[Foundation-l] This is not an Advertisement

[Bruno Martelli]

Hi everyone.

I have read Brion Vibber's long message yesterday. I appreciated the 
frankness of the message: however, I have a different opinion, and I would 
like to explain that below.

His analysis could maybe (roughly) summarized as follows: "we need the 
money, we really need it, we understand that a little adv is annoying, but 
it's really tiny, it's not exactly advertising, and it's only for one 
day". 

1) A company pays and gets some webspace with its name and 
hopefully a logo in it. This is proper 100% advertising. The same one 
which every big company does every day all over the world on TV, web, 
magazines, etc. 

2) The icon is thin, should we deduce that the advertising is just  
tiny and harmless? When measuring the impact of it, one should look at 
all parameters: the adv is tiny on 
each page, little in time (1 day), but really enormous in number 
of web pages (some millions: every page on every project!). Summing all 
up, it is a huge advertising campaign, reaching many thousands of 
people. 

3) Reaching many thousands of people (editors and readers) with a little 
annoying message. That is what it is, concretely. There is a name for 
things like that, which everyone knows and detests: it's "spam". Don't we 
all detest spam? I think so, there should be no need of discussion about 
that.

4) For this simple reason I disagree with the choice of the WMF of putting 
name and logo of a donating company on each page. We editors do our little 
constant work everyday against self-promotion on the encyclopedia. We say 
"no" to unknown artists, tourist agencies, little companies who simply try 
to write few lines about themselves on a single page. Recently, a message 
(was it from the WMF?) was written in order to wake the troops: "we 
are losing the battle against self-promotion!". In the meanwhile, we see 
a big company spammed *everywhere*... One could argue that promotion 
"inside" the encyclopedia is different from "outside", but the web page is 
the same.

5) We need the money. Ok, but how much? Of course I have no idea of the 
answer. My humble opinion is however that we shouldn't spread names and 
logos all over the encyclopedia. Donations from big companies have to 
be encouraged, but they should be thanked in a single appropriate page, 
not in the main namespace. Of course we will get less money from each of 
them, but we could stress this fact when asking for funds: "following our 
policies, we have no ads: please be generous". Some very well known NG 
Organizations apply this policy since years, and they are still alive and 
in good health.

A thing is maybe worth saying to avoid misunderstandings. I know 
what the GFDL says, I am not by far "anti-commercial" or whatever like. I 
am happy that more people earn some money thanks to our work: this kind of 
license is simply magic.

That's all.
  best,

 Bruno Martelli AKA Ylebru (from it:wiki)