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

[Robert Rohde]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 9:16 AM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Interesting to read that women tend to believe that something like the
> Wikipedia comes from "some rich guy", probably of royal blood and coming
> along on a white horse. :-) Maybe men know better about the Wikipedia and
> its background than women, due to higher internet affinity. (My wife and
> my
> step mother use the internet, but only for a short research, never surf
> around just like that.)
> Yes, Wikimedia and Wikipedia PR must much more emphasize that its about a
> non profit organisation, not a big corporation with thousands of
> employees.
> And make understandable why one should donate.
> About advertising - it will make a big deal not only what the money will
> be
> used for, but also how it would be implemented (not close to articles, but
> maybe on related sites). I wonder what a more thorrough research would
> tell
> us about the acceptedness of advertising. Just following our stomach's
> feeling or asking our WP-buddies (or those who have the strongest opinion
> and urge to tell it to everybody) will not do.
> Ziko
>

Also, these are fairly small samples (i.e. 100 people) to draw conclusions
from.

To take an example from "Should Wikipedia Run Ads":

Purely on statistical grounds, if you have 26 of 100 people say "none of
these things are worth ads", then with 90% confidence, you can only conclude
that somewhere between 19.5 and 33.8% of the underlying population is
opposed to ads.  (Which is on top of the question of whether this sampled
population is a good reflection of the population one would like to be able
to sample).  The smaller breakouts for age and gender are nearly worthless
for much the same reason.

I realize this is just a first run, but if you are really hoping to take
action based on information gathered this way, then one of the things that
ought to be done is increase the sample size.

-Robert Rohde