

Should Wikipedia run ads that ask for money, or ads that make money? - aaronklein
http://www.aaronklein.com/2011/12/wikipedia-begging-for-handouts-and-building-schools-in-africa/

======
neilk
This FAQ is linked in the comments of the OP, but I thought it bears
rereading. It's not just conflict of interest, it's also privacy, and the fact
that the community just plain doesn't _want_ advertising. In fact, Spanish
Wikipedia already forked once, out of concerns that Wikipedia would become too
commercial.

[http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en#Why_doesn.27t_Wik...](http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en#Why_doesn.27t_Wikipedia_use_ads_for_revenue.3F)

It's true that other projects manage to combine collaboration with some
traditional revenue sources such as advertising. But, rightly or wrongly, this
is the community's choice, and it seems to be how the general public feels
about the site too. There's something about a mission to promote knowledge
that people want to keep mentally, physically apart from commerce. A friend of
mine (non-techie, non-wikipedian) describes Wikipedia as a "sacred space".

Finally, and this is my own take on it, I think there's something valuable
about having the reader community take ownership in something, rather than
just be eyeballs to be packaged.

Disclaimer, I work for the WMF, although not on fundraising.

~~~
executive
except they are running ads right now.. of an ugly guy's face

~~~
cyrus_
You may substitute "commercial ad" every time you see the word "ad" in
discussion about this, if you'd like to be picky.

~~~
wisty
I HATE non-commercialism. It's like saying that a charitable hospital can ask
for money, but can't run a cake-stall to raise it. Charities end up spending a
huge amount of money soliciting donations. Wikipedia's lucky, because they can
nag everyone on the internet for essentially no fee, and even partly deny
service (by offering a gimped service). The Red Cross can't give disaster
victims a nag message before helping and hope to make any more money, nor can
they do it with a good conscience; so they have to spend all their money
asking for donations from rich people who don't currently need their help.

It can go too far the other way, though. I heard that some of the "Pink"
products gave a fixed fee to breast cancer, so buying their stuff wouldn't
give any money. Others gave a tiny portion.

I'll concede that it's a good model for wikipedia - spend nothing, and nag
users for donations. But it's not a great model in general. But it only works
as a replacement for micropayments, and that's where unobtrusive advertising
works better.

~~~
cyrus_
There are a lot of issues with putting advertising on a site dedicated to
providing unbiased information to the public. Advertising is, I think you'll
agree, very unbiased information.

You can argue that users will be able to distinguish between the ads and the
content, but Wikipedia serves a very diverse community -- children, the
elderly, people who can't read very well, people who are more-or-less computer
illiterate. If even a small percentage of them are confused by the ads,
Wikipedia will have failed in a small way.

(FWIW, I've seen technically-literate peers get confused by the current banner
too, thinking the person pictured was the person the article was about.)

~~~
foxit
<http://theoatmeal.com/blog/jimmy_wales>

------
JonnieCache
One of the best things about wikipedia, some might argue _the_ best thing, is
that it is free from all the conflicts of interest invited in by money
changing hands in exchange for services.

This applies to all free culture, including the OSS world. It would be a
tragedy to change it.

(Obviously in the OSS world, people do pay for services, but the important
thing is you can always choose not to. Just as you can choose not to send
money to wikipedia.)

~~~
jaylevitt
I don't know Wikipedia's donor requirements; how do they avoid that same
conflict of interest via donations? Is there some maximum donation per
individual, reporting requirement, etc. that prevents corruption any more than
using an automated ad network like AdSense would?

~~~
baddox
As far as I know, donators don't get any special treatment, and there aren't
any conditional donations (e.g. I'll donate if you delete this article), so
why would donations cause a conflict of interests?

~~~
naz
Say if Facebook donates a million dollars a year, Wikipedia would be
incentivized to treat Facebook favorably.

Obviously this doesn't happen, but that is one of their arguments against
advertising.

~~~
lambda
Right, and one of the reasons this doesn't happen is that Facebook doesn't get
any benefit out of donating all that money, other than the (potential) control
they could get by threatening to stop funding Wikipedia.

Businesses have an incentive to buy ads, and users have less incentive to
donate to an ad-supported site, which means that the funding would be skewed
drastically in favor of advertisers. With donations, yes, you can have large
donors using their clout, but you don't automatically skew the pool of money
towards a few particular interests.

Ads also have problems in that they are juxtaposed with the content of the
site. That can create an implicit sense of endorsement of the ad by Wikipedia,
and vice versa. People manipulate content providers all the time, by
mentioning to advertisers that their ads are juxtaposed with some
objectionable content, and even threatening to boycott those advertisers if
they don't remove their ads. By only accepting donations, you are supported by
people who are much more likely to be dedicated to the free exchange of
information that is your mission, and you aren't putting their name up next to
content that they might object to.

------
orthecreedence
Ask for money. If this model works for them (it seems to), then there's no
reason to change it.

Also, by having "sponsors" you open yourself up to "change this article to be
like this, or we'll pull our support from Wikipedia." This may seem like a
far-fetched scenario, but unless you only use the ad revenue for _extra_
income and don't depend on it _at all_ , you are vulnerable (no matter how
many levels removed you are from the advertiser).

It's also extremely difficult to have a steady source of income and _not_
become dependent on it (like ads). My point being that even if they did run
ads, they would have to still depend only on community donations if they
didn't want to be held on the puppet strings of the capitalist dollar, which
is a hard thing to do.

Note that I'm not _against_ capitalism, but once you depend on it for your
income, you and your free speech are at its mercy.

I completely agree with Wikipedia for not running ads. It would open a door
that once opened is very difficult to close.

~~~
tzs
> Also, by having "sponsors" you open yourself up to "change this article to
> be like this, or we'll pull our support from Wikipedia."

Why can't the people who donate money do the same thing--that is threaten to
stop donating unless an article is changed to their liking?

~~~
orthecreedence
They can...but the difference is that most people reading Wikipedia _enjoy_
the fact that it's unbiased. I can imagine many more scenarios where a
company/corporation would NOT enjoy this.

There are also many more readers of Wikipedia than there are advertisers. This
makes gathering donations a more distributed means of paying their expenses.

------
spodek
Reminds me of a time I saw Craig of Craig's List on a forum in the mid 2000s.
People asked him why he didn't put ads on the Craigs List. With negligible
effort his company could profit hugely.

He politely pointed out that most of the companies that tried to maximize
profit that way went bankrupt in the recession. Meanwhile his company was
chugging along, free to do what it wanted, delivering a product its customers
loved to a global audience with minimal staff, costs, or conflicts of
interest.

People don't give you money for nothing.

Note to the original blogger, statements like "Capitalism won, try it," when
referring to one of the most successful projects on the net, don't make them
look bad. They make you look like you missed something. But that's just my
perspective.

~~~
tuppy
This argument doesn't make sense since Craigslist is already a vehicle for
advertisement. People pay for advertisements placed on Craigslist. They don't
pay their operating costs through donations, they pay by having people give
them money to provide a service (in this case, advertising).

~~~
spodek
Argument?

I said it reminded me of something and described it.

Anyway, try looking for similarities. Anyone can find differences between
things, but what do we learn from that? We already know no two things are
perfectly identical.

I find we learn more from similarities in things we expect to be different.

~~~
tuppy
Perhaps argument was the wrong word.

As a personal note, disagree about what you think we learn more from. I find
differences far more interesting. If the universe was all the same it would be
immensely boring. It's the differences that make us question everything else
that has been the same before.

Metaphysics and all, and quite useless practically. But it's fun to discuss :)

------
jballanc
Why is it that people automatically equate "Capitalism" with "doing whatever
it takes to get your dollar", instead of "producing a better product than the
competitor"?

If competition is essential to capitalism, and if "capitalism won", then why
doesn't the author create a competing service? Certainly, if Wikipedia is
doing something so obviously wrong, then it should be trivial to out compete
them in the marketplace, no?

Ok, maybe the author doesn't have the time to put in the effort that would be
required to create a competing service. In that case, maybe we can ask the
nice people at the Encyclopedia Britannica to help? Oh, or maybe the people
that work on Google Knol? I think maybe they could shed some light on how
"capitalism won"...

~~~
baddox
This was obviously an abuse of the term, but I think I know what the author
means. Presumably, the author is just talking about free enterprise and
voluntary exchange, which tend to be important in a capitalist economy.

------
decklin

        Capitalism won, try it.
    

I don't think this is true here at all. The obvious real-world analogy is
news. I would much rather listen to NPR or the BBC than watch CNN or a local
broadcast station -- I don't care if the latter has "won" by making money, I
care about the quality and editorial independence of the content.

~~~
snowwrestler
NPR makes most of its money from private foundations and corporate sponsors,
both of whom it acknowledges by name on the air. That is a type of ad.
Wikimedia Foundation could raise a ton of money if they just did something
like this.

------
austenallred
I disagree with others making the conflict of interest argument. I don't see
how it would create a conflict of interest if they applied a hands-off, self-
serve (call it laissez-faire if you must) advertising strategy -- in fact this
would create much less of a conflict of interest than accepting direct donors.

But that point is moot. The true risk you run is alienating contributors. The
beautiy of Wikipedia is that they have (almost) completely eliminated the
influence that Wikipedia itself has on the content. It set up the rules and
lets the crowd do the work, and lets the crowd be incentivized by the
contribution it is making to society, like most other crowd sourced projects.
It has created (or is striving to create) an autonomous encyclopedia.

If Wikipedia were to have ads, even if it weren't a for-profit company, it
feels like contributors should receive something in return, a la
BleacherReport.

Bottom line: It's not about conflict of interest, if Wikipedia accepts
advertising it starts to feel like a business, and the incentive of
contributors to keep contributing is greatly lessened.

------
johnkchow
These ads serve a secondary purpose of reminding people that Wikipedia's
wealth of information originates by public knowledge. A lot of people tend to
take knowledge for granted, and I personally feel humbled and grateful for
Wikipedia from their ads.

------
moe
I've said it before, I think they should just get _one_ sponsor per year and
be done with it.

Just stick a permanent "Powered by Coca Cola|Microsoft|Whatever" banner in the
footer; Coca Cola and friends surely won't mind to cover the operational costs
of Wikipedia (and then some) in return.

In order to prevent a sponsor from becoming too influential they can simply
make it a rule that the sponsor must be cycled annually. They could even have
the community vote on the sponsor for the next year.

Sponsors would certainly wait in line for this ad-spot and personally I'd
prefer it over the constant begging on every page.

------
johnohara
I don't know what the answer is for wikipedia. But I do know that I use
dictionary.com less frequently because of the ads.

An extreme example of how far this goes was the Apple iPad ad that ran on
yahoo.com a week or so ago. It WAS the upper fold of the front page. Fixed in
place at 974px by 500px just below the search bar and logo. Bam. Here I am.
Buy me now. No doubt paid some bills but made me think "this organization has
a price."

My impression is wikipedia values the way users interact with its content and
would rather not introduce distractions.

------
InclinedPlane
Ads that ask for money: the readers are wikipedia's customers.

Ads that make money: the readers are wikipedia's product.

Incentives matter.

~~~
matthewj
A good reminder to always pay attention to who/what is actually the product.

------
coffeeaddicted
Wikipedia competes with other companies not just on market share and money,
but even more on attention from people actively supporting it by editing the
information. I see no immediate gain they could get in market share by making
money with ads as they are already having the biggest share of any
encyclopedia with their current way of working. But I'm rather certain they
would lose a lot of editors and would even give a competitor a chance to gain
those people. As little as many people might care about seeing Google-ads, no
one helps Google for free. Swarm driven websites have to care about attention
from people far more than about money as long as they are able to cover their
costs (and they are able to do that as long as they have the swarm behind
them).

------
Yahivin
Wikipedia should absolutely not run ads that make money. Even if they put the
strictest protections in place to prevent advertisers interfering with the
content it would still cast doubt in the eyes of those using the service.

If Wikipedia were to become dependent on a revenue stream generated from
advertisements for products then over time they would become beholden to those
interests.

------
gwillen
This question is a litmus test. Anybody who is unable to correctly answer this
question, and articulate the reasoning for the answer, is not equipped to
operate successfully in the age of free culture.

------
jarin
They should place one ad in the sidebar, with a "request for comments" link
right above it. Run that for a week, post the results, and let the community
decide.

~~~
gwillen
If you follow the history of Wikipedia, ads have been discussed many times.
The consensus has always been "no, absolutely not."

If the WMF put even a single ad on Wikipedia as an experiment, there would be
a community uproar and probably at least one fork (much as the Spanish
Wikipedia forked years ago under threat of ads, and didn't rejoin for years,
even though the ads themselves did not persist.)

Personally, I think that's as it should be.

------
gerggerg
Do we really need an explanation about why a public reference resource should
be free from potential conflict of interest?

Capitalism isn't even involved. It's not about making money, it's about
keeping the resource available and valuable. There are all kinds of "just do
this and you'll make tons of money and no one will get hurt" ideas. But they
truly don't matter. They all devalue the service. And frankly, it's kind of
embarrassing for humanity that we can't modestly fund our most valuable
information resource and that there are many complaints of wikipedia _nagging_
its users.

Servers ain't free, developers ain't free, freedom ain't free. You use
wikipedia? Buck up and spend $10. Think about how the free market isn't about
companies finding money faucets. It's about voting with your dollars. So go
out and fucking vote.

------
aorshan
You can't run ads that make money while at the same time expect people to
believe you are completely impartial.

~~~
phamilton
Google did it. Aside fom the normal skeptics, your average person trusts the
organic results to be truly organic.

~~~
wpietri
Google is very unusual as ad-supported businesses go.

Most ads are distractions from content. At Google, because you are actively
looking for something, people are much happier to get ads. Especially relevant
ones, which Google has invested a zillion dollars in being able to do well.
Google also has incredible power to shape the market, so they can get away
with forcing ads to be in a form that users like, rather than one that
advertisers love.

Google has a further advantage: people generally trust them, even thought they
don't know how things work. The general public is much more skeptical of
Wikipedia, partly because it's so open.

------
JustinSeriously
I've always wondered why Wikipedia doesn't include affiliate links to Amazon
on all their book and movie articles.

I think their current logic is that affiliate links force them to choose which
online store they want to support, which is something they appear loath to do.

Look at the page they send you too when you do try to buy a book in an
article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0802130984> . It's
so large and completist that it has two tables of contents, and it's so
obsessively non-preferential that it does a good job of hiding the one
amazon.com link that most people are probably looking for.

Personally, I've bought 100s of books and DVDs after reading their Wikipedia
articles, and I'd be happy to let the WikiMedia Foundation get my affiliate
dollars.

~~~
Geee
The point is that the information about the book might not be completely
objective when money is involved. It's that tiny bit of bias that might get
injected in the article, by someone who is affiliated, be it Amazon employee
or someone from Wikimedia. When this might not be a real issue, no one can be
sure, and the trust in absolute objectivity is lost.

~~~
JustinSeriously
You're right, but money already is involved in these articles. Authors and
actors (and agents, I've suspected in a few cases) _are_ keeping a biased eye
on their articles.

I think it would be difficult for Wikipedia to be corrupted by money. There's
too much transparency, and there's too large of a community. The admins have
already discovered with dealt with large-scale attempts to game the system.

What's actually at stake here is the _appearance of objectivity._ Affiliate
links, which are nearly universal across the web, should be minimally
objectionable.

------
gojomo
Imagine Google made a live read-only Wikipedia mirror, with AdSense
advertisements. Then, donated all resulting revenues to the Wikimedia
Foundation.

Would that action be lawful evil or chaotic good?

What if it multiplied the WMF budget by 20X or more while reducing server
expenses?

What if Bing did it? Blekko? DuckDuckGo?

Does it help at all that by the CC-SA license, the preferences of the
Foundation or community really shouldn't matter: this is a completely legal
tactic? (Could that help solve the potential financial-motivation-crowding
issues: the fact that such a bonanza occurred "against the community's
wishes"?)

------
antimora
I used to donate to the fund, but ever since I saw their budget that doubles
every year (now it's around $20 Million), I started having reservation on
giving. I don't mind supporting Wikipedia service, but I feel the money is now
being spent on some other initiatives.

~~~
rd108
This is actually what I was thinking too. The fundraising pitch they're
currently running says something like "We have 6000 servers and only 95 paid
staff". I'm not sure 95 paid positions + servers cost 20 million a year, but
then again, Wikipedia does deserve to be well-funded and not have to worry
about making budget year-to-year. I'd like to see a more open transparent
accounting of the funds right there on the fundraising page.

------
webfuel
I wish they had an opt-in ad program so people who don't want to donate can
still help.

------
larrys
There is another issue here as well that isn't being considered.

If you look at the 2010 Financial Report that lists contributors there are a
few foundations that give wikimedia more than 1 million. And there are 6 that
give between 100,000 and 999,999. And then even more that give other varying
amounts. As well as obviously individuals.

That's money that isn't going to other non-profits and potentially non-profits
that _wouldn't_ be able to sell advertising and raise money that way. They can
only rely on donations and foundation money to support their cause.

[https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2011....](https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2011.E2.80.932012_fiscal_year)

(pdf:)
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common/4/48/WMF_AR11_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common/4/48/WMF_AR11_SHIP_spreads_15dec11_72dpi.pdf)

~~~
gerggerg
Wow, so Wikipedia is being greedy by not putting ads on their pages?

~~~
larrys
I wouldn't say greedy is the right word. But they are disadvantaging another
charity simply because they like the look and feel of their community being
free from advertising. Maybe selfish is a better way to put it.

------
vacri
This article reminds me of the developer who simply couldn't understand why
open-source people "willingly work for free".

------
jellicle
The question is pretty simple. The question is whether you want Wikipedia to
be beholden to its users or to corporate interests.

------
shingen
Both, ads that make money while asking for money.

This plea brought to you by Encyclopedia Britannica, please support Wikipedia
with a donation.

~~~
babebridou
This would actually be one of the better ways to do it. The link would only
lead to Wikipedia donations, and the business would be essentially paying for
public goodwill, a hefty sum of it.

Just imagine Coca Cola making a big donation to Wikipedia just to have its
name figure on the donation ad for the "Soda" category. I'm not sure how the
community would react to this, though.

------
Craiggybear
Well, they could do both. Adverts imply a non-impartial editorial stance so I
totally get why they see that as the thin end of the wedge I respect that
totally, which is why I'm happy to donate now and then.

Why not?

