Ask HN: Wouldn't It Be Better If Wikipedia Had Ads Than Asking For Donations?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875408

by davidsmith8900 • 13 years ago

10 24 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

- I always ignore ads and I understand that companies need to pay their bills, so when websites have ads it doesn't annoy me.

mooism2• 13 years ago

You ignore ads, so presumably you ignore the ads on Wikipedia asking you to donate. Why then do you care one way or the other?

davidsmith890011• 13 years ago

- I care because it hurts me when Wikipedia needs money, and I can't give to them because I don't have it.

cprncus2• 13 years ago

But presumably you also don't have the money to buy the advertised goods that they would make their money off of if it were ad-generated revenue (unless it were goods that you had to buy anyway, but I doubt Wikipedia would be making money off ads for ramen and heating oil).

crisnoble2• 13 years ago

I don't think so. If they introduce ads it introduces the opportunity to have perverse incentives. Right now they want to have the best content for the most people. When you make money off ads it is all about page views, content quality is an afterthought.

Imagine a wikipedia where each sub-section is paginated to generate more page views like Salon or Newsweek. This is why I think we should support wikipedia directly, so that wikipedia's goal is to make and awesome experience so that we donate again.

davidsmith890011• 13 years ago

- I can see where you are coming from. Thank you for clearing that up for me crisnoble. I appreciate it.

sp3322• 13 years ago

Ads don't give much money per-click. Donations average a lot more money from each person who clicks through.

davidsmith890011• 13 years ago

- So Wikipedia makes more money from Donations than ads. Thats cool then.

cprncus2• 13 years ago

It's been proven mathematically that any sentence that begins with, "Wouldn't it be better If Wikipedia had ads than [X]" has the property that it doesn't matter what X is, the answer will still be "no."

For example:

Q: Wouldn't it be better If Wikipedia had ads than planet-wide thermonuclear war?

A: No.

davidsmith890011• 13 years ago

- Thanks cprncus, but where can I find this mathematical statement from?

sp3322• 13 years ago

It's not mathematically proven, but empirically derived and sometimes wrong. It's called Betteridge's Law of Headlines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

crisnoble2• 13 years ago

Q: Wouldn't it be better if Wikipedia continued to not have ads?

A: Yes.

sharemywin• 13 years ago

to raise the money they need they could run ads for like 1 day. or only on a small faction of pages.

davidsmith890011• 13 years ago

- Sharemywin, you and I are on the same page.

dbieber2• 13 years ago

Introducing ads on Wikipedia would likely do more than show you ads and have ad providers pay Wikipedia; it would also introduce third party tracking.

Adding ads to Wikipedia would give ad providers the ability to trace your Wikipedia activity. This would be horrible because the average person would not understand that their wikipedia history was being revealed to third parties and this history is often highly personal. For nontechnical users who do not know about this tracking, this would be deceitful. For nontechnical users who do know of the tracking but do not know how to stop this tracking, having ads would severely compromise their ability to use Wikipedia since they must then become cautious of the way they browse.

davidsmith890011• 13 years ago

- Great insight dbieber, but why would anyone care about whose tracking their wikipedia history? I could understand about social networks or porn but what about wikipedia? Plus people know that they get tracked on certain sites and yet they still use them. So what is the difference?

dbieber2• 13 years ago

One's Wikipedia browsing history is very revealing. For instance people often use Wikipedia to learn about diseases they (or loved ones) have or are concerned they have. One should be able to research such diseases without revealing to advertisers or insurance companies the association between the user and the disease. The amount that can be garnered about an individual from their Wikipedia search history is kind of unbelievable. You can figure out things such as a person's interests, to some degree various aspects of their intelligence, some things about their medical history, if they are pregnant, their religious and political affiliations, if they may be suicidal, if they have surgery coming up, where they live and how old they are, what sort of pastimes they have, the list goes on and on. You can't figure out all of these things about all people, but the tracking has the potential to be very dangerous.

The most common way in which this data is used is targeted advertising, which probably doesn't concern you. Historically this type of data has also been used for price discrimination (which you may care about) and this data has the potential to be used in much more nefarious ways.

Even if we could somehow ensure the data would only be used in acceptable ways, the fact that the tracking goes on without most people's knowledge or approval seems unethical to me, and would be particularly troublesome on an encyclopedia of everything.

caw• 13 years ago

The tracking is bad, even when you know about it. Sometimes my friends will send me something on Amazon with ridiculous reviews or it's just a crazy item (e.g. the $5 million book on Amazon or the Nissan car). Now Amazon thinks I like that thing and want to see similar items, when all I really did was go to the page, laugh, and go on my way.

I know now to open up those links in incognito windows, but every so often I still have to go delete my "viewed items" on the site so the prediction becomes relevant again.

jgeorge• 13 years ago

Ads also limit the impartiality of the content. If you read a page about some company or some technology, and then some ad service decides that that's a great trigger to place an ad for that company or technology on the very same page, even if it doesn't spoil the impartiality of the content, it gives the appearance of impartial content.

This is the same reason why Consumer Reports doesn't take paid advertising in their publications either.

davidsmith890011• 13 years ago

- I never knew Consumer Reports didnt take paid advertising in their publications. Thank you for the knowledge jgeorge.

easong• 13 years ago

I don't mean to be aggressive, but why are you replying to every comment in the thread with some sort of vague affirmative and a mention of their username? Your karma count/account age would suggest that you've been here long enough to know that it's not normal behavior, and I don't see similar comments in your history (deleted?). Additionally, you have a lot of submissions from repetitive domains and a low average karma score per submission. I've seen a lot of fake accounts on reddit trying to build karma do the same thing.

Apologies if you're not a native English speaker or something, but it seems fishy.

Ask HN: Wouldn't It Be Better If Wikipedia Had Ads Than Asking For Donations?

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