[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Brian]

This seems to be a generally agreed upon point. I don't know of anyone who
has seriously thought about it that thinks that showing adverts in the main
namespaces (or even a meta namespace) would ever be approved by the
community. So the real question is, what about Special:Search? Would the
community be willing to put up with adverts on the search engine if the
funds were mostly put to african schools or an endowment, with a small
portion going to servers/software/quality? Every year that we don't do this
we are deliberately choosing to not put tens of millions of dollars to a
good cause. Is that choice well founded? That's the question that needs to
be answered.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:20 PM, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> >  foundation-l mailing list
> >  foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> >  Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>