, two separate sources of distortion, its two different ways of referring to the personal biases of editors
No. Politics can make one say things they do not believe, things contrary to their bias, or to withhold things they do believe. There is an intersection between politics and personal bias but it is only a partial intersection.
Advertising will have a negative impact on the impartiality of information. [1] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
Its unclear as to whether letting google or some other third party feed ads is more or less warping than politics or bias.
The question is irrelevant, since adding commercial bias through ad-dependence wouldn't eliminate personal bias unless it also involved eliminating community editing completely. So it doesn't matter if advertising is, on its own, more distorting than the existing sources of distortion, since advertising adds to, rather than replacing, those sources.
The problem with your argument is that politics, bias and advertising are not equivalents. Politics and bias can not save wikipedia but advertising may. If wikipedia fails no good is served. In its failure it would not even achieve a philosophical victory given that it is already tainted. Its a negative/negative decision. The lesser negative of an incremental and possibly inconsequential(*) tainting versus the far greater negative of complete failure.
(*) Ads are not negotiated or served directly by wikipedia. A third party aggregates and serves targeted ads. Google for example, an organization that already has an influence on wikipedia via its multi-million dollar donations.
Did we learn nothing from what happened to TVTropes earlier this year?
The word "moving" is appropriate. NBC's CEO has discussed several times the possibility of quitting broadcast and becoming a cable-only channel. He said in an interview, "The cable model is better and more stable than the ad-supported model. We want to become more like our cable properties MSNBC and Syfy which have been very profitable even during this downturn."
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
The source of funds is very important. Paid Ads would implicitly mean corruption and sponsor controlled information.
What's important here is not "Jimmy's Begging Mug vs. Ugly Teeth Whitening Ads". Both are unpleasant to look at but the Ads implicitly cause corruption. Period...
Thanks about it: Pepsi spends a lot on advertising, Pepsi owns Taco Bell. If Taco Bell uses an ingredient which is suspected to cause cancer, I'd like to read about that on Wikipedia! I WONT BE ABLE TO if PepsiCo is funding Wikipedia! Then Wikipedia is just like every other 0wned source of information. Untrustworthy.
Wikipedia isn't perfect. As some have said, humans are flawed. We all try to make it go our way. We all try to "game" the system. Maybe Wikipedia's information is biased by editors with an agenda, but adding the automatic corruption of corporate sponsorship is not the answer.
It doesn't use the term "non-commercial", it says "(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;".
As I understand it, the U.S. IRS defines "nonprofit" to refer to organizations that pay no dividends. If WMF were to put AdSense units below the toolbox on Wikipedia pages, non-free images would still be used "for nonprofit educational purposes", but the use would also be "of a commercial nature", so the first factor would likely be a wash instead of strongly in WMF's favor.
I could deal with ads, but only if they were:
1) Small compared to the page/content size
2) Non-moving or animated in ANY way (no scrolling, flipping, blinking, sliding, motion, video, etc)
3) Non-Flash (which pretty much goes with #2)
4) No mouseover interaction other than it just being a link
5) No sound
6) Clearly indicate they are an ad
7) Fast loading and not requiring pre-loading before other content
THAT is a tasteful Ad. The kind I would never be compelled to block or push off my screen because it distracts from my reading. Unfortunately that kind of ad is extraordinarily rare. Could Wikipedia really do that, and never give in to pressure? I don't know.
Secret Santa this year. But the thought of donating to Wikipedia never entered my mind, despite that I use it daily. Why? Because I've never seen the deletionism issue seriously addressed by the organization. I have a fundamental disagreement with how the site is run.
As well, I don't believe Wikipedia is all that unique. While it may have been (one of?) the first wiki encyclopedia, and obviously now it has a huge amount of content, there's nothing inherent in Wikipedia that couldn't be recreated if necessary. I don't think the Internet would implode if Wikipedia vanished tomorrow. Would I be inconvenienced? Yes. Would it take years to build a new Wikipedia? Yes. But it's not so vital to the Internet. Whereas if Google had never existed, I think the Internet would be far different.
Notwithstanding the issues surrounding what might be described as Cliquipedia (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) I have to object to some of the fundamental philosophy underpinning "acceptable" content.
They don't accept original work, and they don't accept speculation. Now, I agree that original work should be called out as such. It ought to reference or contain methodology and details of any supporting lab work from which the assertions were derived. But a properly documented and checked primary source is worth a thousand unchecked but published and thoroughly referenced learned opinions.
As for speculation, all of science is speculation. The only certainty in science is that the body of "knowledge" is more of a body of current best guesses that's as internally consistent as we can make it and makes predictions that check out when checking is possible. If you really want to omit speculation then the article on cosmology would have to be limited to "There are lights in the sky. Spectral analysis yielded (table of values). Parallax effects suggest great distance."
Wikipedia is not, we are told, the place to publish your work. But why not? Is there any good reason not to use it like this?
You are our favorite way to waste time on our smartphones, the first thing that comes up when we type "coprophagia" into Google
Ahahaa, that's almost as bad as a goatse link.
My attempt join the Wikipedia community was prematurely cut short when an admin blocked a range of 8192 Verizon IP addresses. I found this out when attempting to edit my user page. My attempted appeal was summarily dismissed--there is no mechanism for distinguishing legitimate users from vandals. To add insult to injury, Wikipedia requires that the appeal remain on my talk page until the range block is lifted some time in 2011. Until then, I will not be donating to Wikipedia. There are plenty of other worthy causes.
PBS has always done the begathons. They interrupt programming and plead, passive aggressively, for the ungrateful sods leeching off the free service, to please, for the love of all that is good and holy, GIVE US CASH.
There is a long and rich tradition of the free-service types pleading for shekels.
If you spent years learning something that you think someone can learn from a well written wikipedia article, maybe you should try to get a refund on those years missing from your life.
c++;
The problem is the reverse is also regularly true on WP. Someone who is more opinated than knowledgable spends a great deal of time sitting on articles ensuring their views are the ones put forwards regardless of correctness, then someone knowledgable comes along but doesn't have the time to sit on that page and defend themselves against the incombant moron has his usefull contributions lost and more often then not won't bother to contribute further.
And they still need more?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Charge 0.01 (US) cent per page view. The Wikipedia article on Wikipedia says they get 25,000-60,000 page requests per second depending on time of day. If they average 25,000 page views per second (yes, I know not every page request results in a page view) that amounts to over $78 million per year.
But, I wouldn't object to the level of advertising I see on /. either.
User pay makes sense.
Possibly a little reminder would help.
The html for the page could track your usage, saving the counts in the cookie. Perhaps visits per month for the last 12 months.
Once a year, different times for different people, it could nudge with a suggestion based on usage - say 1 cent per visit or topic.
They serve billions of pages. If 1% of visitors donated 1 cent a page, they might make their goals.
Then every schmoe writing a book will want citations on wikipedia, I'd rather see more 'needs citation' than more spam of irrelevant footnotes.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
It shouldn't.
A question I've been wondering about lately is "why would you donate money to wikipedia?". I read things on wikipedia now and then, I spend time contributing to articles... but you often hear people say things like "wikipedia is good for technical stuff, but you can't trust the political articles", in other words, it's acting as a forum for fanatics and professional propagandists. Why would you volunteer to support a platform for these people?
Effectively anonymous, free accounts are clearly not conducive to anything like a robust information architecture... someday we're going to look back on sites like wikipedia (and slashdot) and phrases like "rope of sand" will come to mind.
"I find a lot of complaints around WP are about someone's inability to insert something they value but which isn't widely known or reported in the media." And I find that a lot of the defenders of WP generally seem to miss the point of a lot of the criticism.
Since it's bad to be "original" on wikipedia, you're stuck with "consensus opinion" as the only guide toward the truth. This "family feud" criteria seems pretty silly when you feel you can prove that the consensus is wrong.
A modest proposal: wikipedia should incorporate a mechanism for evaluating original material. Jimmy Wales reason for rejecting this is pretty lame: "we don't have the resources". So create the resources, already.
Amen. The way I would summarize it is that working on wikipedia articles just isn't any fun, and they expect an insane amount of dedication from their volunteers.
But I hardly see how running ads is going to help this, unless part of the deal is paying editors and writers...
So let's say wikipedia is up against it, and a few years hence it will be in an obvious state of decay. What are we going to replace it with? (I don't have a lot of hope for citizendium, somehow, I suspect it goes a little too far in the opposite direction, the control is a little too tight.)
500+ comments in this so I know my little post here will be lost, but what the heck...
Wikipedia is pretty awesome. For many things it's the cleanest way to find facts and get useful links.
But I agree with you on the source taste left by contributing. I used to contribute, but I just got so sick of having my changes reverted. I remember one article camped on by a tin goddess who reverted my changes which were just a few sentences, useful, relevant and sourced. She reverted it. I reverted it back. She threatened to report me for vandalism. I tried talking but she was haughty and nasty. She wasn't too hard to find her elsewhere on the web; I think she had "issues;" An empty social life she countered by pretending to be someone big and important on the web. Well I gave up. I've had similar experiences. There's only one article I've managed to contribute to successfully. It was a lot of work, and at the end of the day I decided all the grief and hassle wasn't worth it. I still use Wiki, but I can't be bothered contributing. Why waste an evening to make a contribution which some tin god can turn around and revert? (I used to contribute to Bruce Schneier's blog but stopped after I found he was deleting what he saw as controversial posts without telling the authors. Was half an hour on a well thought out post only to have it disappear. Why bother? I didn't harbor ill-will against Bruce but at the same time I found I drifted away from his community too.)
For donations there are more deserving charities and I don't really know that my buck to Wikifoundation will go where it's needed or into some hanger on's dinner. But certainly the above tribalism from wikicampers turned me away from developing closer links with the so-called Wikipedia community.
So there you go: If you don't listen to people, they will still turn up to the free beer nights, but don't expect them to support your wider agenda.
But Jimmy's banner ad is awesome. Such a warm friendly face. That's a face you could trust with your newborn. Lovely work.The photographer who came up with that deserves a prize.
I don't agree with the sentiment, that everything on the internet is/should be a business. Wikipedia is a public service - it is the only real online encyclopedia that is free, and for most parts of good quality. Advertising would completely ruin this aspect; it would certainly open up for suspicion about the neutrality of the articles. As an example, how about the accuracy of articles about drugs, if the medical company that produces them is a major advertiser? The perception of neutrality is orders of magnitude more important for an encyclopedia than for a newspaper; how can one ensure that its information is trustworthy is there are financial interests that influence it?
They could disable ads on pages containing "unlicensed use of copyrighted works under fair use."
If the most popular pages have non-free content on them, then ads wouldn't help much. That would invite a bunch of infighting as to whether the most popular pages are allowed to have non-free content at all. If it were to be implemented, one would first need to make a MediaWiki extension to hide images by category, as detecting whether a page includes images in Category:All non-free media would use the same code.
They should stop holding the campaigne so close to Christmas (too many other charities to compete with, like toys for tots and the salvation army. They should also hire an experienced development officer to run the micro-lending campaigne, throw together an annual benefit or event to raise money, get a bunch of volunteers to run that and call it a day... They begging is not so much a problem, as is the manor in which he chooses to beg... No one wants to read some long sobby story about why we should donate, just put the donate now button at the top, bottom, and middle of the page with the $5, $10, $20 option, paypal or credit card...boom. Moreover, they should be mindful of the whole macro-environment and stop asking for more money every year...everyone is broke--if you rely on donations this means you are broke too. Adds are not the answer, cos then they'd have to hire someone to administer, select, run the adds, another headache that is bound to get out of control, plus it definitely would compromise the neutrality of the whole project. This article seemed too snarky, with no sense of pragmatic knowledge of the non-profit world... and also as many others alreay mentioned it was a bit elitist, sounds like someone doesn't appreciate the democratic nature of wikipedia.
I don't see how the first factor is a wash?
Fair use itself has four factors that must be considered. I read the purpose and character factor as itself having two subfactors: "whether such use [A.] is of a commercial nature or [B.] is for nonprofit educational purposes". Currently both A and B are in WMF's favor: A because the absence of paywalls and ads means that the use is not "of a commercial nature", and B because WMF pays no dividends. But if Wikipedia had ads, it would be nonprofit yet commercial; B would be in WMF's favor and A would be in the copyright owner's favor. Or does there exist case law against my interpretation?
Yep, it's partly the =absence= of qualified professionals that made Wikipedia so great.
Wales still seems to have trouble understanding this. It's like, he still wants Wikipedia to be a "proper", legitimate, "official" encyclopedia that he can be proud of when he talks about it at dinner parties, staffed by proper academics and proper encyclopedia professionals. He wants it to be a certified, corporate, properly quality-controlled enterprise. Like Microsoft, or Disney, or , uh, Fox News.
Trouble is, if you take a successful and thriving volunteer programme, and you get a chunk of money and hire a bunch of academics to "sort it out", the project dies. The guys you hire won't be as involved or as dedicated or as knowledgeable or enthusiastic or as involved as the people they replace, because if they were ... they'd already be contributing. //is// contributing, you already have for free, so ... why spend donor's money fixing what ain't broke?
Wikipedia is huge. Any academic who isn't already a serious contributor isn't worth hiring, and any academic who already
The other problem is that Wales sometimes seems to be fairly reeking disdain for the Wikipedia project. If he starts hiring-in "proper" academic editors from "outside" in an attempt to change the culture, then by rating those individuals as more important than the people who actually built and maintained Wikipedia, he'd be basically pissing in the faces of the people who made WP such a success. How do you stay motivated as a contributor, if the organisation basically declares you to be inferior to some newbie outsider who's going to get all the credit, and public glory, and superuser priveleges, and get paid for it too?
Wikipedia does have some serious issues that need sorting out, but those are arguably partly Wales' fault. For instance, he keeps complaining about the lack of serious researchers contributing to WP, and cites this as a reason why the WP project has failed, and why other encyclopedia projects are necessary.
Truth is, the reason why more experts don't contribute isn't just because of WP culture, it's because one of Wales' own favourite WP rules expressly ==prohibits== anyone from adding or editing information that relates too closely to their own original research. A lot of good technical info seems to be added to WP by people breaking this rule, and editing under aliases. If Wales wants more expert-written articles, the obvious thing to do (without spending any money!) is to relax the current rule that explicitly bans experts from writing about their own specialist fields (on the grounds that they're biased). Or maybe to accept that WP actually has a large number of articles written and edited by known experts, who are smart enough to do it anonymously, because their priority is that the article be great, and that it not be turned into a political debating forum between people with something to lose. Articles should be judged by their content, not their authors' reputation. Using named experts means that article debates become personalised.
Another problem with hiring academics who aren't already contributing is that some of them won't be prepared to put up with being edited by less qualified folks, and some of them, although they might be top-notch as experts, are likely to absolutely suck as encyclopaedists. A world-class organic chemist or mathematician or particle physicist may have no idea at all as to how to write a coherent Wikipedia article. They may not have ever used Wikipedia. They may not have used any encyclopedia at all since they were kids. They may be completely clueless about what an encyclopedia is, and what people use it for.
Wikipedia, when it's working well, it a ruthless meritocracy. Edits and articles live and die purely on perceived quality and usefulness. It doesn't matter what your qualifications might be, or how many years you spent studying a subject, or whether you won the subject's Nobel Prize last year ...
Eric Baird