On 25/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
(As I write this, incidentally, I have #wikimedia-donations open in an IRC window on the same screen; each donation notification picked up from the server and dropped into an IRC channel. It's a really heartwarming thing to have ticking slowly by as you work; a note every minute or two telling you how happy people are with what we're doing here. The most recent is "It's an honor to be a part of the worldwide Wikipedia community!" - from someone who was *giving us money* to say that. Just thought I'd share that thought...)
On this subject, here is something to think about.
Which is worse in terms of COI risks?
Funded 100% by donations by 50% of the donation money comes from only 1-3 people/groups.
Funded 90% through ads but with no advertiser accounting for more than 1% of the income.
It's a serious and important question.
It strikes me that it's a tradeoff.
a) you have a COI issue on half a dozen pages - those relating to the big donors - and this issue is *very* prominent. (Half our money comes from, say, Google? Hell yes, we'd all be worried about the neutrality of [[Google]]).
b) you have a COI issue spread across several hundred or thousand pages - those relating directly to the advertisers for those specific pages - but to a smaller degree for each one because we're less beholden to each. (If you give us 30% of our income we can't tell you to go boil your head; if you give us 3%, we can grit our teeth and start kicking)
As Jason notes below, the first case becomes much worse in cases where the donor is anonymous - it's very much a matter of external perception, since the *community* doesn't know who that big donor is and so can't really pander to them, but that's still just as bad.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, the former is probably the
lesser of the evils - it means we can say with reasonable confidence that 99.9% of the encyclopedia is completely untouched by any possible COI, and we can even - perhaps - think about proactive measures like a discreet disclaimer on articles related to our donor. Unpleasant but manageable.
For a model with only a small number of advertisers, you're looking at much the same thing - there is a major worry about COI for each, *but* the limited number means that we can get a reasonable idea of "these articles are to worry about, the rest are completely irrelevant to the adverts and so fine".
The latter case, I presume you're thinking of an adsense model. This makes it even worse than simply "having a hundred advertisers", because it gets more and more diffuse. As a result, at any given time we can't easily say which pages are and aren't "tainted" - *or* how much money we get from any given advertiser. In effect, we have to worry about the appearance of potential COI on a large fraction of our pages, albeit not at a very great level.
The advertising world probably has some complex reputation metric for this...