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

[Robert Rohde]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 2:29 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

> Librarians approve the purchase of anything regardless if the material
> in it is needed. Its one of our basic principles, that we pay no
> particular heed to the economic basis of the publication. Even so most
> of us prefer to differentially support projects from the non profit
> publishers rather than the large corporate publishers, and to keep a
> certain amount of the money to support open access--the usual is about
> 1 to 5 5 of the total.
> There are certain business practices we do not do, or at least many of
> us dont. we normally do not buy material that requires the user to
> personally identify himself to the publisher. we normally do not buy
> material that is not going to be available to the entire community we
> are responsible for.
>
> But advertising does not invalidate the quality of a source--it lowers
> it slightly, depending on its nature. advertising from google in WP
> will not ruin it altogether. It will decrease its value somewhat, as
> would any other stain on its possible objectivity.
>
> Thus, local newspapers are not reliable necessarily for covering all
> the embarrassing events of their community.  And so for WP we do not
> altogether trust them for local events where they may not be
> objective.



For the sake of playing devil's advocate, I would like to point out that
there are things which could be accomplished with advertiser funding that
could offset percieved declines in Wikipedia's quality.  It's not a simple
case of advertising automatically implying that Wikipedia appears worse.  If
advertising derived funds allowed for improved technical and management
resources, it is entirely possible that the additional funding would on
balance lead to a perception of higher quality even in spite of the precense
of ads.

That said, if you can get the necessary funds from other reasonable sources
without advertising then that is good too.

-Robert Rohde