[Foundation-l] Advertisement and service at the same time

[teun spaans]

I can recognise both the benefit for visitors of a page and the headache for
volunteers.

Aside from contributing to several wikipedias, i also have a small website
which generates a small income (still insufficient for hosting cosst)
running both amazon and google ads.

The google ads bring in about 3-5 times the amount that amazon brings in.
The amazon links provide imho a better service to visitors. Amazon also
allows better control over the ads displayed, as I select what book/dvd i
will advertise.

IF we allow every company to inserg their own ads, volunteers will indeed be
even more busy to remove unwanted ads. But if the foundation strikes a deal
with Amazon, and just Amazon, we have only one template which volunters can
add or not add to a page. There is little extra risk that this will lead to
an large extra burden on the volunteers. The volunteers keep complete
control over the neutrality of a page.

The main problems with such an approach seem to me:
* how many volunteers are willing to add amazon links to provide income to
the foundation?
* will there be many disputes over neutrality of links to Amazon?
* will links to Amazon only violate our NPOV?
As soon as more than one company is contracted by the foundation, we'll have
volunteers at war with each other about which add must be placed where.



On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:

> or if the advertisement also was a bringing a benefit to the reader ?
>
> I ask the question because my husband opinion is very clear on the
> matter. When he reads an article about a BOOK, he would like that we
> provide as a service, a link to a website where he can directly buy the
> book. Typically, an Amazon link. It would be an advertisement of course,
>  but it would bring a service to the reader. It would not be a
> GoogleAds.  We would be able to exactly select which articles we want
> the ad to be on (for example, all articles about books. all articles
> about DVD). It is not damaging the NPOV of the article. It could be
> identified in a special area. Deals could be made with one, or several
> providers. It would bring some money, but not huge amounts of money (who
> could disrupt the organization...).
> ant
> ******
> That's exactly the kind of example that looks sensible to a casual reader
> and causes monumental headaches for volunteers.  After all, why should
> Amazon.com pay to have an outgoing link from that book article when
> anybody
> can insert that link for free?  And Amazon's competitors can insert their
> own external links for free also?
>
> This problem seriously detracts from encyclopedia-building.  For example,
> the textile arts project on en:Wikipedia. has about 500 articles and 5
> active members.  The topic sees large numbers of of cottage entrepreneurs
> whose only interest is in generating links to their own particular online
> stores, and smaller numbers of professional PR folks who pepper articles
> with pitches for this or that brand name.  Extracting that dross is no
> fun.
> Look away for a few weeks and linkspam even creeps into the navitational
> templates.
>
> The problem drains the productivity of the most active individuals and
> turns
> off the fair weather volunteers from helping at all.  To be specific, the
> time I've wasted on linkspam is why our featured portal drive isn't
> completed yet, and why the "Sumptuary law" article isn't in good article
> candidacy by now, and also why I haven't started a new article on
> traditional Maori textiles.  We've also got basics to put in place: 16 of
> the project's 28 top-importance articles are start-class or stub-class.
>
> So Florence, I have an invitation for your husband.  If he really wants
> Wikipedia to save him ten seconds of looking up a product on Google,
> please
> ask him to come help expand "Beadwork".  Five line top-importance articles
> are the price of linkspam management.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beadwork
>
> -Durova
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>