[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Todd Allen]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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Regardless, -external purchase links violate NPOV-. Period. NPOV is a
Foundation issue. The ONLY text that should appear on a mainspace page
is an NPOV article and the standard utility and navigation links, at
least provided the user hasn't voluntarily modified that him/herself
with Javascript tools. Having text anywhere on that page which might
say "Brand X Widgets: The best in the world!" or "Buy the best,
longest-lasting Something around at a great value today!" is
unacceptable and violates NPOV. Worse, with something like Google
Adwords, the text of the ads would likely be closely related to the
article the reader is looking at, compounding the problem.

I suppose, if someone really wanted to sell ads in projectspace, or
other namespaces where NPOV is not a requirement, that wouldn't
violate that critical Foundation issue (that article space must remain
-absolutely free- of POV, be it boosterism or attacks, and ads are by
definition one or the other), but it wouldn't provide a significant
benefit in that case. Wikimedia projects and Wikimedia's mission,
especially the requirement for NPOV, are not compatible with
advertising. Ads are, by definition, POV ("Buy from me, not my
competitors!"), and therefore deliberately inserting them into
projects requiring NPOV (which all Wikimedia projects do)
fundamentally contradicts that critical principle.

That's aside from annoyance, bad PR, volunteers leaving, and the
likelihood of a successful fork (and if no one else were to fork when
ads were added, I happily would.) We'd be left with two equally bad
choices: The Foundation removing NPOV from its list of "must-have"
Foundation issues, or the Foundation to say "Well this only applies to
the -projects-, not to -us-, when we're making money from violating
it." We cannot have both ads and NPOV, so I say let's keep NPOV. It's
really pretty done us pretty well so far.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.