[Foundation-l] This is not an Advertisement

[David Strauss]

You missed Brion's point. It doesn't matter if it's actually an ad.

Besides, your definition of ad labels almost all forms of sponsorship
and underwriting "advertising."

Bruno Martelli wrote:
> Hi everyone.
> 
> I have read Brion Vibber's long message yesterday. I appreciated the 
> frankness of the message: however, I have a different opinion, and I would 
> like to explain that below.
> 
> His analysis could maybe (roughly) summarized as follows: "we need the 
> money, we really need it, we understand that a little adv is annoying, but 
> it's really tiny, it's not exactly advertising, and it's only for one 
> day". 
> 
> 1) A company pays and gets some webspace with its name and 
> hopefully a logo in it. This is proper 100% advertising. The same one 
> which every big company does every day all over the world on TV, web, 
> magazines, etc. 
> 
> 2) The icon is thin, should we deduce that the advertising is just  
> tiny and harmless? When measuring the impact of it, one should look at 
> all parameters: the adv is tiny on 
> each page, little in time (1 day), but really enormous in number 
> of web pages (some millions: every page on every project!). Summing all 
> up, it is a huge advertising campaign, reaching many thousands of 
> people. 
> 
> 3) Reaching many thousands of people (editors and readers) with a little 
> annoying message. That is what it is, concretely. There is a name for 
> things like that, which everyone knows and detests: it's "spam". Don't we 
> all detest spam? I think so, there should be no need of discussion about 
> that.
> 
> 4) For this simple reason I disagree with the choice of the WMF of putting 
> name and logo of a donating company on each page. We editors do our little 
> constant work everyday against self-promotion on the encyclopedia. We say 
> "no" to unknown artists, tourist agencies, little companies who simply try 
> to write few lines about themselves on a single page. Recently, a message 
> (was it from the WMF?) was written in order to wake the troops: "we 
> are losing the battle against self-promotion!". In the meanwhile, we see 
> a big company spammed *everywhere*... One could argue that promotion 
> "inside" the encyclopedia is different from "outside", but the web page is 
> the same.
> 
> 5) We need the money. Ok, but how much? Of course I have no idea of the 
> answer. My humble opinion is however that we shouldn't spread names and 
> logos all over the encyclopedia. Donations from big companies have to 
> be encouraged, but they should be thanked in a single appropriate page, 
> not in the main namespace. Of course we will get less money from each of 
> them, but we could stress this fact when asking for funds: "following our 
> policies, we have no ads: please be generous". Some very well known NG 
> Organizations apply this policy since years, and they are still alive and 
> in good health.
> 
> A thing is maybe worth saying to avoid misunderstandings. I know 
> what the GFDL says, I am not by far "anti-commercial" or whatever like. I 
> am happy that more people earn some money thanks to our work: this kind of 
> license is simply magic.
> 
> That's all.
>   best,
> 
>  Bruno Martelli AKA Ylebru (from it:wiki)
> 
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