Real-time mirrors seem to be a recurring phenomenon. They are a drain on Wikipedia's resources, and hunting them and shooting them down is a continuing battle.
The reasoning behind these mirrors appears to be:
1 putting up a Wikipedia mirror with ads will make money... 2 too lazy to set up a proper mirror... 3 instead, set up a script that queries Wikipedia in real time... 4 profit!
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
Currently, Wikipedia's running costs are about $1.2M per year, and this pays for, among other things, serving about 4000 hits per second, that is to say, about 1.26 x 10^11 hits per year, or about $ 10^-5 per hit. (Of course, this is average gross cost; marginal cost will be significantly higher, say $ 10^-4 per hit).
Web advertising rates are generally of the order of $1 CPM: that is, $ 10^-3 per hit. If an advertiser manages to get 10,000,000 hits per year, they will make $10,000 in ad revenue, and costs the Wikimedia Foundation around $1000 in leeched server load.
What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit for an official real-time mirror service? (Of course, this would be aggregated in lumps, because it's impossible to bill tiny fractions of a dollar). Now, the economics to the mirror operator is $ 10^-3 - $0.2 x 10^-3 per hit, and they still make 80% of the money they would have before, and don't need to worry about being cut off. However, the economics for the WF are now quite different: instead of losing $ 10^-4 per hit, the Foundation would make $ 2 x 10^-4 income - $ 10^-4 cost per hit, and thus makes $ 1000 gross profit over the course of the year for those 10,000,000 hits, which can be ploughed back into achieving the Foundation's charitable goals (for example, by buying new server kit and bandwidth, or paying for other real-world activities).
Note that the users of the real-time mirrors are _not_ being charged for use of the GFDL content, which remains freely available as before; they are being charged for real-time access to WP data, with no need to run a modified copy of MediaWiki in order to run their service.
Administration of the scheme could be made automatic, by allowing the existing credit-card interface to be used to for payment, and entering an IP address or addresses to be authorized, an E-mail address for contact, and getting an authorization key mailed back.
As a result: * Wikipedia remains ad-free * the WF gets revenue * the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time without leeching unauthorized resources.
The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from around the page contents.
With other changes, for example, not checking for red/blue links, serving costs could probably be reduced even further, and quote possibly WF could charge more than $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit. Given the number of mirrors around, setting up this scheme might pay for itself in a month or less.
Good idea, or bad idea?
-- Neil
Neil Harris wrote:
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
Putting ourselves in a situation where we are dependent on other organisations for our existence allows them to threaten withdrawal of financial agreements if we do not make changes they request.
Chris
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
Neil Harris wrote:
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
Putting ourselves in a situation where we are dependent on other organisations for our existence allows them to threaten withdrawal of financial agreements if we do not make changes they request.
The answer to that is to diversify revenue. That limits the damage that can be done by such people. That's a principle of responsible investments. Countries with responsible pension standards do not allow any more than a small percentage of a pension fund's investments to be in the company's own shares. This helps to prevent situations such as happened at Enron.
Ec
Neil Harris wrote:
What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit for an official real-time mirror service?
We already have something very similar, in the form of a paid OAI-PMH subscription. It's kept very quiet, maybe for PR reasons, so there aren't many subscribers.
As a result:
- Wikipedia remains ad-free
That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on the Internet, and only one of them is ad-free, that is the one at wikipedia.org. Most readers come to Wikipedia via the search engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will go towards spamming those search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of Wikipedia pages.
- the WF gets revenue
- the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
without leeching unauthorized resources.
The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from around the page contents.
The best cache hit rate is for ordinary anonymous page views. Unless hits from mirrors were responsible for a significant proportion of our traffic, the reduced cache hit ratio would outweigh any benefit from lightweight skins.
-- Tim Starling
On 4/9/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on the Internet, and only one of them is ad-free, that is the one at wikipedia.org. Most readers come to Wikipedia via the search engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will go towards spamming those search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of Wikipedia pages.
Okay, but isn't that the situation we are already in? The only difference is that the people running the advertising-laden copies will have to pay for the privilege of doing so.
Ryan
Ryan Delaney wrote:
On 4/9/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on the Internet, and only one of them is ad-free, that is the one at wikipedia.org. Most readers come to Wikipedia via the search engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will go towards spamming those search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of Wikipedia pages.
Okay, but isn't that the situation we are already in? The only difference is that the people running the advertising-laden copies will have to pay for the privilege of doing so.
Ryan
Well, strictly speaking, they won't _have_ to pay anything, since the content itself is free, they could simply download a dump and work from that.
It's just that if they want to load Wikipedia's servers by using them in real time, and don't want to get cut off without notice, they could pay for the privilege of doing so, and thus support Wikipedia by offsetting significantly more than the raw cost of serving their hits.
Of course, they can always leech without paying, as is generally the case now, but if they can be cut off rapidly before they make any money (hint: they only get revenue if they appear on search engines, and as soon as that happens, we can also see them and distinguish them from non-real-time mirrors) they may well consider paying part of their revenue to be the better option.
-- Neil
Ryan Delaney wrote:
On 4/9/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on the Internet, and only one of them is ad-free, that is the one at wikipedia.org. Most readers come to Wikipedia via the search engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will go towards spamming those search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of Wikipedia pages.
Okay, but isn't that the situation we are already in? The only difference is that the people running the advertising-laden copies will have to pay for the privilege of doing so.
It's the difference between harrassing and encouraging. What we'd be selling would be the ability to set up a Wikipedia mirror for $10 per month plus a couple of hours of setup time, with the security of knowing your service won't be randomly cut off by the Wikimedia server admins. Currently you either have to buy more expensive hosting with enough disk space to hold a complete copy, or you have to evade the blocks and remote load from our servers.
Of course, if the venture is successful and the site becomes popular, then the costs will increase in proportion to the traffic, but so will the revenue. That's why the startup costs are the only financial risk involved. If you reduce or eliminate them, then you encourage the proliferation of mirrors.
How many mirrors is enough? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? Eventually I imagine the market will become saturated, when a new mirror can't recover its minimal startup costs, even with the most aggressive SEO techniques. What will the Internet look like then? Will the average user be able to find independent information in the search engines, which didn't come from Wikpedia?
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
Ryan Delaney wrote:
On 4/9/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on the Internet, and only one of them is ad-free, that is the one at wikipedia.org. Most readers come to Wikipedia via the search engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will go towards spamming those search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of Wikipedia pages.
Okay, but isn't that the situation we are already in? The only difference is that the people running the advertising-laden copies will have to pay for the privilege of doing so.
It's the difference between harrassing and encouraging. What we'd be selling would be the ability to set up a Wikipedia mirror for $10 per month plus a couple of hours of setup time, with the security of knowing your service won't be randomly cut off by the Wikimedia server admins. Currently you either have to buy more expensive hosting with enough disk space to hold a complete copy, or you have to evade the blocks and remote load from our servers.
Of course, if the venture is successful and the site becomes popular, then the costs will increase in proportion to the traffic, but so will the revenue. That's why the startup costs are the only financial risk involved. If you reduce or eliminate them, then you encourage the proliferation of mirrors.
How many mirrors is enough? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? Eventually I imagine the market will become saturated, when a new mirror can't recover its minimal startup costs, even with the most aggressive SEO techniques. What will the Internet look like then? Will the average user be able to find independent information in the search engines, which didn't come from Wikpedia?
Obligatory [[m:bash]] quote:
<jwales> Damn Wikipedia people! <jwales> They took over the Internet!
On 4/10/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
How many mirrors is enough? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? Eventually I imagine the market will become saturated, when a new mirror can't recover its minimal startup costs, even with the most aggressive SEO techniques. What will the Internet look like then? Will the average user be able to find independent information in the search engines, which didn't come from Wikpedia?
I guess that within this theoretical framework, you have to decide whether you're more interested in what's good for the internet or what's good for WMF. Fortunately, that's a false dilemma, as we seem to be getting by just fine with donations. The only way we would be forced to make such a decision is if we chose to adopt this idea.
Ryan
Ryan Delaney wrote:
On 4/10/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
How many mirrors is enough? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? Eventually I imagine the market will become saturated, when a new mirror can't recover its minimal startup costs, even with the most aggressive SEO techniques. What will the Internet look like then? Will the average user be able to find independent information in the search engines, which didn't come from Wikpedia?
I guess that within this theoretical framework, you have to decide whether you're more interested in what's good for the internet or what's good for WMF. Fortunately, that's a false dilemma, as we seem to be getting by just fine with donations. The only way we would be forced to make such a decision is if we chose to adopt this idea.
Ryan
Well... no. We are not doing just fine with donations. The site survives with donations. No more. However, the people working for Foundation related issues are all the time on the thin edge. We desperately need to hire some people to do as simple things as answering the phone or helping with the hundred of emails received everyday. We need more developers. We need support on the legal side, if only to write contracts. We need help for the accounting. Most of this work is not necessarily the most interesting one for volunteers, plus, it holds a responsability such as it is better there is a contractual agreement betweent the Foundation and the worker. We also need to pay for the audit. So... any other source of income is welcome... there is so much more we could do with decent human power :-(
Regarding Tim analysis, there is another issue not considered. Those (potentially) interested in the live feed are not only "simple" mirrors; They may also be websites which have an original content, but rely in part on our content for time-sensitive information. Those can not afford displaying an outdated content. They need daily updated information. Hence, the interest of the live feed as well.
ant
Anthere wrote:
Ryan Delaney wrote:
I guess that within this theoretical framework, you have to decide whether you're more interested in what's good for the internet or what's good for WMF. Fortunately, that's a false dilemma, as we seem to be getting by just fine with donations. The only way we would be forced to make such a decision is if we chose to adopt this idea.
Ryan
Well... no. We are not doing just fine with donations. The site survives with donations. No more. However, the people working for Foundation related issues are all the time on the thin edge. We desperately need to hire some people to do as simple things as answering the phone or helping with the hundred of emails received everyday. We need more developers. We need support on the legal side, if only to write contracts. We need help for the accounting. Most of this work is not necessarily the most interesting one for volunteers, plus, it holds a responsability such as it is better there is a contractual agreement betweent the Foundation and the worker. We also need to pay for the audit. So... any other source of income is welcome... there is so much more we could do with decent human power :-(
Regarding Tim analysis, there is another issue not considered. Those (potentially) interested in the live feed are not only "simple" mirrors; They may also be websites which have an original content, but rely in part on our content for time-sensitive information. Those can not afford displaying an outdated content. They need daily updated information. Hence, the interest of the live feed as well.
ant
A real-time RSS feed of recent changes would be a natural complement to the ability to get a real-time feed from the servers.
In addition, it might be an option when leech sites are cut off to initially replace the WP content being served to them with a message: "Wikipedia traffic to this site has been disabled: click [[here]] to see how to get access to an authorized [[real-time Wikipedia feed]]", for a short time (a week?) prior to cutting them off completely.
-- Neil
On 4/9/06, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Real-time mirrors seem to be a recurring phenomenon. They are a drain on Wikipedia's resources, and hunting them and shooting them down is a continuing battle.
The reasoning behind these mirrors appears to be:
1 putting up a Wikipedia mirror with ads will make money... 2 too lazy to set up a proper mirror... 3 instead, set up a script that queries Wikipedia in real time... 4 profit!
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
...
Good idea, or bad idea?
-- Neil
From a business perspective, what is to stop a site from sucking in
just enough to mirror in real-time, and then turning around and forwarding it to other mirrors? In an extreme case, there would be only one customer of this service (paying say $1000) and they in turn might have multiple customers of their own (say 11m paying say $100); the original customer will turn a profit just from reselling the feed, the secondary customers will save major amounts of money, and all benefitting from advertising. I doubt we could prohibit it contractually, and even if we could, suing fly-by-night outfits would be tough, even in addition to the PR aspects.
~maru
On 4/9/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
From a business perspective, what is to stop a site from sucking in
just enough to mirror in real-time, and then turning around and forwarding it to other mirrors? In an extreme case, there would be only one customer of this service (paying say $1000) and they in turn might have multiple customers of their own (say 11m paying say $100); the original customer will turn a profit just from reselling the feed, the secondary customers will save major amounts of money, and all benefitting from advertising. I doubt we could prohibit it contractually, and even if we could, suing fly-by-night outfits would be tough, even in addition to the PR aspects.
Even if we couldn't contractually prohibit this, we could just turn off the feed.
On 4/9/06, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
Even if we couldn't contractually prohibit this, we could just turn off the feed.
...and then we'd be right back where we started.
Ryan
On 4/9/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
From a business perspective, what is to stop a site from sucking in
just enough to mirror in real-time, and then turning around and forwarding it to other mirrors? In an extreme case, there would be
Is this a bad thing? Wikipedia's goal is the free disemination of information. We would only charge as a means to that end. If those sites aren't sucking our content directly, they're not costing us, hence no need to charge them. And it's generally considered a good thing if third parties are making money off our content.
Steve
maru dubshinki wrote:
From a business perspective, what is to stop a site from sucking in just enough to mirror in real-time, and then turning around and forwarding it to other mirrors?
Billing by the byte. Doesn't stop them from doing it, but stops it from being a problem for us.
On 4/9/06, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
It sounds good to me, but would only work if we could add sufficient value to that feed to make it worth buying instead of stealing (inasmuch as scraping our pages is stealing). Cleaning up the feed (could we supply raw XML?), filtering (oh wait, we don't content-tag our pages :)) and hiding red-links would certainly be ways of doing that...
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 4/9/06, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
It sounds good to me, but would only work if we could add sufficient value to that feed to make it worth buying instead of stealing (inasmuch as scraping our pages is stealing). Cleaning up the feed (could we supply raw XML?), filtering (oh wait, we don't content-tag our pages :)) and hiding red-links would certainly be ways of doing that...
Actually I was thinking that a paid subscription service *would* be content-tagged and based on "stable" versions...
Neil Harris wrote:
Real-time mirrors seem to be a recurring phenomenon. They are a drain on Wikipedia's resources, and hunting them and shooting them down is a continuing battle.
The reasoning behind these mirrors appears to be:
1 putting up a Wikipedia mirror with ads will make money... 2 too lazy to set up a proper mirror... 3 instead, set up a script that queries Wikipedia in real time... 4 profit!
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
Currently, Wikipedia's running costs are about $1.2M per year, and this pays for, among other things, serving about 4000 hits per second, that is to say, about 1.26 x 10^11 hits per year, or about $ 10^-5 per hit. (Of course, this is average gross cost; marginal cost will be significantly higher, say $ 10^-4 per hit).
Web advertising rates are generally of the order of $1 CPM: that is, $ 10^-3 per hit. If an advertiser manages to get 10,000,000 hits per year, they will make $10,000 in ad revenue, and costs the Wikimedia Foundation around $1000 in leeched server load.
What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit for an official real-time mirror service? (Of course, this would be aggregated in lumps, because it's impossible to bill tiny fractions of a dollar). Now, the economics to the mirror operator is $ 10^-3 - $0.2 x 10^-3 per hit, and they still make 80% of the money they would have before, and don't need to worry about being cut off. However, the economics for the WF are now quite different: instead of losing $ 10^-4 per hit, the Foundation would make $ 2 x 10^-4 income - $ 10^-4 cost per hit, and thus makes $ 1000 gross profit over the course of the year for those 10,000,000 hits, which can be ploughed back into achieving the Foundation's charitable goals (for example, by buying new server kit and bandwidth, or paying for other real-world activities).
Note that the users of the real-time mirrors are _not_ being charged for use of the GFDL content, which remains freely available as before; they are being charged for real-time access to WP data, with no need to run a modified copy of MediaWiki in order to run their service.
Administration of the scheme could be made automatic, by allowing the existing credit-card interface to be used to for payment, and entering an IP address or addresses to be authorized, an E-mail address for contact, and getting an authorization key mailed back.
As a result:
- Wikipedia remains ad-free
- the WF gets revenue
- the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
without leeching unauthorized resources.
The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from around the page contents.
With other changes, for example, not checking for red/blue links, serving costs could probably be reduced even further, and quote possibly WF could charge more than $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit. Given the number of mirrors around, setting up this scheme might pay for itself in a month or less.
Good idea, or bad idea?
-- Neil
The live feed service exist. Generally, it is a bad idea to let live-mirrors as they are a drain on our resources. For this reason, a service is provided against a certain fee, meant to at least cover the costs of feeding the live-mirror.
There could be two main sources of customers. Either mirrors or potential customers are directly contacted by Terry. Or live-mirrors are blocked by developpers and as a consequence contact the board to complain or look for another solution. In this case, we answer them that they can either choose the dump or sign a contract with us for a live feed.
Now... to be fair, there are very few customers :-) So the income made through this mean is frankly... limited.
Why is it so ? Well, it may be a mixture. Possibly Terry contacting few potential customers. Possibly blocked live mirrors not being informed of that solution (now, you know, so next time a blocked mirror complains, please tell it to contact us). Possibly a lack of reactivity to propose contracts. Or lack of understanding from the people in OTRS about what the live feed is...
So, to go back to your original mail, yes, good idea. Good idea to implement more widely.
Ant
Anthere wrote: <snip>
The live feed service exist. Generally, it is a bad idea to let live-mirrors as they are a drain on our resources. For this reason, a service is provided against a certain fee, meant to at least cover the costs of feeding the live-mirror.
<snip>
Why is it so ? Well, it may be a mixture. Possibly Terry contacting few potential customers. Possibly blocked live mirrors not being informed of that solution (now, you know, so next time a blocked mirror complains, please tell it to contact us). Possibly a lack of reactivity to propose contracts. Or lack of understanding from the people in OTRS about what the live feed is...
Uh, yeah. Actually letting people know that it exists would be a good start...
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Anthere wrote:
<snip> > The live feed service exist. Generally, it is a bad idea to let > live-mirrors as they are a drain on our resources. For this reason, a > service is provided against a certain fee, meant to at least cover the > costs of feeding the live-mirror. > <snip> > Why is it so ? Well, it may be a mixture. Possibly Terry contacting few > potential customers. Possibly blocked live mirrors not being informed of > that solution (now, you know, so next time a blocked mirror complains, > please tell it to contact us). Possibly a lack of reactivity to propose > contracts. Or lack of understanding from the people in OTRS about what > the live feed is... >
Uh, yeah. Actually letting people know that it exists would be a good start...
I second that request. If the WMF actually is interested in selling this service, it would make sense to inform Terry (to my shame I must admit I do not even know who this is) of the existence of live mirror sites.
As one of the people dealing with mirrors on de:, I would be happy to do so. Additionally, it might be a good idea to establish some official way to get live mirrors blocked. I tried to find someone to block those listed at [1] at #wikimedia-tech three times, but didn't succeed. Of course, I absolutely understand this is far from top priority for our server and software people, overworked and few as they are.
I am also aware this issue may not be fully suitable for this list, but my mail to wikitech-l seems to be stuck in moderation and at least the thread seemed appropriate :-).
Cheers, de:mdangers
mdangers wrote:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Anthere wrote:
<snip>
The live feed service exist. Generally, it is a bad idea to let live-mirrors as they are a drain on our resources. For this reason, a service is provided against a certain fee, meant to at least cover the costs of feeding the live-mirror.
<snip>
Why is it so ? Well, it may be a mixture. Possibly Terry contacting few potential customers. Possibly blocked live mirrors not being informed of that solution (now, you know, so next time a blocked mirror complains, please tell it to contact us). Possibly a lack of reactivity to propose contracts. Or lack of understanding from the people in OTRS about what the live feed is...
Uh, yeah. Actually letting people know that it exists would be a good start...
I second that request. If the WMF actually is interested in selling this service, it would make sense to inform Terry (to my shame I must admit I do not even know who this is) of the existence of live mirror sites.
Hi
Terry is a person working for Bomis and Wikia. He gives a bit of time for live feed from time to time. Unfortunately, he does not participate to Wikipedia really, so is unlikely to know which mirrors could be contacted ...
As one of the people dealing with mirrors on de:, I would be happy to do so. Additionally, it might be a good idea to establish some official way to get live mirrors blocked. I tried to find someone to block those listed at [1] at #wikimedia-tech three times, but didn't succeed. Of course, I absolutely understand this is far from top priority for our server and software people, overworked and few as they are.
A few days ago, I drafted this answer http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AAnthere&diff=326... (which was fixed by Brion, then heavily edited by Uninvited Company for proper english) to provide on OTRS. We rather frequently have emails sent from mirrors and complaining they have been blocked. This answer is now available on the board queue, but might be added to other queues as well if necessary.
There are three requirements for taking care of live mirrors 1) getting them blocked (this mostly concerns the english and german wikipedia for now I suppose) 2) contact them to explain why they are blocked and to propose a live feed 3) if they are interested, have some one trusted handle the transaction and make them sign a contractual agreement (note that the contractual agreement is available en english at least).
Brion should write in the next few days/weeks a page to explain the technical considerations of the live feed.
In case some editors on en.wikipedia and de.wikipedia could draft a page where it would be explained to blocked mirrors why they are blocked, and explain them what alternatives are available, it would be great.
Cheers
Anthere
I am also aware this issue may not be fully suitable for this list, but my mail to wikitech-l seems to be stuck in moderation and at least the thread seemed appropriate :-).
Cheers, de:mdangers
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Mdangers/rot
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On 4/9/06, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
- Wikipedia remains ad-free
Why is this an important goal? If we put, say, Google ads up on Wikipedia, how would it compromise Wikipedia? They're easy enough to block.
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 4/9/06, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
- Wikipedia remains ad-free
Why is this an important goal? If we put, say, Google ads up on Wikipedia, how would it compromise Wikipedia? They're easy enough to block.
It's not a case of blocking the ads, it's a case of increasing our dependency on a profit-making organisation. Google has done good works but it makes me nervous thinking we may become dependent on corporations for Wikipedia's existence. Corporations are known to threaten the withdrawal of funds as punishment.
Chris
On 4/10/06, Chris Jenkinson chris@starglade.org wrote:
Google has done good works but it makes me nervous thinking we may become dependent on corporations for Wikipedia's existence. Corporations are known to threaten the withdrawal of funds as punishment.
Wikimedia in itself is a corporation.
I don't see how a few google ads could threaten Wikipedia by withdrawal of funds. The ads are context-sensitive according to parameters set by the site owner. Many corporations would be very happy to see their ads in a pool to be selected by Google to show on Wikipedia, one of the most popular non-Chinese language websites in the world. If Google tried to be funny, we're big enough to take our business elsewhere. Actually, maybe we could run our own advertising system and enforce a noninterference agreement from the start. Really, Wikipedia is absolutely massive, there's no reason not to do this except lack of seed capital and political squeamishness.
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 4/9/06, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
- Wikipedia remains ad-free
Why is this an important goal? If we put, say, Google ads up on Wikipedia, how would it compromise Wikipedia? They're easy enough to block.
We've been through this before:
- es: forked at the very first *suggestion* of ads - Ads are incompatible with NPOV
On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
- Ads are incompatible with NPOV
I've never understood this: how are they incompatible? NPOV applies to articles only (as the userbox people are so keen to point out). Articles are what's in the div wrapper "content", i.e. the article content.
OK, if we take the assumption that advertising inherently is non-neutral, Wikipedia (and, indeed, the Wikimedia Foundation) does not need to be neutral. Of course, in an ideal world, we would be utterly and totally neutral, but this isn't an ideal world. Why shouldn't the Foundation publicise those who are keen to give us backing? This is just a smaller scale version of http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors
Our role is not to produce a neutral website. It is to produce neutral and factual content.
-- Sam
Sam Korn wrote:
On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
- Ads are incompatible with NPOV
I've never understood this: how are they incompatible? NPOV applies to articles only (as the userbox people are so keen to point out). Articles are what's in the div wrapper "content", i.e. the article content.
OK, if we take the assumption that advertising inherently is non-neutral, Wikipedia (and, indeed, the Wikimedia Foundation) does not need to be neutral. Of course, in an ideal world, we would be utterly and totally neutral, but this isn't an ideal world. Why shouldn't the Foundation publicise those who are keen to give us backing? This is just a smaller scale version of http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors
Our role is not to produce a neutral website. It is to produce neutral and factual content.
So, you wouldn't mind reading an article on eg. the September 11 attacks and having ads for jewsdidwtc.com appearing at the side?
On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
So, you wouldn't mind reading an article on eg. the September 11 attacks and having ads for jewsdidwtc.com appearing at the side?
With respect, I was discussing advertising in principle, not specifics of whether we would have editorial control over adverts. Too often I see people dismissing advertising out of hand based on false assumptions.
-- Sam
--- Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Note that the users of the real-time mirrors are _not_ being charged for use of the GFDL content, which remains freely available as before; they are being charged for real-time access to WP data, with no need to run a modified copy of MediaWiki in order to run their service.
Administration of the scheme could be made automatic, by allowing the existing credit-card interface to be used to for payment, and entering an IP address or addresses to be authorized, an E-mail address for contact, and getting an authorization key mailed back.
As a result:
- Wikipedia remains ad-free
- the WF gets revenue
- the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
without leeching unauthorized resources.
The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from around the page contents.
With other changes, for example, not checking for red/blue links, serving costs could probably be reduced even further, and quote possibly WF could charge more than $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit. Given the number of mirrors around, setting up this scheme might pay for itself in a month or less.
Good idea, or bad idea?
Very good idea. We are already doing that somewhat via RSS feeds but we have not publicized the option and the few companies that have signed up did not use the service for long (or maybe we just forgot to send them invoices...). Either way, we really do need to maximize that revenue source and clamp down real tight on parasitic mirrors. Hiring another developer to manage the service and kill parasitic mirrors would likely get us a bunch of net revenue.
-- mav
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