[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form NewPartnership

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/24/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Angela wrote:
>
> >In a scenario which is hard to imagine ever occurring on Wikipedia,
> >the influence could come from the fact that AdSense relies on context,
> >and particular keywords on a page will lead to
> >higher-revenue-generating ads. So, attempts to drop phrases like
> >"credit repair" into articles could lead to greater revenues and might
> >encourage some to insert an odd sort of influence on the content for
> >this purpose. It would, of course, be violating Google's terms of
> >service and not something I would recommend doing. :)
> >
> >
> AdSense-style ads would also lead to the potentially undesirable
> scenario where companies (or individuals) would be able to buy text on a
> particular Wikipedia article's page, for example to refute it or point
> to an advocacy page attacking the viewpoints the article summarizes.
> There's no way to do this directly, but some trial-and-error playing
> with keywords could allow an advertiser to,. with high probability, get
> their ads to appear on specific Wikipedia pages in that manner.
>
> -Mark

 I can't actually think of a situation where that would be a bad thing, even
if I add in the types of ads which Google isn't going to allow anyway (like
a pro-Nazi page being advertised on a Wikipedia page on Nazism). But maybe
that's just because I believe the best way to fight speech is with speech, a
position which not everyone agrees with. If Nazis (or any POV pushers) want
to give us money to help spread factual neutral information, that's fine
with me.
 I did just think of another potential problem with Google Adsense in
particular, though. It may provide incentive for certain people to insert
certain keywords into random articles to draw competitors away from the
pages they want to advertise on (and thus lower the cost to appear on those
articles). I'm not sure if it'd work or not, though.
 Anthony