[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

Wed Mar 19 05:34:14 UTC 2008

Ads in articlespace would shoot the credibility of Wikipedia down the toilet. We have built our reputation by being ad free, lets not screw this up.

----- Original Message ----
From: Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 10:11:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Advertisements?

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 9:20 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.
>

I don't know what the community as a whole really thinks, but I think
your view that clearly labeled and distinguished advertisements are
fundemental breach of NPOV is absurd.  I trust in the basic intelligence of
our readers to be able to distinguish between a clearly labeled ad and our
actual content.  Do you consider the NYTimes (and essentially every other
newspaper and magazine) to be fundementally biased simply because they carry
ads?

IF ads are ever added to Wikipedia, then I for one would stick with the site
that would be expected to have tens of millions of dollars for further
development rather than clinging to an idealistic, but ultimately
self-destructive, fork.

-Robert Rohde

PS. I'm not saying ads are the only solution, but I consider them an
entirely reasonable option.
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Never miss a thing.  Make Yahoo your home page. 
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs