[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[Nathan]

(I'll stop spamming my opinion on this issue shortly)

Gregory, I disagree with you when you argue that if Wikimedia is unable to
sustain itself by donation that must mean that the mission lost its
importance or resonance among its audience. This is akin to saying that
combating malaria was not important until Bill Gates decided to donate money
to the cause - and that if he stops, then malaria will once again become
unimportant. As long as Wikimedia projects are popular, advertising revenue
remains an option. If that changes then the question of supporting the
projects through advertising will be moot. But there is a limited community
of individuals willing to donate money to Wikimedia, and some risk attached
to accepting large donations from individuals or corporations - and these
issues can be short-circuited by simply allowing the popularity of
Wikipedia, which it has justly earned, from earning its future stability.

This isn't to say there aren't potentially important negatives to consider -
advertising along content that is vandalised or objectionable in some other
way (as was mentioned with libel, etc.). This is a problem with many
potential solutions, including limited placement of limited advertising -
perhaps only on FAs. Wikimedia doesn't need 100 million a year in
advertising, ads don't need to go on every page. The issue of tax status -
many non-profits have billions of dollars a year in commercial revenues
(even Target was originally owned by a charitable foundation). The tax
implications are not insurmountable.

Nathan

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:43 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> > Involving
> >  contributors by asking for donations is great - relying on the
> continued
> >  generosity of these contributors to put the foundation on a sound
> footing
> >  for the long term is irresponsible.
>
> While I agree with you that many of the arguments against advertising
> are bogus, I can't at all agree with the above.
>
> Wikimedia is a charity and I don't just mean that it has a particular
> tax status under US law, but rather that its fundamental mission is
> one of public service.
>
> Through innovative operation the WMF sites are able to comfortably
> operate, meeting the essential needs to keep the site up and serving
> users, with a fairly small amount of money which well within the
> average level of donations.
>
> Certainly there are additional endeavors which are helpful to the
> mission, like paying for Wikimedians to travel to Wikimanias in exotic
> locations... and these efforts do put a larger burden on fundraising,
> but they are non-essential and could be put on hold if it ever came to
> that.
>
> When it comes down to it... as a charity, a public service, people
> *ought* to want to give Wikimedia money to operate Wikipedia. This
> should be especially viable since most of the operational cost are
> roughly proportional to popularity (and hopefully sub-linearly
> proportional...).
>
> If some day so few people want to give money to keep Wikipedia running
> that it couldn't stay running without ads then truly something wrong
> has been done, and if it really came to that I think we might conclude
> that the world may be better off without it Wikimedia if it couldn't
> even bring donations in to the tune of a fraction of a cent per user
> per month.
>
> This doesn't mean that I don't think that additional modes of funding
> aren't good and worth exploring... and that advertising might be a
> reasonable one... they well may be,  but the notion that failing to
> run ads is irresponsible is just too far.
>
> We need to keep a careful eye on the difference between nice to haves
> and need to haves, and consider how much of the current budget are for
> nice to haves and their related overheads before we could say the lack
> of ads is such a failure.   I don't think it is today... and unless
> the office undertakes some incredible empire building, making it
> difficult to scale back to the essential core mission, I don't see how
> it could be at any point in the future.
>
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