On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 4:18 AM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: True but It is an attempt which is not assured to success. For English or other languages it would work. But it doesn't work for other languages with over 100M population like Japanese. We know Wikia using Google AdSense and their Japanese wikis got user complaints against "inappropriate ads". On Gmail, there is also ads and most of ads accompanied to Japanese mails seems to me irrelevant and not intellectual. Like a wiki related mail + "you can earn 510K JPY a month" or "you can get your Ph.D. (sort of diploma mills). Introduction of advertisement in a semantic approach may be disastrous if the system implemented doesn't work well in its target language. -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD

White Cat wrote: Just for discussion purposes, the two ads I see on google right now for "World War II" are for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and for World War II History magazine. The Museum advertisement leads to a special section of their website focussing on D-Day. From my cursory reading of it as a non-specialist, it does not appear to be POV pushing. It is an educational site about the war. At Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9110199/World-War-II I see a banner at the top, apparently unrelated to the content (for Advair, an asthma medication). Further down, I see an advertisement for the Lincoln Navigator, a giant SUV car thing. And I see an advertisement for the University of Phoenix. And another ad for the University of Phoenix. And the google ads. (I am not even counting their ads for their own products.) Interestingly enough, at Ask.com, I see no advertisements for "World War II". At Yahoo, I see a series of text ads similar to google's (though, more of them). A search for "Tutankhamun" at Google (the most popular pharoah I suppose), shows 3 advertisements for tickets to the Tutankhamun exhibit, which is currently in London.

I don't know of anyone, even among those advocating for advertisements, who advocates putting them in article space. White Cat wrote:

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 12:54 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, Foundation is not talking about ads... but the elites closely related to the foundation are Of course, it's going to be discussed since there's no money enough to secure the site operations AND save the world

White Cat wrote: Advertising is rooted in an underlying consumerist philosophy. Consumerism in turn needs mass production to be successful. In a truly collaborationist model we all start as equals; there is no presumption that a body of knowledge cannot contain certain ideas on the grounds of triviality; there is no presumption that a templated technological solution will bring needed order to the universe; there is no presumption that a style guide represents the unique allowable form of expression. All of these uniforming techniques are the bread and butter of consumerism. Ec

I still don't like it. And how are these examples a service? - White Cat On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 6:31 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Right, we do not have an immediate need for advertisements, I like to think all this as a mere thought exercise. - White Cat On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Pedro Sanchez <pdsanchez(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Pedro Sanchez wrote: What you ignore is that a significant part of this debate is driven by a fear of advertising that verges on a pathological phobia. I think that most people view the subject with a greater degree of pragmatism. Ec

Jimmy Wales wrote: Correct. The advertisement discussion has been going on, every now and then since the creation of the Wikipedia. Nothing new. For the fun, some old historical discussion: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Advertising_on_Wikipedia Also, I must point out that Wikimania, though it naturally appears in the budget, is roughly a self sustainable projects. We get sponsors to pay for it, and if we had no Wikimania, we would not get these sponsors money. So, it is a zero sum event. Ant

Andrew Gray wrote: I agree a generic interface is the right way to go, but the main problem I have with it is that it seems almost purposely designed to make it hard to find a link to a bookseller. I'm not sure if this was the intent, but it comes across as if the person who made the layout is sort of ideologically against buying books or something. You have to scroll through something like 8 pages of links to hundreds of different libraries before you can find any possible link to a bookseller the book---"Booksellers" is currently section 7... and section 5 which precedes it has *64* subsections. It'd be somewhat easier if there were only a handful of links at the top, maybe to 2-4 library meta-search engines (e.g. WorldCat) and to 2-4 bookseller meta-search engines (e.g. AddAll), before dumping the reader into a morass of literally hundreds of links to individual libraries. Do we even need the latter? Surely someone who has access to, say, the University of Colorado at Boulder library, already knows how to visit ucblibraries.colorado.edu, or else can find it through WorldCat/etc. if not. -Mark

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: There's been a recurring debate in the library world about how to handle this exact question in library catalogs. When you pull up a book in your local library catalog (or on worldcat etc) it seems helpful for the reader to also provide a link to a commercial site to buy the book if they wish, or to get more information. (This is a "service" the way Florence refers to it). The ideal and obvious thing is to direct them to the publisher's site, but this is not always possible, especially for older materials. So there's a big question about a) *whether* to send patrons to commercial sites, and b) *where* to send them -- since the library, as a non-profit NPOV institution, generally does not want to *endorse* any particular reseller. As a library, we have no stake in Amazon versus Powells (a large independent bookseller in the U.S.) versus Blackwells versus your corner bookshop etc., and we don't especially want to endorse one over the other. It seems to me that Wikimedia is in exactly the same position. Let's not forget, from the point of view of Amazon a direct and easy link to Amazon from Wikipedia would be an *amazing* windfall, a simultaneous endorsement and direct channel of people to purchase materials (and because of Amazon's nasty habit of retaining your browsing habits if you're a customer, they might well even know *which* wikipedia articles with amazon ads you'd been browsing, and be able to use that information). Other booksellers, however, would be disenfranchised simply because they don't have the reach or the money to pay for ads the way Amazon does. And what if we don't think Amazon is a good company, or don't want to support them, or simply want to avoid entangling ourselves with any commercial service? I am very much in favor of sharing metadata and improving our link-out mechanisms so it's easier to find out more about the books and other topics on Wikipedia. If someone wants to improve special:booksources so it's easier to use (perhaps as a javascript menu -- choose your location, choose libraries vs booksellers?), that would be fantastic. I am not, however, in favor of directly or obviously linking to a handful of commercial sites. -- phoebe