On Sat, 31 Dec 2005, Hermione1980 wrote:
I'm not opposed to ads on Wikipedia per se. I am,
however, vehemently opposed to those damn flashing
red-and-white banners that scream at me from some
websites. As long as any hypothetical ads to be put on
Wikipedia are unobtrusive, I'm not going to scream too
loudly.
This is one of the reasons I am opposed to advertising on
Wikipedia: far too many web ads are designed with the
intent of drawing attention to themselves, which distracts
from the content of Wikipedia. I doubt many people would
find it easy to work their way thru an article on
mathematics or rewrite the tortured syntax of a syntax while
from the corner of the browser an ad for a dating service
flashes the cleavage of some attractive woman -- one of
my recent annoyances with the Userfriendly website. (I also
despise internet dating services for other reasons, which
are not relevant here.)
Insuring that any Wikipedia ads adhere to some standard only
increases the overhead that accompanies advertisements.
As Eclectology noted in another post, if you have ads, then
you need to pay someone to track (& collect) the revenues.
Then there is the cost of marketing Wikipedia ads . . . which
leads to a group of people with a vested interest in monitoring
article content (for example, adding pressure to remove or
rewrite articles about sexuality so that Wikipedia isn't
blocked by potential eyeballs).
One important thing about not having ads is that it is a
return to the older Internet, a place where explicit commercial
use was forbidden. Maybe I've improved my memories of that
environment, but I remember that there a certain sense of
community there whee everyone was more willing to share --
even the porn, believe it or not, was free.
Ads on websites have helped to erode that sense of community.
Whenever ads appear on a website, this cannot help but
create a sense of us vs. them: the users who are subjected
to ads, & the people behind the website who presumably are
getting rich off of the ads. Thus this would send a message
contrary to the official one that Wikipedia is as accessible
as possible to all; & I suspect that advertising on Wikipedia
would be soon followed by an increase in vandalism, & a
decline in new members.
These are just a few immediate thoughts I have on the matter.
It might be more informative to study just how the community
around the Internet Movie Database changed when Amazon
bought it.
Geoff