[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Robert Rohde]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Charli Li <kbblogger at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Advertisements usually do not say "buy this".  However, when an
> advertiser is contracted to financially support an individual or an
> entity, the advertiser wants something in return.  That something in
> return is usually the placing of an advertisement on the venue(s) that
> the individual or entity owns, but that can be different in every
> case.  In Wikimedia's case, the advertiser(s) could edit, or force
> someone to edit, a Wikipedia or Wikinews article about the advertiser
> or something related to the advertiser to make them look good.  The
> advertiser(s) could also spam external links to the point where there
> would be too many that violated the specific guideline(s) about
> external links.

<snip>


Why do you believe the community or the WMF woud tolerate abusive editing by
advertisers?  You speak as if it is a foregone conclusion that advertisers
would control content and I think that is nonsense.  Advertisers who come to
us with that expectation could and should be rejected.  However, many
reputable companies have profiles that are both fully NPOV and which the
companies are quite comfortable with.

Advertisers participating in Google Adwords (for example) have no
expectation of control over the content of the pages those advertisments
appear on, and their advertisements are plainly distinguished.  I have no
reason to expect that Wikipedia should be any different.  In fact if there
are visible advertisements for Widget by X, I suspect the community would go
to extra lengths to strip any self-serving bias from X's article.

Frankly, I think the potential for self-serving content manipulation is much
less with advertising than it is when a large fraction of the WMF budget
comes from a handful of anonymous major donors.  When a single entity
privately donates $300k to the WMF the risk that they would come back later
expecting secret favors seems much higher than when there are many
publicly-visible advertisers each contributing only a small portion of the
WMF's income.

-Robert Rohde