Should Wikipedia Sell Advertising?

The Narrative Fallacy writes "The LA Times has an interesting story on the state of Wikipedia's finances and how with 300 million page views a day, the organization could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. Without advertising the foundation has a tough time raising its annual budget of $4.6 million. The 45,000 or so individuals who contribute annually give an average of $33 each, so campaigns, which are conducted online, raise only about one-third of what's needed. As Wikimedia adds features to its pages, such as videos, costs will rise. 'Without financial stability and strong planning, the foundation runs the risk of needing to take drastic steps at some point in the next couple years,' said Nathan Awrich, a Wikipedia editor who supports advertising."

obviously they should sell advertising

it ruins the impartiality, it ruins the experience, it compromises the purpose, blah, blah, blah, zzz...

you have to pay the bills. idealism doesn't pay the bills. a "compromised" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia

there really isn't anything you can say that is more illuminating on the subject. either you can run the site financially or you can't. it really is that cut and dry

Re:obviously they should sell advertising

Bullshit.

They can adopt distributed updates and such and ask universities to help with the bandwidth costs. Instead I guess they want to keep all the chips in hand so that they could one day turn into a billion dollar company.

Wikipedia is run by submitters and editors. If people feel that updating and maintaining wikipedia gives their habits away to advertisers, then it will also kill wikipedia. There will be startups that will focus on just music or movies or just on mathematics and provide a better experience per the negatives of advertising. Most people end up in Wikipedia through google searches and it won't take long for the wikipedia articles to go stale while the contributors move somewhere else.

Plus, those bandwidth heavy images, videos and sounds isn't updated frequently and can be asked to be cached in distributed storage across the internet in universities. Since article updates propagation might be hard in distributed file systems, at least the media should be straightforward.

There is a lot of stuff that can be done.

Re:obviously they should sell advertising

you have to pay the bills. idealism doesn't pay the bills.

Look. Our little liberal is growing up and becoming a conservative....

It's the opposite

a "compromised" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia

One of the important things that make wikpedia is that there is no advertising.
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:It's the opposite

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.

Why don't we do their advertising?

Scenario: "I'm young, I'm idealistic. I haven't got a credit card, I haven't got paypal, but I do have a website with at least some few visitors. And I really like Wikipedia."

Think this is uncommon? I certainly don't.
So. How do we "monetize" this resource? Let them run ads generating income for Wikipedia.
Someone(tm) in Wikipedia, or some trustworthy foundation, should set up an account somewhere, and then volunteers will make a few widgets to easily add ads to your site, a Wordpress plugin, banner rotation so you can donate a certain percentage of page impressions... I'm sure more things will come up.

actually, every human endeavour IS about money

money is really just an abstract expression of human interest and value. pick the most idealistic human endeavour you can think of. it has value to other human beings. therefore, it is monetized. sure, it needn't be expressed in actual dollars, but a conversion to that occurs at some point for anyone who interacts with that human endeavour. the church? marriage and love? science? they all involve cash transations at some point

why do you think you achieve some sort of higher moral ground or purpose by shunning money? all you do is hobble your own ability to properly understand how the world you live in actually functions. i'm not asking you to worship money. and money certainly leads people to do evil things. but again, money is just an abstract expression of human desires. the real evil is aspects of human nature itself, not a piece of green paper with alexander hamilton's face on it

all i'm asking you to do is grant money the proper respect it deserves for quantifying abstract human interest in such a way that it makes the world we live in a better place. yes, money is a great invention, like the wheel or the semiconductor. it makes your world a better place. bartering chickens for school books gets kind of old after awhile. thus the glorious invention of money. and no, i'm not gordon gecko. i'm just a realist. realism trumps cotton candy idealism any day. and the most sober realistic consideration of money in this world is that it makes your life better

cotton candy headed idealists can be so stupid

You can model it that way, sure

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.

Let's do something special again...

WikipediAds, the advertisements anyone can edit! Who better to make the ads than the customers?

My sympathy is limited

Since, according TFA, they just moved offices from FL to San Francisco, and are renting 3000 square feet there. That cannot be cheap. If you're a strapped non-profit, why on earth would you go to one of the most expensive places in the country to run your internet-based business?

Re:My sympathy is limited

Actually, as I currently live in FL and am looking to the west coast for relocating, guess what, it actually *is* cheaper to live in the San Francisco area than in Florida. While the initial rent is a bit higher (about 3-5%) the taxes to operate are far lower, and the infastructure cost to the individual business is dramatically less.

They should, begging for money is no business mode

OK, a broken business model that based on begging for money every 6 months or so.

Go for advertising. Buy out books to the public domain, give back some money to wikepedia authors (e.g. give money to proven authors for writing additional articles), ... Gazillions good ideas come to mind. Buy out books to the public domain.

But no money means no money for good ideas. And Wikipedia will stay vulnerable to attacks from someone with money (think Google Knol).

Yes yes, money changes people. Articles may get flawed to get more money. If you think, Wikipedia must stay independent, make it independent. Create a Wikipedia-Ad-foundation, that tries to get as much money as possible, but give them absolutly no control over Wikipedia-The-Content-Organisation. Both orgs should be absolutly independent.

And so you'd have a lot of money *and* complete seperation of concerns.

And there are *so* many unbelievably good ways to spend money.

Re:They should, begging for money is no business m

Wikipedia's not a "business" by any stretch of the imagination.

NPR and PBS have also shown that this "begging for money" business model can indeed work successfully. If anything, Wikipedia should turn to them for inspiration and fundraising advice.

Links to commercial content.

Not banners.

Something that adds to the value of the site would be good - paid-for "related" links to commercial sites.

Data recovery - link to services. Bridge construction - links to firms building these. Encryption - encryption software. Every single pharmaceutical - online pharmacy. Every single book or movie - amazon.com or other such. So if you're willing to pay for what you've just learned about, you know where to go to buy it or have it done, or learn more about it.

What about sponsers?

What wikipedia should do is try to hit up the private sector for some rich sponsors looking to make donations to a tax-free charity.

Maybe a single link on the front page to link to the top 1000 donations of all time and top 1000 donations in the last 12 months will be a nice compromise.

Keep an eye on the money!

Given the independence of the editors (the volunteers) from the publishers (Wikimedia Foundation Inc.), I'm not too concerned about the content. Of course that independence only lasts until Wikimedia insists on seats on the Arbitration Committee or other editorial authority.

But they need a mechanism -- beyond 'trust us' -- to keep an eye on the money. That much money is just too tempting, not only for plain embezzlement but also for things like loans and investments for personal or friends' businesses, unreasonable expenses, etc.

Who controls the money? To whom are they responsible? Ultimately, the responsible party is the Wikimedia Foundation Board [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?

Redesign ...

The idea of Wikipedia - a freely available online encyclopedia that anyone can edit - I believe is better if it is impartial and independent. It becomes encumbered, compromised, by advertising incentives. There is added value in advertisement free - vis-à-vis Consumer Reports.

The question is: Why is Wikipedia so expensive to maintain? If it is bandwidth and servers, is the HTTP client/server model the answer? Is there an efficient model to share Wikipedia entries peer to peer? Or perhaps share costs between Universities or other institutions that act in the public interest?

Additionally, if Wikipedia does go to a peer to peer model, can it integrate projects like FreeNet to ensure that the information remains free and accessible.

If you think the complaints about edits, arbitrariness, capriciousness and bias with Wikipedia are bad now, wait until it commercializes. In my (limited) experience, this will change the paradigm of its management. Wikipedia will cease to be a gift to humanity. It will be owned.

Re:Well .....

> I even plan to start reselling ADSL with a transparent proxy configured my own special way, so other people can also enjoy the same
> advertisement-free Internet experience (and I can make a few quid as a secondary consideration).

I take it you won't be advertising your service?

Re:Well .....

One of these days, I even plan to start reselling ADSL with a transparent proxy configured my own special way, so other people can also enjoy the same advertisement-free Internet experience (and I can make a few quid as a secondary consideration).

Sure, as long as you don't call it the Internet. What makes the Internet so special is that the providers (the good ones, anyway) censor/filter NOTHING, and the filtering is left up to the end-user. IMHO, the second you begin denying your customers specific content/services (be it ads or BitTorrent), I no longer consider you a proper ISP, and neither should the law.

And besides, if you can filter all those ads, we don't think you would have a problem filtering out child porn either, right?

I've got a better idea

Allow advertising that anyone can edit.

Re:I've got a better idea

With moderation. That way a company can proclaim its product, past consumers can point out its flaws, and administrators can arbitrate disputes of false advertising and libel.

While I had the same joke come to mind, I think the idea has serious merit.

Re:Prepare yourself

The cake (or pie chart) is here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Planned_Spending_Distribution_2007-2008 [wikimediafoundation.org]

Not sure what happened to the 2006 one.

Re:Oooh.

All this criticism of Jimmy Wales seems a bit silly. The guy could easily have created Wikipedia as a for-profit enterprise. It would be no different as a website or a resource, and he could be profiting immensely from it. As for me, text-based ads a la Google don't bother me much. I'm much more irked by the flashy banner ad crap like what's at the top of this slashdot page than a few text links down the right hand margin.

Funny how no one is harassing Coyboy Neil for not running Slashdot like Mother Theresa.

Re:Oooh.

All this criticism of Jimmy Wales seems a bit silly.

It's beyond silly. IMHO, Jimbo should be one of the three men in the world, at this point. If wealth is our measure of reward for your value to the community, then surely the man who made it possible to preserve our shared knowledge should be rewarded duly. I feel the same way about anyone who improved the state of our world. If his worst crime is to try (not succeed, mind you, but try) to get reimbursed for an obscenely expensive meal, then he's doing better than most politicians who have done far, far, FAR less for improving our lot.

Re:Oooh.

The guy could easily have created Wikipedia as a for-profit enterprise.

Hindsight's 20/20. If he had created it as a for-profit enterprise then would there have been nearly the same participation levels? It wouldn't be in the position it is today if it were created for-profit and we wouldn't be having this discussion.