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

[Mike Godwin]

Brion writes:

>  Advertising brokers such as Google already attempt to make ad  
> selection
> based on contextual information as relevant to the reader as  
> possible --
> there is a direct commercial advantage for them to provide ads that
> readers will want to click on.

This is my understanding as well, although I think it should be clear  
that the "broker" function is typically highly automated (for  
countless good reasons, including privacy-related ones).

> That sort of direct dealing with individual advertisers and articles  
> is
> *exactly* the sort of thing that would be considered suspicious.

I absolutely agree.  Historically, this has been a problem for  
newspapers and other traditional media -- so much so that, at least in  
the American newspaper tradition, there has been an attempt to build a  
cultural barrier between "church and state" (between the business side  
and the news side of a journal) in order to diminish or circumvent  
this hazard.

A sufficiently clever set of algorithms could, at least in theory, do  
an even better job of separating "church and state."  The question  
becomes whether you trust the people in charge of the algorithms  
(Google, say).

Obviously, no one should reflexively trust Google (or another other  
large commercial entity), even as a broker.  But it should be noted  
that Google's value in the marketplace lies precisely in the extent to  
which it can convincingly demonstrate that it is a comparatively  
neutral broker (a "featured" link is clearly labeled as such, and all  
other links are algorithmically ranked).  To that extent, Google as an  
advertising broker is in many ways more transparent than the  
traditional organs of journalism (newspapers, magazines, TV news  
programs, and the like).

This discussion is meant to underscore that the discussion of the  
effect of advertising is complex. Not least is the assumption (or  
assumptions) one brings to the question of whether a reader can  
perceive bias.  I happen to believe that most readers in a  
complicated, media-rich culture like ours are capable of making many  
reliable judgments about bias (or, to put it in our own language, lack  
of NPOV). That's why, even in ad-free Wikipedia and other projects,  
countless editors are alert to NPOV problems even in articles that  
don't appear anywhere near ads.  Is there a reason to believe that our  
editors will become less able to see such problems if we were to carry  
advertising?  I see plenty of credible arguments against advertising,  
but this doesn't strike me as one of them.  I have a lot of faith in  
our community of editors as a whole.

So, then, the next question becomes, do we believe we can't trust  
*readers* to distinguish between biased and unbiased content in the  
presence of advertising.  If so, then I think we have a moral  
obligation to end all agreements with Ask.com and any other commercial  
enterprise that accepts Wikipedia and other project content and  
redistributes it with advertising.  But I think that's probably not a  
correct assessment of our readership, who, after all, consult us out  
of intellectual curiosity, the impulse to ask questions, and the  
desire to do basic research.  They're not such a vulnerable population  
either, in my view.

Almost all questions about commercial partnerships for Wikimedia  
Foundation projects boil down to questions about the extent to which  
we trust the wisdom of our readers -- not just active community  
members, but everybody -- to recognize bias when they see it, and to  
make things better when they find things wrong.  I worry that if we  
make a top-down decision from the "elite" of our community, we run the  
risk of distrusting the larger community that we have grown up with  
and have grown to rely on.


--Mike



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