On Friday 11 February 2005 05:05, Chad Perrin wrote: Personally I don't know much about AdCouncil, I found it just some days before, but I noticed some ads are very US-centric. However, as long as you can choose which campaigns to show, this isn't a problem. If you know any facts about AdCouncil biases, please send me an e-mail, just to know. -- NSK http://portal.wikinerds.org/

On Friday 11 February 2005 02:37, Mark Williamson wrote: There are anti-smoking, education, science/math or anti-discrimination ads, too. I think it would be safe to show these ads. -- NSK http://portal.wikinerds.org/

No offense, but I actually agree with node on this. The Foundation is and should remain neutral on all issues (to the best of its ability). Ads, and more importantly, choosing them, is a can of worms that doesn't need to be opened up. --Slowking Man On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 01:43:57 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Not nessecarily even that. We are a free encyclopedia, yes, but wouldn't it be POV to support such a slogan? Mark On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 06:28:26 -0800, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 21:53:55 +0200, NSK <nsk2(a)wikinerds.org> wrote: Or your misunderstanding of what is meant with 'free' at its best, it's free as in freedom not free as in price (though it just happens to be as a side-effect.).

Ray Saintonge said: Wikipedia material is GFDL. Wikimedia Foundation can and should employ whatever fundraising methods it thinks are optimal. Anybody who doesn't like the methods still gets to use the product on their own fork. Free as in speech.

Daniel Mayer wrote: What if those ads contain bias toward strict intellectual property rights to the exclusion of such efforts as those behind the GFDL? If something is, by underlying assumption, opposed in principle to "free and open content", that might change the tenor of the issue in the minds of some people. Taking that recognition of the minefield of bias involved back to previously passed-over issues might then shed new light on the subject. I'm not specifically arguing against AdCouncil ads on the site, mind you. I simply believe that the clear biases of AdCouncil ads shuld be recognized and viewed with attention to detail and concern, and all ramifications of allowing advertising bias should be considered before any such decisions are made. I agree, personally speaking, that the "no Wikipedia" option is to be avoided, and that having ads with no strings attached would be preferable (though I'd be more inclined to go with unobtrusive text-based Google ads, whose only biases are "They pay us money!"). This is certainly not a particularly useful quibble, for this discussion, but I feel it's worth mentioning: There are ardent pro-capitalistic "zealots" who would also oppose advertising on a project like Wikipedia, possibly to the point where the choice might be made to drop Wikipedia entirely. Capitalism, itself, isn't merely about making profit. It's about a complex, socially supported system of economics wherein money ("capital") is used as a convenient method of facilitating trade (and cooperation). In some respects, a donations-only project that produces freely available output is a perfect representation of capitalistic process: it proves that the value of a thing can ensure its survival without resorting to any confiscatory measures. In any case, I'll let things get back to the on-topic now, I suppose. -- Chad

Tony Sidaway wrote: Fair enough. The question, then, becomes one of whether the risk of perception of bias on the part of Wikipedia is a valid barrier to acceptance of advertising revenue. -- Chad

Tony Sidaway (minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com) [050214 09:16]: Advertising on wikipedia tends to be treated as one of the Worst Ideas Ever because when it was first even *mooted*, the Spanish wikipedia promptly forked. Producing the Enciclopedia Libre and taking a large chunk of the userbase with it. A truly pointless fork, because it's got pretty much the same goals. So the question would be whether it would risk a similar effect. - d.

David Gerard said: No. Next question. :)

--- Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ah, starting off with an insult. I'm very aware of the Spanish Wikipedia fork - I was here when it happened and I led an unsuccessful attempt to remerge the projects some months later. That fork hampered the development of the Spanish Wikipedia for some time, but now the tide has turned and the Spanish Wikipedia is growing very fast with over 40,000 articles and Enciclopedia Libre is growing slowly with just over 27,000 articles. This combined with the existence of other much less-successful wiki forks, gives us our only data on the subject. On top of that is the huge momentum behind the Wikipedia brand and the fact that it is very, very popular. This kind of popularity requires a lot of money to keep things running, thus making forks even less likely to be successful. That said, we do need to make sure we keep people reasonably happy about the way things are run. Doing that will go a long way toward making forks less likely. But they will always be possible due to the terms of our license and the fact that we cannot possibly accommodate everybody's views on how things should be run. See above and re-read my previous message. Especially note its overall message that there is no need for ads in the foreseeable future. -- mav __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com

On Feb 14, 2005, at 1:29 PM, Delirium wrote: That and the meltdown of another similar math project.

Ray Saintonge said: ...is, I think, a sign that I didn't make my thoughts clear. I think it's the Foundation's job to consider this, not ours. But by "optimal" I mean just that. I don't mean "likely to net the greatest amount of money." The Foundation must weigh in the balance, amongst other things, its greatest asset: the editors. But there will always be some editors who will reject any advertising. Those people will still have access to their material.