Should Wikipedia Sell Advertising? 317
The Narrative Fallacy writes "The LA Times has an interesting story on the state of Wikipedia's finances and how with 300 million page views a day, the organization could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. Without advertising the foundation has a tough time raising its annual budget of $4.6 million. The 45,000 or so individuals who contribute annually give an average of $33 each, so campaigns, which are conducted online, raise only about one-third of what's needed. As Wikimedia adds features to its pages, such as videos, costs will rise. 'Without financial stability and strong planning, the foundation runs the risk of needing to take drastic steps at some point in the next couple years,' said Nathan Awrich, a Wikipedia editor who supports advertising."
Prepare yourself (Score:2, Insightful)
obviously they should sell advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
you have to pay the bills. idealism doesn't pay the bills. a "compromised" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia
there really isn't anything you can say that is more illuminating on the subject. either you can run the site financially or you can't. it really is that cut and dry
Re:obviously they should sell advertising (Score:2, Insightful)
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only if, but HOW (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well ..... (Score:5, Insightful)
And besides, if you can filter all those ads, we don't think you would have a problem filtering out child porn either, right?
Re:obviously they should sell advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
Won't people stop with the stupid advertising nonsense already? Not everything is about money!
Re:Prepare yourself (Score:2, Insightful)
So here's the deal: stop the book-burning deletionist jihad, and those who follow Howard Tayler's campaign will suddenly resume donations. And no, you can't squeeze any advertising money from the likes of me thanks to Adblock.
Unlike commercial encyclopaedias, most of us do pay in some kind: we donate our time, our work, our expertise. Without community editors, Wikipedia would be nothing. Stop throwing away the contributions and a lot more people will be inclined to toss in also some cash.
Re:Oooh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny how no one is harassing Coyboy Neil for not running Slashdot like Mother Theresa.
Just use YPN or AdSense (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep an eye on the money! (Score:5, Insightful)
But they need a mechanism -- beyond 'trust us' -- to keep an eye on the money. That much money is just too tempting, not only for plain embezzlement but also for things like loans and investments for personal or friends' businesses, unreasonable expenses, etc.
Who controls the money? To whom are they responsible? Ultimately, the responsible party is the Wikimedia Foundation Board [wikimediafoundation.org]. While I don't believe fame and talent are highly correlated, and have no doubts about the board members, it would inspire more confidence if someone was putting a broader reputation on the line for Wikipedia. I want some on the board who have something serious to lose if things go wrong, like Mitch Kapor, Joi Ito, and others on the Mozilla Foundation board [mozilla.org]. In fact, I wonder why don't have people like already. Certainly it's prominent enough to attract them.
Finally, what mechanisms do similar organizations use to manage windfalls of cash?
It's the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
Like many people have already pointed out, there are many other options.
You add advertising and it's no longer wikipedia.
So I'll fix that for you:
a "slower" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia.
Re:My sympathy is limited (Score:3, Insightful)
actually, every human endeavour IS about money (Score:5, Insightful)
why do you think you achieve some sort of higher moral ground or purpose by shunning money? all you do is hobble your own ability to properly understand how the world you live in actually functions. i'm not asking you to worship money. and money certainly leads people to do evil things. but again, money is just an abstract expression of human desires. the real evil is aspects of human nature itself, not a piece of green paper with alexander hamilton's face on it
all i'm asking you to do is grant money the proper respect it deserves for quantifying abstract human interest in such a way that it makes the world we live in a better place. yes, money is a great invention, like the wheel or the semiconductor. it makes your world a better place. bartering chickens for school books gets kind of old after awhile. thus the glorious invention of money. and no, i'm not gordon gecko. i'm just a realist. realism trumps cotton candy idealism any day. and the most sober realistic consideration of money in this world is that it makes your life better
cotton candy headed idealists can be so stupid
Re:My sympathy is limited (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that deserves an Insightful mod. I dislike that questions such as this are just accepted without reservation: That you get to choose between Wikipedia and Compromised Wikipedia. Who framed those options and what did they do to reach the conclusion that this choice is inevitable.
-A Proud Wikipedia Donator
-H.
you view its strength as its weakness (Score:3, Insightful)
random people off the street have no agenda. or rather, in a nonhierarchical structure, the overlapping agendas of random people cancel each other out to arrive at true neutrality on a subject matter. after all, you are posting anonymously and you obviously have a flawed bias
"experts" making encyclopedias in the traditional manner have a bill of goods they need to sell us. plenty of "facts" in this world are nothing more than statements of indoctrination into a given agenda. "experts" in a field of study are often champions of indoctrination, not education
true propaganda in this world never tells a single lie. it merely omitts certain unmentioned facts here and there in such a way to color people's perceptions. that's why they are called half-truths. meanwhile, a wide open encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to is the only way to illuminate those corners of propaganda that someone with an agenda doesn't want you to see
even a subconscious agenda a contributor is not aware of: their own biases they are blind to, such that they have no intent to lie to you, this is a threat to real truth
and so what you see as wikipedia's greatest weakness is in fact its greatest strength
you need to come to understand this
Re:obviously they should sell advertising (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say FUBAR Widgets decides to buy a sponsored article. On the Wikipedia article, there would then be a link that says "This company has its own self-maintained article, which you can see here." On the purchased page, then, the article would be headed with a disclaimer, perhaps "This is a sponsored page owned by the company. The contents of the page are edited by the company itself, and cannot be edited by others."
Of course, companies who abuse this for of advertising should have their pages removed without refund. The actual terms of service, though, are left for the lawyers to haggle. It all boils down to in exchange for having their corporate pages free from editor tyranny, they in return have to play nice elsewhere.
The advantage for the company is that they get to maintain their own entries in the Wiki (not really, but close enough), and the advantage for the Wiki is that it makes it easier to "sandbox" corporate shenanigans on the main entries.
I suppose even another variation is conceivable, where specific pages could be sponsored that are not directly linked to the company. At the bottom of the page, the sponsors could then be listed. "This article about roses is officially sponsored by the following companies: Foo Flowers, Bar Blossoms, Snafu Seeds"
Re:They should, begging for money is no business m (Score:5, Insightful)
NPR and PBS have also shown that this "begging for money" business model can indeed work successfully. If anything, Wikipedia should turn to them for inspiration and fundraising advice.
yes; the mirrors do (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:obviously they should sell advertising (Score:3, Insightful)
It's important to maintain that Wikipedia is not a primary source, but more of a source guide. Encyclopedias always have been. A lot of people forget that.
Mozilla Foundation isn't a business either. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, you could claim that Firefox isn't about money, but about freedom, open source and standards support. But I'm sure that money has helped them to achieve this goal and as far as I am concerned money hasn't stopped or corrupted them.
bye egghat
You can model it that way, sure (Score:5, Insightful)
You can model any human activity in terms of money, certainly. But that doesn't make that model the predictor for all classes of activity. I mean you can model every human activity in terms of garbage if you want to: every human activity produces some waste materials, if only from from the excrement of those so engaged and the waste heat of the work performed. You can say every human endeavour is about anything with a little ingenuity.
But the fact that we can analyse Wikimedia purely in terms of money is not an argument for them using ads to finance their operation, any more than being able to conduct the analysis based on refuse constitutes an argument for them buying a fleet of garbage trucks.
Don't confuse the map with the territory, dude.
Re:Go Distributed (Score:3, Insightful)
Go for Google ads, I say! Just one block across the top, where their donation banner usually sits. I see no harm in it.
Should cancer patients take cynaide pills? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikipedia has definitely peaked. The community has become closed off into cliques and the content has become entrenched to the extent new contributers are actively chased off if they suggest any challenge to the status quo. Selling advertising would crush what is left of the community spirit of the project.
Its a shame, because fundamentally Wikipedia is an OK idea. What is needed is a viable, popular fork. I suppose this is as good as anything for speeding that up.
Re:Oooh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prepare yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
2) You may repay by editing, but unless you define "us" in "most of us" as people who edit wikipedia than most do not. I will go as far as saying that I live with 2 people who have found errors in wikipedia and not fixed them (one that I remember was the date of a French author's birth, that burned 1/4 of the people in the class (the rest used the text book), and still didn't get fixed.
I would personally think the best way for wikipedia to remain neutral is for it to take advertising from something such as adsense, clearly marking it as advertising. If I go to look up info on a a game, and I get a clearly marked add to buy it, no one loses. Wikipedia would only need to protect itself from the influence of one company, and it should be easier than policing the thousands of donations they get now that may or may not be influencing them.
Re:obviously they should sell advertising (Score:2, Insightful)