[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Todd Allen]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 9:42 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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Special:Search is, by and large, an extension of mainspace, as its
main use is far and away to find mainspace articles. To have readers
see POV ads -before- finding the article they're looking for is
arguably worse in terms of NPOV than having that happen -after- they
find it. So my answer remains the same, let's not auction off NPOV at
any price, and if ads appear there, I will leave.

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