[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Brian]

Clarification: That good cause is precisely the Foundation's mission:

> The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people
> around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free
> license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and
> globally.


http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:42 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> 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
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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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.
> >
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