I feel like I’m living the first line of my obituary.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=L11_1123_combo10B_PFP/en/US

by k3dz • 15 years ago

130 69 15 years ago

CharlieA• 15 years ago

"We don’t run ads because doing so would sacrifice our independence. The site is not and should never be a propaganda tool."

I really don't understand wikipedia's continued hesitation to accept advertising--nor the argument that it would sacrifice their independence--anyone can edit it already, so I question whether sponsorship needs to have any impact on article content whatsoever.

What's the problem with having a banner at the top saying "Wikipedia is brought to you today by McDonalds..." just something small, as a way of saying that they care about free access to knowledge too.

jlarocco2• 15 years ago

I mostly agree.

On the other hand, I would block any ad they posted, so I'm not sure how much my opinion should count.

protomyth• 15 years ago

Honest question, how would you have them get paid for your use of their service?

sixtofour• 15 years ago

The problem is perception. With ads, there is the possibility of influence, so there is also the possibility that readers would trust wikipedia less.

Although I would prefer that they take ads rather than disappear.

jpdoctor2• 15 years ago

> I really don't understand wikipedia's continued hesitation to accept advertising

Try to think of an example where editorial maintained independence from the sales department.

My favorite example from dead-tree newspapers: For all the noise they make about the sacredness of editorial, I don't think it was a coincidence that the number of articles about the bubble in real estate were inversely proportional to RE advertising dollars.

gujk• 15 years ago

Do you have any research about this inverse proportion? The bubble was in the news the whole time. People just didn't care. http://seattlebubble.com is entirely funded by real estate advertising.

devs10105• 15 years ago

so, this is just hypothetical, but lets say McDonald's ends up having some major scandal (say, like Enron, but not so bad that they go out of business), this scandal ends up being well known and there's a Wikipedia article written about it, as there is for the Enron scandal (Google "Enron Scandal wiki" to check for yourself). So, don't you think maybe McDonald's would put a little pressure on Wikipedia to censor or remove this page? I think its naive to think not, and the result would be censorship and suppression of information that would be available if Wikipedia was standing on its own and not propped up by this specific company in question.

gojomo4• 15 years ago

I don't think the presence of advertising makes Wikipedia any more subject to the influence of commercial institutions.

How exactly do you 'put a little pressure on Wikipedia' as an advertiser? It's a hive of independent contributors who, overwhelmingly, draw no money from the Foundation. Very few care at all about advertiser-friendliness.

Any communication to any particular editor suggesting warmer-treatment-for-money risks a big backlash, and provides little assurance of warmer coverage.

On the other hand, even without advertising, big interests can and do try to massage their Wikipedia entries indirectly. If they have a legal case against content, they can and do threaten legal action – again, no advertising link required.

There may be good reasons for excluding advertising. Since an important core of contributors hate the idea advertising, simply keeping them happy may be a good enough reason, and as long as annual donation drives generate plenty of money, why not?

But I don't see where advertising would add new motivations or mechanisms for commercial entities to meddle in article content, especially if proper care were taken to separate and automate ad functions.

mseebach• 15 years ago

Let's say I donate money to Wikipedia, and then I end up having some major scandal that has a Wikipedia article written about it. So, I put some pressure on Wikipedia to censor or remove that page. Why is everyone so sure that Wikipedia is so much better equipped for resisting pressure from individuals than from businesses - especially considering that individuals are much better suited for crafting personal relations than a corporation would be, and the damage to a person is much easier to empathise with than damage to a corporation.

Wikipedias force in this regard is that their operating budget is small potatoes: they can easily afford to shun any one donor - commercial or personal.

duopixel• 15 years ago

Advertising not only influences content, it influences the perception of content. If you see a "Wikipedia is brought to you today by McDonalds..." banner and then read the entry on McDonalds, a presumably intelligent reader without extensive knowledge of the inner workings of Wikipedia might wonder if there's some kind of editorial influence on the content.

jonhendry2• 15 years ago

They could probably get a small income by taking personal message ads, for example, a small blurb in honor of someone's late father or congratulating a friend on the birth of a child.

Charge, say, $50 or $100 to reduce nuisance ads and pranks. Careful design of a form for purchasing these ads, rather than using freeform text, would help cut down on the potential for controversy over content.

These would be non-commercial, so that wouldn't be an issue. They'd be small, so any one ad buyer would be unlikely to wield much influence. Most ads would have little or nothing to do with any content in Wikipedia, so skewing of related pages shouldn't be an issue.

FaceKicker• 15 years ago

I don't really understand this idea. If you want a reasonable probability of your friend/family stumbling upon your ad, you'd have to be running it for probably about 10% of pageviews. In which case you'd only be running 10 at a time, charging $50 or $100 per...what? Week? That would be < $52,000 per year of income (compare to their 2011-2012 total budget of $28.3 million). Doesn't even seem worth it for that insignificant of a revenue stream.

6ren• 15 years ago

Chomsky argued that media cannot help but be influenced by the source of their bread and butter. He who pays the piper calls the tune. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

Note that Brandon used the term propaganda. Certainly, Wikipedia would be extremely effective as a propaganda tool.

namdnay2• 15 years ago

The Foundation thought about this, and even did it during the fundraising drives (see http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Fundraising...). The most (in)famous example was Virgin Unite.

chaddeshon2• 15 years ago

There are several great organizations that have no way to make money, so they rely on donations. Wikipedia isn't in that situation. They could sell ads that were clearly marked as such. A simple small text ad on each page would give them more money than they would ever need.

They're costs seem to be low enough and the value of ad space is high enough that they wouldn't have to put up with anyone trying to extort them or take away there independence.

If they are worried that the surplus of money would corrupt their organization, then they can give the surplus away or just limit the number of ads they sell (but maybe hire a couple more devs first).

That is why I will not donate.

tingletech3• 15 years ago

Wikipedia has enough problems with spam etc. now. I can't imagine how the dynamic would be altered if ad sales folks figured out some angle to game things.

Are you suggesting that they should do inside sales (with some sort of chinese wall); or use an ad sale agency? Would I be able to bid on specific wikipedia pages and keywords, or would it be random pages? What if I put a deceptive add on a page that was sensitive politically, in an attempt to bait people with an interest in a certain topic into some sort of targeted phising or malware attack?

I'm not familiar with web ad sales at all, is there a general rule of thumb for commoditization of traffic? Function(Unique visitors, page views, ??? ) = $x

prophetjohn• 15 years ago

I don't get the reluctance to use advertising. Wikipedia could place one small, unobtrusive text ad on each page and they would have more than enough money to operate their business and pay their employees what they deserve. If there's money left over, they could offer scholarships or make charitable donations. I don't think that placing small ads on a page in an effort to keep information free and prosperous amounts to propaganda or a loss of independence.

chaddeshon2• 15 years ago

As if you need to buy ad space to put propaganda on Wikipedia.

ypcx• 15 years ago

Those who know, they don't need to be told. Those who don't, they will probably fight / downvote you because they think that if something has so much positive, then how it could contain any negative? That's ok, our brains are hardwired to simplify things. There have been numerous studies, and numerous discussions e.g. on Slashdot, on this topic, and the truth about the bad about Wikipedia is truly horrific. But I'm an optimist, I believe they/we will deal with that at some point.

Volpe• 15 years ago

Well, a little bit of self-glorification is okay...

But seriously, is it wikipedia that's giving people access to knowledge or is it google (and other search engines)?

Without google, I'd guess wikipedia would get a fraction of the traffic it gets now. There is no use building a massive repository of knowledge if no one can navigate it easily.

kalleboo• 15 years ago

There's no use building a content indexer if there's no content to index.

tikhonj• 15 years ago

I think you have it backwards--Wikipedia actually faces (in a sense) competition from Google. With Google, I can get my information from millions of disparate sites, each specializing in some niche--if I'm looking to buy a car, I might visit ten or twenty car club websites, for example.

Without Google, there would be no good way to find all of the little, disparate sites. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is an organized, uniform collection of information; finding the right article there is much easier than finding an appropriate fan site or the like.

Google's mission is to "organize the world's information". Wikipedia's mission could just as easily be phrased as "organize the world's notable information"--there is a gigantic overlap between the two.

calydon• 15 years ago

Wikipedia needs to stop begging and find a viable business model. It may not be easy, but it should be possible.

irony: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_begging

tingletech3• 15 years ago

They have the same viable business model as public television and other charities. That reminds me, I need to donate all the charitable contributions that I've budgeted for the year soon, public television is the only one of contributions I've remembered to make this year.

markmccraw• 15 years ago

Given that it costs less than $20 million to run Wikipedia (cite: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/ac/FINAL_...), that seems completely attainable without needing to change the nature of Wikipedia by introducing advertising.

A lone rich donor could cover the budget for an entire year, and many people who could afford that wouldn't even be mentioned in Wikipedia, so there would be little opportunity for any conflict of interest. Even if someone high profile donated a large sum that would only be one profile to monitor for any potential bias.

Here's why I think ads would be a terrible idea:

_________

ADVERTISING

Pros:

More Money

Cons:

Integrity possibly compromised

Contributors might leave

Readers might trust Wikipedia less

-----------------

DONORS

Pros:

Maintains editorial independence

Maintains trust of readers and contributors

Cons:

Harder to raise money

__________

Ads are a lazy solution. I can't think of a single benefit to Wikipedia or its users other than "it would be so easy to meet the budget."

jwallaceparker2• 15 years ago

> A lone rich donor could cover the budget for an entire year, and many people who could afford that wouldn't even be mentioned in Wikipedia, so there would be little opportunity for any conflict of interest.

Isn't the risk of influence higher if a "lone rich donor" funds Wikipedia rather than hundreds of advertisers?

roel_v2• 15 years ago

Back when I was a young lad, there used to be these things that had sort of the same issues. They were a stack of 'paper' (pressed wood pulp) sheets that content was 'printed' on (a black substance called 'ink' was sprayed on them). People used to write for them during the day, they were produced ('printed') at night and teenagers would deliver them in the morning so that people back then could still read news reasonably fast after it had happened.

Anyway, they had the same issues about ads and editorial independence, yet somehow they seemed to be able to continue to be trusted despite having ads. And get this, even though they had ads, you still had to pay for them, too! Those were some strange days...

obtu• 15 years ago

Today's news is almost entirely ad-funded, with a lot of the story work done ahead of time by PR agencies. It's not a shining example of editorial independence.

twelvechairs2• 15 years ago

Has anyone actually read what they spend their money on? Just about 10% on 'travel expenses' and 'awards and grants' together.... Also (overlapping the previous - but only by $63,000) almost 10% goes to fund-raising activities.... Seems to me (from a distance) that there is plenty of bloat here and these are not things that the average wikipedia user cares about....

And thats not mentioning the over 7 million (40%) on salaries and wages..... I'm not sure you can describe this as a 'small non-profit'....

Sorry if that all sounds cynical - but this is a not-for-profit institution here... I think that they have a duty to provide an efficient (value for money) service, which I am concerned is not being done....

mousa2• 15 years ago

Those numbers really aren't bad at all. Obviously wages are going to a main expense of a nonprofit that's a giant website.

marquis• 15 years ago

The moment ads are permitted on Wikipedia, advertiser conflict begins. We see this all the time on news sites: unintentionally offensive correlated-ads on content that should be free-standing. I believe the Wikipedia Foundation would agree with this and advertising will not become an option.

_ea1k• 15 years ago

Fortunately, they don't accept advertisements from corporations, and are thus uncorrupted by the donations from said corporations.

namdnay2• 15 years ago

In fact, there was a dodgy moment a few years ago when Wikipedia pages would display an advert for Virgin Unite. The argument was that since it's a charity, it doesn't count as advertising, but for me there's a big difference between the charitable arm of a corporation and a "true" charity. The main one being that Unite is obviously at least partly an attempt to improve the Virgin brand. He didn't call it The Branson Foundation or just Unite.

devs10105• 15 years ago

Interesting dilemma I suppose, I think what they are worried about is the slippery slope, Wikipedia is used to this frugal operation where theoretically they have minimal pressure and influence as far as what is published on their site. As others have pointed out, they could easily run ads on just a small number of pages and start raking in cash. They could even limit themselves to "good" or "neutral" ads, those that meet certain guidelines (no ads from questionable companies / for questionable products, etc) but then what happens? They get used to having this cash flow, they hire more people, get nicer offices and then there could be pressure to start bringing in more money, lowering the standard of ads. I think its more a testament to the beliefs of the people who run Wikipedia as to the power of human greed and corruption as they seem to feel that an infusion of excess cash could put Wikipedia on a negative path.

RockyMcNuts2• 15 years ago

Not sure which would be less annoying - a few Adsense links clearly marked and off on the side, or the ginormous banner and somewhat overwrought copy.

skrebbel• 15 years ago

I don't think "annoying" is one of the reasons why they don't do ads.

RockyMcNuts2• 15 years ago

hopefully 'helpful to users' enters into the optimization function somewhere. if not, why are users expected to donate?

twelvechairs2• 15 years ago

People seem to forget that wikipedia already has ads - giant ads showing what Jimmy Wales' stylist has managed to conjure up this year, and more importantly very partisan text (note for instance Jimmy Wales assertion as wikipedia 'founder' where his wikipedia page lists him as 'co-founder'....)

pflanze• 15 years ago

The idea behind Wikipedia is to be made by users. With our time, and our money. It's good to know that it doesn't just run with content from other users like me (and mine), but also their money (and mine).

aresant• 15 years ago

Brilliant headline.

But man, I would love to help Wikipedia optimize their campaign.

I know they work on CRO internally but on this page, for instance, I see 30%+ sitting on the table with:

a) Fix the headline - Wikimedia's headline is "From Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris". The OP in this thread fixed by taking the very compelling first line "I feel like I’m living the first line of my obituary." Still needs an action for scanners (80% of your readers).

b) Call to Action Needs to be More Obvious - The call to action doesn't appear as a link in the copy, users will miss the box on top right. Eye @ end of article flows to the "give monthly" link. The box at the top right falls into the deadzone of visual attention. An arrow would be cheesy, but effective, as would hyperlinks in the text w/strong call to action text.

c) Edit the Copy & Formatting - The copy concept is outstanding. The formatting and paragraph structure needs to be edited down. The old "If I'd had more time i would have written you a shorter letter" - eg word economy. Could be as powerful or more-so with moderate editing. Needs sub-headlines, just something like "How can you help?" lets scanners quickly read the headline, first paragraph and jump right into donate mode.

d) Humanize Brandon - Get a picture of Brandon on there for goodness sakes. Humanizing the page with an actual image almost always works.

e) Fix Your CC Page - The click through to the donate page is bizarrely formatted with the form on the far right. Why introduce more ad-copy when somebody has indicated they want to donate? Reduce friction, don't introduce more. Better yet partner w/Amazon or somebody to process donations that's trusted and makes payments absurdly easy (PayPal doesn't count)

f) Leverage the Exit Action - I get that Wikipedia is a foundation but hit some of the basic fun commerce drivers like a little javascript exit pop like "Want to help but don't have the cash? Donate 60 seconds instead." and drive to a simple FB / Twitter screen to have people push to social on the drive.

g) Tweak your Buttons - These buttons feel like government issue desks. You might argue that this helps give them credibility as a charity to look a little off-the-shelf, but that is one of the most basic things to tweak. Build a button people can't resist rolling over, and they'll click it more and take more actions. Period.

I love Wikipedia, I want to help. Who do I go bother?

If anybody from Wikipedia is out there I am raising my hand, I want to donate time and expertise. Contact me via profile.

lukeschlather2• 15 years ago

On point d, if you go to Wikipedia proper you will possibly get a banner with Brandon's face which is a link to this article. I doubt they were intending this to be linked directly, so you might want to take a look at the banner also.

kachnuv_ocasek• 15 years ago

You might want to bring this up on the IRC (freenode/#mediawiki or #wikimedia) or on the mailing lists (https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l or https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l).

ksri• 15 years ago

h) I entered my credit card details and submitted, but couldn't proceed because zip code and state are mandatory. I do not stay in the US, so those fields don't make sense to me. You are alienating non US citizens.

Arjuna• 15 years ago

Try this link [1]. It appears to be slightly different from the one in the original submission.

This link allows donations in various currencies, although some are only available via credit card, while others require the use of PayPal.

The credit card details form that displays after clicking "Donate by Credit Card" offers "Outside the U.S." as an option for the "State". Also, there is a "Postal code" field, which is hopefully more friendly for those without a Zip Code. Finally, there is a drop-down list for selecting "Country/Region".

There are also alternative donation methods, described here [2].

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Now/en

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give/en

iand• 15 years ago

Every industrialised nation in the world has benefited from the educational value Wikipedia brings. If at their next meeting the G20 countries were to donate a dollar for every schoolchild in their country then Wikipedia would have an endowment that could cover their costs for the long term.

jwallaceparker2• 15 years ago

I don't understand how advertisers would in any way influence the content of Wikipedia.

I would argue that donors wield more control over an organization than advertisers.

Advertisers pay money to an organization and receive ad placement in return.

Donors (especially large ones) pay money to an organization and are more likely to ask for some sort of favor in return.

yread• 15 years ago

I don't understand people moaning about "why don't they show us ads already". I am using wikipedia a lot and I think I got a lot of value from it. Admittedly I was using it more as a student, but now I can afford to give something back for that. I have no problem with donating.

We have ads everywhere, some are scammy some are annoying, advertising companies track us with them. Why would you want to put them on wikipedia when you can prevent that by just sending a couple of bucks?

roel_v2• 15 years ago

I guess because most people don't care about some ads left or right (not Bonzi buddy or full-screen 'click to continue', just Adword style).

VMG• 15 years ago

I think those who actively engage in these kinds of discussions already have an ad blocker

gizzlon• 15 years ago

think these pro-ads comments have scared me into donating to wikipedia

dudurocha• 15 years ago

What make me sad about wikipedia is that year after year, they will have to make this 'begging'. And jokes about Jim Wales will appear all over the web, and some more begging, and people complaining about some rich dude who 'only' donate 500 larges.

Well, Wikipedia has to find a sustainable model, they do not want ads or propaganda, but some new model has to be found, books, classes, especial encyclopedias, I don't know. But they need to stop doing this every year.

mousa2• 15 years ago

It's not really that big a deal for them to this every year. It's just something you have to live with like NPR's fundraising drives, except much less grating. I don't hear people irl complain about it. I know it really irritates many of the entrepreneur types on here that one of the biggest sites on the web is asking for money, but it's perfectly fine for them to have fundraising drives every year.

zerostar07• 15 years ago

I enjoy the ads (and begging if that's what u like to call it) and i donate every year (it also seems wikipedia sets a cookie when you donate cause i don't see Jimmy's pretty face anymore). Donations are not a good model for most stuff on the web but for wikipedia it's a very fitting model i think. The only alternative model would be government or UN-funded, but that would endanger its (non-)political identity.

ZeWaren• 15 years ago

There are also people who refuse to give them anything since they believe that the CC-BY-SA license is not really "free" (the Share-Alike part prevents you from doing anything without licensing your work with the same license).

speleding• 15 years ago

I'm more worried that Wikipedia would feel compelled to ensure their content is not too critical to their big donors, than that wikipedia would become corrupted by advertisers.

I can understand how advertising could be a corrupting force, but Wikipedia needs to explain why attracting donors doesn't have the same problem if not bigger.

I feel like I’m living the first line of my obituary.

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