[WikiEN-l] Advertising on Wikipedia

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> I expressed the problem of advertising, in terms of
> eating seed grain.
>
> We could never have written what content we have
> written, by paying people the money that we have
> received as donations, never mind the frigging
> servers...
>
> No amount of donations could have payed people to
> write our content. Period.
>
> I stop here. Because if you can't connect the dots from
> there on in, to the obvious conclusion... No amount of
> argument can get you to see you have a nose in front
> of your eyes...

The situation is not entirely hopeless.

The community sees that the foundation having money for things other
than servers and bandwidth is useful - they donate a lot knowing that
most goes elsewhere.

The community could potentially come around to a less
advertising-hostile intellectual stance.  There are a number of us who
aren't knee-jerk anti-ads.  I think that the conflict of interest
issues are significant, and am very leery of it.  But I think that the
problem could probably be worked to a successful conclusion.

But I don't think it's a good idea.  It would take a lot of effort to
make the issues manageable.  Many in the community would fight it
tooth and nail.  And as Jussi points out - we can't replace the
community content building efforts with money to pay people to build
content.  It's just not there.  You can't replicate this on ad
revenue.

The Encyclopedia exists because it was a good idea, and Jimmy et al
kicked in the effort to get it rolling, and many people (tens and tens
of thousands of active participants, many more low level active or
small anonymous contributions) joined in.  The community of people
that did form to do that don't as a rule want ads on their contributed
content.

Wikipedia is not necessarily a singular accomplishment - someone else
could get a better try at the same concept going and actually succeed.
 But this one is defined by its community core values, which at this
point include "no ads".  I am not saying that as someone opposed to
ads.  I'm saying it as someone who's relatively impartial on the
question of ads, but who listens to the community, and has no desire
to see it riled up.

We don't need the money.  We do need the community.  At this point in
time, I think even serious discussions about the topic would drive the
community away somewhat.  Therefore this is a bad idea.



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com