--- Jeroenvrp wikipedia@xs4all.nl wrote:
Op donderdag 28 december 2006 21:42, schreef Brion Vibber:
JeroenVP for instance has made clear that he does
not care about the
core values of Wikipedia at all (making knowledge
available to the
public as free content) but only cares about not
ever seeing anything he
perceives as an "advertisement".
I assume the above statement is a way to polarise the discussion ever more and I will ignore these remarks.
It's about free/open educational content. It's
about making materials
open and available for use by the public,
including the creation of
derivative works and redistribution.
Exactly, but you you miss the point completely Brion. It's advertisement at a location where the free content is CREATED, not redistributed/mirrored. Actually I don't care about if people make money with Wikipedia content, the same applies for Linux distributions, but we are talking about advertisement on the location where the content is created. That kills our reliability, so far we have that allready. It's not about business-models, websites, but about the source off the free content. Any connection to what kind of company, religion, political party, government, whatever... will harm one of the basic principles of this great project.
There is no difference between where the content is created and distributed and consumed. It is all the the same place. The high number of hits logged by Wikimedia websites would not be happening if the primary consumption of the content took place at the mirrors. The success of Wikimedia is due to this elimination this idea that content is something to be created and then distibuted to consumer. In Wikimedia creation and consumption are combined and anyone is welcome to either create or consume (or both!) from the same outlet.
I want to explain were I think the general opposition to advertisement comes from. While brion is correct that free-content is not against commercialism; free content is against consumerism. Advertising is a large part of the culture of consumerism. This is a culture that *is* at odds with the ideas of Wikimedia. This is where I believe the strong reaction against ads stems from more than anti-commercialism.
I think it is natural for people with a strong dislike for the consumer culture to make there way to Wikimedia. It is natural that these people suddenly seeing a multinational coporation in the site-notice would have a bad reaction. I think the reasoning behind the sitenotice display is sound and I support the decision. But perhaps I would have been upset if I had not already expected to see coporate matching donors. It is hard to say, I am really not that radical. At the same time I have seen many people who I think are radical in their related areas defend this sitenotice. This makes me think the bulk of the reaction is really due to the surprise factor. Maybe the lesson here is that there is a need for better internal new releases.
I think Brad's annoucement of the beginning of the fundraising drive was very good. If it had had a footer silmilar to what the Wikimania Tapai team has been doing, encouraging people to forward it and spread it to other lists, maybe there would have been less uproar. It is sometimes hard to remember how much of a communication problem still remains within this organiztion. Six months ago it was nearly impossible to know what happening at the Foundation level. Now there are annoucements, reports, and even timetables! But this is not being spread much through the larger community. I think the LSS is a great step forward, perhaps it is time to not only list this on meta but make weekly "deliveries" to the village pumps of small communities and ask any larger communities with internal news programs to host within those programs.
Birgitte SB
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