The Debate Over Advertising on Wikipedia 262
An anonymous reader writes "Some Wikipedians have objected to Virgin Unite's participation in the Wikimedia Foundation's fund drive, calling it adverising. But there's a strong case that Wikipedia should run advertising. The funds raised could support dozens of Firefox-scale free knowledge and free software projects, outspending all but the wealthiest foundations."
Sure, why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
public broadcasting (Score:5, Insightful)
"And if you call in with your pledge of support right now, your money will be matched, dollar for dollar, by the generous contribution of ACME Inc. You will also receive a cuddly ACME logoed teddy bear and an assortment of ACME tea bags. Public broadcasting needs you to pick up that phone, and call in, to keep the airwaves free of the usual commercial breaks that other stations need to use to fund the valuable programming you hear."
Too many editors? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it have to be all or nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising profanes (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising inherently trivialises its surroundings.
If the Wiki is bare, it stands alone as a mass of knowledge.
If it is adorned by adverts for books and DVDs and so on, it becomes profane; it loses its sanctity.
People I think see these words and dismiss them, I suspect because of their somewhat religious association; but they represent human feelings and impressions of the world around them. They represent real states of mind and impressions.
Sounds good (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats the thing with wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
Thats the thing with Wikipedia, no matter what you do, some Wikipedians are going to disagree with it.
Against ads on wp. Here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
- Ads ad new privacy-problems (somebody else tracks what you have visited)
- Ads fight for your eyeballs. Beeing a distraction-free zone is a big plus for wikipedia, because it made it so enjoyable for the authors.
- Some ads try to dupe people into thinking they are seeing error-messages etc. Others blink and distract. Many many ads try to manipulate you. We should not give in to this.
- Hosting costs have come down a lot. The project can very much sustain itself by just relying on fund drives.
Just my opinion on it.
Re:Advertising profanes (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, all of this might sound a bit religious, but forget not that religion has had a firm basis in philosophy. Many of the monk scriptures were not rooted in religious affairs at all, but contained basics of knowledge. What we should do now is built up a new fort of knowledge and let that knowledge value itself (instead of revenue dollars from ads).
All Jimbo's horses and all Jimbo's men... (Score:5, Insightful)
In Wikipedia's early days there was a good deal of discussion about this very point, with some conspiracy-minded contributors fearing that Jimbo Wales would talk freedom, neutrality, and noncommercialism at the start and change the rules later in the game.
There are a number of precedents for this sort of bad-faith maneuver, one of the most notorious being CDDB, which happily accepted contributions of CD track names from thousands of volunteers who believed they were contributing to an open-source project; sneakily changed their software so that it add "stealth" copyright notices giving the rights to the information to the organization; then took it private and sold people's generous volunteer work and lined their own pockets with the money.
One of Wikipedia's cornerstones is the "neutral point of view" policy. This policy is a fragile and precious thing. Innumerable people are constantly leaning on it and chipping away at it in an effort to use Wikipedia for promotion. The only reason why NPOV works is that the core of Wikipedians truly accept that WIkipedia really is neutral, and are willing to enforce the policy.
If Wikipedia ever accepts paid advertising, I believe it will destabilize the fragile balance. Advertisements will most likely be targeted to appear on the same pages as relevant article. Many WIkipedia articles about commercial products contain substantial amounts of both praise and criticism. In its nature, this material is frequently in a somewhat dynamic state of flux, with competing editors wordsmithing things back and forth; at its best, a stable state is reached in which the editors on one side of an issue grudgingly acknowledge that the wording of the material on the other side is acceptable to them.
What happens when an advertiser notices that the related article contains material that has a different spin from its marketing communications? I think the delicate house of cards comes tumbling down, that's what. I don't see how anyone can ever build a "Chinese wall" between advertising and editorial when any advertiser can be an editor.
And once it becomes generally accepted that Wikipedia is no longer neutral, WIkipedia is dead. That will unleash a flood of self-promoting crap which old-time WIkipedians will be unable to hold back.
It will also piss off everyone who, like me, has made voluntary monetary contributions to Wikimedia almost every time they've launched one of their frequent pledge drives, in the belief, which will have been shown to be naïve, that Wikipedia was promised to be noncommercial.
Wikipedia can survive a reputation for occasional inaccuracy and for "fancruft." But if it is ever seen that Wikipedia articles are a practical avenue for promotion and advertising, or that they reflect the interests of advertisors, all Jimbo's horses and all Jimbo's men will never be able to put WIkipedia together again.
And all the old-time Wikipedians will say "We told you this was going to happen." And they'll be right.
Re:Adblock (Score:3, Insightful)
So why dont you just set a good example by stopping to use it?
Re:End justifies the means (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying this will happen, but will Wikipedia cave to the presure of sponsors wanting to keep harmful information from Wikipedia?
For instance; if Microsoft became a sponsor, would the articles about XBox hacking remain intact? I'm sure the media companies wouldn't like advertising on a site that happily explains DeCSS, and just wait until hacks for Blu-ray and HD-DVD are being documented. And the numerous scandals involving companies that still exist today; would they like those articles? Not to mention politicians, who have already proven not to be trusted when it comes to Wikipedia content.
I'm not saying this will happen, nor that it cannot be defended against. Just to define what "means" may be in this case.
Re:Advertising profanes (Score:3, Insightful)
While I wouldn't put wikipedia in some kind of holy light, if wikipedia decides to take in advertising it soon enters the realm of the the dollar being mightier than the knowledge it is designed to support.
What I'm really afraid of is when advertising dollars begin to dictate the direction of wikipedia. And that is very very very very not cool.
Re:Advertising profanes (Score:3, Insightful)
The real world includes things like money, advertising and probably many other things you may consider to be corrupting or evil but it is often because of and not in spite of these facets of society that progress and learning advance.
In this case Wikipedia has the opportunity to raise very large amounts of money in a manner which need not interfere at all with their current operation, this money can be used for starting similar operations or even to fund real hard science. Whatever it is used for it will represent money being spent on useful projects that would not otherwise take place or have money spent on them.
Re:Advertising No Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
From another point of view, I assume I spend maybe 100 hours per year working on Wikipedia. Even at my salary level (as opposed to my consulting rate), paying for this would be quite a chunk of money. Multiply it by 3 million of editors, and the "huge" advertising revenue suddenly is not that huge anymore. Even losing a small fraction of good editors over advertising would be a net loss.
Non-issue (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds good (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if I was browsing an article for something I was interested in (say, a literary topic), I'd much rather hit up Amazon or whoever my trusted bookseller is, than click a random ad.
Re:Sure, why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
For me the three main ways I find information on the web are: Google, Wikipedia, and various digital libraries (in that order). Allowing Google to pry on the two first in concert would make the existing risks of Google regarding privacy considerably worse.
A plague of spammers shall descend on ye (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:End justifies the means (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:End justifies the means (Score:5, Insightful)
Since then, very often when I pick up a magazine and read a glowing review of a product, I'll look further in the magazine for an advertisement from the company who sells it. Most often I'll find, at minimum, full page ads and often several of them. In fact, you'll probably notice that horrible reviews are rare in magazines. If you look even harder, you'll notice that the company involved almost never has an advertisement in the same issue.
But wait, you say, isn't Wikipedia is edited by the readership? Certainly they won't be influenced by the ads? Sadly, this is not true. The reason this is not true is that advertisers are readers as well. If they were putting money into the publication, they'd read that publication on a much more regular basis and they'd have a much larger motivation to influence the articles published. Since it's so easy to have direct influence over Wikipedia, I would find it hard to believe that advertisers would sit on their hands if they saw an opportunity to make their company or products look better.
TW
Re:They already are unreliable (Score:3, Insightful)
There have ALWAYS been edit wars back-and-forth over every religion, and at some points in time there are "favorable" edit waves and sometimes "hostile" edit waves for certain sets of articles. It's a process, not a destination. I doubt that it had anything to do with any one group donating, though that group may have decided to look into Wikipedia's content becuase they were now involved, and may have brought a wave of positive edits to certain pages for a period of time. That's certainly happened before.
This is not the problem you think it is. It happens whenever Wikipedia is the subject of a current event. Some people can't divorce their Wikipedia POV from their edits, and Wikipedia becomes the focus of too much article text. That almost always gets reverted quickly, and over time, the text becomes much more NPOV and much more in-line with policy.
Please link to specific edit diffs, and cite examples.
Wikipedia is both crap and the best reference work ever produced by human effort. There is simply nothing as comprehensive, and yet it will take decades for Wikipedia to reach a level of quality across most important topics that matches their aspirations. Then again, I've seen countless formerly featured articles stripped of that status as the bar has been raised in terms of sources and quality of writing, and the ones that do make it through are far, far better than ever before. So, I do think there's strong hope for a Wikipedia that's not only more comprehensive than anything else, but overall higher quality, but WP is brand new, when compared with every other major reference work. It will be a long time before it improves.
As for advertising, I think the biggest danger is not in specific, focused changes, but in an overall reluctance on the part of independant editors to "rock the boat" when dealing with a contributor... we'll see, but that's the biggest fear that I have.
what next? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ads are a degenerate form of human discourse in my opinion.
Would Wikipedia have reached the heights it has if they had advertised from day one? I tend to doubt it. So adding ads now is bait-and-switch. Bad news.
As for putting my money where my mouth is, I have been donating to Wikipedia since they've accepted donations.
I would love it if ad-based services like Google were opt-out. I would happily pay to get rid of the ads. I'd even pay what Google makes on them on average, even though they make far less (like zero) from me.
-Carl
Re:End justifies the means (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Advertising profanes (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the insults? Well, I thought it was funny-- especially the Starbucks line-- and frankly, that's good enough for me.
Re:End justifies the means (Score:3, Insightful)
>>I'm not saying this will happen, but will Wikipedia cave to the presure of sponsors wanting to keep harmful information from Wikipedia?
Remember that "the Wikipedia" is really a collection of various weirdos who like to spend their free time writing encyclopedia articles for free. That and ideologues of every possible kind. Imagine Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Joe Stalin, Karl Marx, John Lennon, and Gandhi collaborating on an article on Communism, and you might get some idea of what some of the rougher parts of the Wikipedia are like. Getting the Wikipedians to toe any corporate line would be next to impossible. It's hard enough to keep them from killing each other! I'm more worried about corporate e-goons laying down astroturf then I am about Wikipedians being influenced by corporate sponsors. Sponsors trying to lean on the 'pedia would probably cause a backlash that would leave their article more anti- than it was to begin with. Astroturfers are a bit more stealthy.
I'd also be more worried that users would interpret ads as Wikipedia's endorsement of the product. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see what Google Ads decides to put on various article pages, and anybody who has flawed critical thinking skills probably shouldn't be using the Wikipedia as a source anyway. I think I'd be in favor of advertising, provided that the ads are unobtrusive and that the community has input on what the funds go for. In order to keep it unobtrusive, I'd suggest loading the adds last for the sake of people with slow connections and giving logged-in contributors the ability to switch off the adds.
Re:Advertising profanes (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Advertising No Problem (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a flaw in your reasoning: you assume that because you can charge a certain amount of money for doing something, you could charge the same amount for doing anything, which seems unlikely. If you are an educated, experienced software developer, for instance, opposed to an encyclopedist, chances are, noone would be willing to pay you as much for writing Wikipedia articles as your clients do for your programming (or whatever).
Thus, if you were only in it for the money, you wouldn't be writing Wikipedia articles—you would work longer hours doing what you normally do instead, making more money and working more (economically) efficiently.
That means, to calculate the economic value of your and others' contributions to Wikipedia, you can't just multiply the numer of hours spent updating Wikipedia with the hourly wage that the contributors would make performing their usual work. Rather, you would have to compute how much it would cost to recreate Wikipedia using paid contributors, which is surely vastly lower.
Whether the result of such a computation would justify placing ads on Wikipedia is another issue altogether, of course.
Re:Sure, why not? (Score:1, Insightful)
If Wikipedia wants to be a free encyclopedia, it should be. Making money off of other peoples' time is unethical unless they are being fairly compensated.