

Ask HN: Wouldn't It Be Better If Wikipedia Had Ads Than Asking For Donations? - davidsmith8900

- I always ignore ads and I understand that companies need to pay their bills, so when websites have ads it doesn&#x27;t annoy me.
======
crisnoble
I don't think so. If they introduce ads it introduces the opportunity to have
perverse incentives. Right now they want to have the best content for the most
people. When you make money off ads it is all about page views, content
quality is an afterthought.

Imagine a wikipedia where each sub-section is paginated to generate more page
views like Salon or Newsweek. This is why I think we should support wikipedia
directly, so that wikipedia's goal is to make and awesome experience so that
we donate again.

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- I can see where you are coming from. Thank you for clearing that up for me
crisnoble. I appreciate it.

------
dbieber
Introducing ads on Wikipedia would likely do more than show you ads and have
ad providers pay Wikipedia; it would also introduce third party tracking.

Adding ads to Wikipedia would give ad providers the ability to trace your
Wikipedia activity. This would be horrible because the average person would
not understand that their wikipedia history was being revealed to third
parties and this history is often highly personal. For nontechnical users who
do not know about this tracking, this would be deceitful. For nontechnical
users who do know of the tracking but do not know how to stop this tracking,
having ads would severely compromise their ability to use Wikipedia since they
must then become cautious of the way they browse.

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- Great insight dbieber, but why would anyone care about whose tracking their
wikipedia history? I could understand about social networks or porn but what
about wikipedia? Plus people know that they get tracked on certain sites and
yet they still use them. So what is the difference?

~~~
dbieber
One's Wikipedia browsing history is very revealing. For instance people often
use Wikipedia to learn about diseases they (or loved ones) have or are
concerned they have. One should be able to research such diseases without
revealing to advertisers or insurance companies the association between the
user and the disease. The amount that can be garnered about an individual from
their Wikipedia search history is kind of unbelievable. You can figure out
things such as a person's interests, to some degree various aspects of their
intelligence, some things about their medical history, if they are pregnant,
their religious and political affiliations, if they may be suicidal, if they
have surgery coming up, where they live and how old they are, what sort of
pastimes they have, the list goes on and on. You can't figure out all of these
things about all people, but the tracking has the potential to be very
dangerous.

The most common way in which this data is used is targeted advertising, which
probably doesn't concern you. Historically this type of data has also been
used for price discrimination (which you may care about) and this data has the
potential to be used in much more nefarious ways.

Even if we could somehow ensure the data would only be used in acceptable
ways, the fact that the tracking goes on without most people's knowledge or
approval seems unethical to me, and would be particularly troublesome on an
encyclopedia of everything.

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- Thank you dbieber, for a deeper explanation from your side of view.

------
jgeorge
Ads also limit the impartiality of the content. If you read a page about some
company or some technology, and then some ad service decides that that's a
great trigger to place an ad for that company or technology on the very same
page, even if it doesn't spoil the impartiality of the content, it gives the
appearance of impartial content.

This is the same reason why Consumer Reports doesn't take paid advertising in
their publications either.

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- I never knew Consumer Reports didnt take paid advertising in their
publications. Thank you for the knowledge jgeorge.

~~~
easong
I don't mean to be aggressive, but why are you replying to every comment in
the thread with some sort of vague affirmative and a mention of their
username? Your karma count/account age would suggest that you've been here
long enough to know that it's not normal behavior, and I don't see similar
comments in your history (deleted?). Additionally, you have a _lot_ of
submissions from repetitive domains and a low average karma score per
submission. I've seen a lot of fake accounts on reddit trying to build karma
do the same thing.

Apologies if you're not a native English speaker or something, but it seems
fishy.

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- Sorry about that easong. I never meant it to seem that way.

------
mooism2
You ignore ads, so presumably you ignore the ads on Wikipedia asking you to
donate. Why then do you care one way or the other?

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- I care because it hurts me when Wikipedia needs money, and I can't give to
them because I don't have it.

~~~
cprncus
But presumably you also don't have the money to buy the advertised goods that
they would make their money off of if it were ad-generated revenue (unless it
were goods that you _had_ to buy anyway, but I doubt Wikipedia would be making
money off ads for ramen and heating oil).

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- Yes cprncus. I wouldn't have the money to buy the advertised goods, but
whether I buy them or not as long as Wikipedia is making money, it is okay
with me.

------
sp332
Ads don't give much money per-click. Donations average a lot more money from
each person who clicks through.

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- So Wikipedia makes more money from Donations than ads. Thats cool then.

------
cprncus
It's been proven mathematically that any sentence that begins with, "Wouldn't
it be better If Wikipedia had ads than [X]" has the property that it doesn't
matter what X is, the answer will still be "no."

For example:

Q: Wouldn't it be better If Wikipedia had ads than planet-wide thermonuclear
war?

A: No.

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- Thanks cprncus, but where can I find this mathematical statement from?

~~~
sp332
It's not mathematically proven, but empirically derived and sometimes wrong.
It's called Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- I never knew about this link, thank you sp332.

------
sharemywin
to raise the money they need they could run ads for like 1 day. or only on a
small faction of pages.

~~~
davidsmith8900
\- Sharemywin, you and I are on the same page.

