The revenue could allow Wikipedia to take on ambitious projects to further its mission statement, similar to the Mozilla Foundation or NPR.
Unlike most publishers, Wikipedia doesn't need to worry about maintaining a firewall between sales and editorial -- so I think it's a natural fit.
I would rather that they either continue to work through donations, or figure out how to sell their content directly.
Ultimately, I think the use of advertising as a proxy mechanism for charging customers is an inefficient historical fall-out of the constraints of magazines, television, and the web. Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things:
- A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume
OR
- A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
For example, ads encourage sharing. With a paid product, you have to gate access. But then there's a sort of implicit conflict between wanting as many consumers as possible, but wanting to get paid. And especially because it's hard to know the quality of digital media without consuming it, it's hard to know whether it's worth paying for. So there's a ton of friction. That barrier to entry stops virality cold, which limits distribution, and also revenue.
There are ways to do ads well. Google is the obvious example. Highly relevant, not particularly distracting, and take advantage of the intentionality of the searcher.
I think ads are a naturally better revenue stream for digital content. Not to say that they can't or won't be abused.
As someone who works for a different video streaming site (that also has legal content licenses), your ire may be misplaced. Rather than a lack of respect for the customer there's a very likely possibility that the ads must be shown, even for subscribers, due to licensing agreements.
- A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume
OR
- A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
I think it's more indicative of a website trying to pay its bills.
A lot of assholes ruin their content with ads, for sure. A simple text ad or one, small ad, like a Deck Network ad for example, would hardly be so damaging.
It is possible to remove edits in a way that makes the diffs inaccessible. Currently, such power is used in a tiny minority of cases (e.g. personally identifying information). If Wikipedia entered into commercial partnerships with advertisers there would be great pressure to use those tools in a non-neutral fashion.
Selling ads, they'd get a little money from a lot of people. Angering a company that's paying $50 a month isn't a big deal because it's just $50 and if they pull out Wikipedia can sell the ad to somebody else.
On the other hand, in this case they're getting a lot of money from a single person. They might think twice before posting negative information about somebody who just donated $500k.
That being said, a subscription service would be good, and some folks would cry out voiciferously that they can go read the encyclopedia in the library for 'free' why not on the web.
Culturally I think the world is coming to grips with the notion that information has intrinsic value, and that compensating that value achieves the goal of creating additional supplies of information. Interesting process to watch.
Perhaps the problem with formulating such agreements is that there is no precedent.
The Wikipedia authors and editors I have heard speak about this topic seem to be strongly opposed to any kind of commercialization and ads. Writing for Wikipedia is not always fun and sometimes tedious and annoying work. I don’t think Wikipedia can afford to ignore their authors and editors or risk losing them. It’s not like they have to do any work for Wikipedia and it seems like many are doing it for idealistic reasons.
For that reason alone I don’t think it’s very likely that there will ever be ads on Wikipedia.
Wikimedia would have to try very hard to win over as many authors and editors as possible beforehand and would probably also have to give them a lot of say in how ads are implemented and how Wikimedia is run (I think many would demand absolute transparency from Wikimedia and that they justify any and all spending in detail).
Another way to bring ads to Wikipedia might be some sort of grass roots movement from the community. I, however, don’t see anyone who would be willing to start such a movement and I also don’t see how such a movement could win over large numbers.
Wikipedia’s relatively federal structure would certainly allow for interesting experiments. It would be nice to test ads in some smaller Wiki, maybe the Russian or Spanish Wikipedia. That would be a lot more responsible than just introducing ads everywhere. But political pressures inside Wikipedia would require a political genius when it comes to actually implementing that.
I mean that's not too obtrusive but would surely bring in a lot of money. Football teams get £20m a season to put a name on their shirt so...
I'd much rather deal with Jimmy Wales' pleas every so often than to wonder if maybe [insert sponsoring entity here] had some role of changing the tone/content/whatever of a given article.
Additionally, they sell items off their website which have nothing to do with repackaging their content:
http://pbskidstoys.shop.pbskids.org/
http://pbskidstoys.shop.pbskids.org/school-supplies/back-to-....
Here's a page with an ad for "argosy university" which says "support provided by". The logos for the major funders appear in the bottom right of the same page (this is what is typically done in a pre-roll). I'm pretty sure the reason that Argosy does this is for ad value.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/
While certainly appearing more tasteful than typical ads there is still ad value that these companies receive for their donations and support.
1 http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/161440/pbs-pro...
Another idea is partnering with a search engine. Add "Search for X on Google/Bing" to their search drop-downs and add a tasteful "Search in Google/Bing" on each article plus the search landing page. This wouldn't be very intrusive, many users would find it useful, and it's hugely valuable for the search engines.
It seems like such a missed opportunity. The additional money raised could be used in so many ways: investing in full-time researchers and fact-checkers, having full-time photographers, creating teaching materials, or freeing up copyrighted content. Content, afterall, is their core competency.
Wikimedia could be the Google of content if only it had the leadership and ambition.
I'm haven't thought of many reasons to like ads over they years, but this is one.
Way better than that huge begging sign on every page.
Hrm. Obviously this is a good thing, but...
Wikipedia tells me that Brin's net worth is $16.7B. Very roughly, my "net worth" (in the sense of assets required to duplicate my income) is $2M. So that's the equivalent of my dropping $59 on them.
Obviously all gifts are good (as long as you, like me, value wikipedia). And this is a big one. But it hardly qualifies as earth-shaking philanthropy. It's the gift amount Brin would be expected to give, I'd say. Obviously there's a lot of apples and oranges here; both of the numbers above represent "tied down" assets and not disposable cash, etc...
But shouldn't the extremely wealthy be held to higher standards about what they're expected to do with their charity? Why must it be news when someone like Brin does the equivalent of clicking on "Donate via PayPal".
I guess one good thing came of this though: lest I feel like a hypocrite, I went to Wikipedia and clicked on "Donate $100". So that makes me a better person than Brin, I guess?
Every time someone wealthy donates a whole lot of money to a philanthropic cause, people like you pop up in the comment section. "Oh it doesn't matter, it's only X% of his net worth, that's the same as me only donating Y". Seriously, you followed this template almost to the letter.
First, charity isn't a competition over who can sacrifice the most. At the end of the day, that $500,000 helps Wikipedia five thousand times more than your $100. More, probably, because his donation raises the profile and will convince others to donate. Second, people aren't "expected" to give anything, regardless of how much money they have.
I think the thing that annoys me the most is how obvious it is you came in here with preconceived anti-rich notions and then did mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you're "a better person" than this incredibly generous man. If you want to spread that kind of negativity around, go back to Slashdot.
I'm sure someone can articulate this better than I can, but seriously. These sorts of posts just piss me off.
That's actually something philosophers of ethics (not to mention theologians and regular people) disagree on considerably; there is a pretty big range of positions on charity as a choice and/or obligation that are widely held and defended. The "never an ethical obligation" view is one, but probably isn't the majority one, though it's more popular now than it was in previous eras. But an HN thread about Sergey Brin probably isn't a good place to settle that debate...
I'm sorry to nitpick, but while we're discussing appropriateness and lack thereof, can you avoid saying things like that? There is no constructive purpose that that mention could possibly serve.
First, charity isn't a competition over who can sacrifice the most.
At the end of the day, that $500,000 helps Wikipedia
five thousand times more than your $100. More, probably,
because his donation raises the profile and will convince
others to donate. Second, people aren't "expected" to give
anything, regardless of how much money they have.
Furthermore, it could easily be argued that Sergey Brin benefits far more from Wikipedia's existence (perhaps 5,000 times more) than ajross, and this donation is him showing his appreciation for that benefit.
However, I do agree with you on his self-righteousness, that is uncalled for. It is quite irksome to see someone criticize anyone for volunteering a large amount of their hard earned money.
Ask a Christian that. A rich man giving a lot doesn't mean anything if it isn't a sacrifice. Just like doing good things for the humanly recognition isn't the way to give. So says Matthew).
Just sayin'.
They aren't getting press for this donation to say "holy shit he's a wonderful man", they're doing it to encourage others to donate. As the quote in the article says, "This grant is an important endorsement of the Wikimedia Foundation and its work, and I hope it will send a signal".
To people who know who he is, it's a personal endorsement, to people who don't, then a $500k donation looks huge and acts as an endorsement in itself.
Additionally, it acts as a human interests piece to remind people that they too should donate - i.e. this story gives sites like VB the chance to write about it.
About the time that these people started showing up, we lost the ability to see upvote and downvote counts, which made it difficult for new users to understand the "rules". They copied the customs that they used at places like reddit and digg (upvote what confirms your biases, downvote what doesn't).
What you're saying, while disagreeable, is an interesting and well stated point. You're not spamming, you're not flaming, you're contributing to the discussion, and you absolutely shouldn't be downvoted for it, certainly not to the extent that you are.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Well, no, nobody should be held to any "standards" about what they do with their charity. It's his money, he earned it, and if he chooses to give it to charity or build a giant gold statue of himself it's his business. If there's anything he's obliged to pay out to others, it's already been taken care of, many times over, in the millions or billions of dollars in taxes which he has already paid, so as far as I'm concerned, let him do what he likes.
Now, of course, if he chooses to give any money at all to charity then that's very kind of him. And I'm sure he already has, and will continue to do so over the course of his life. But there's many good uses for philanthropic dollars, and while Sergey Brin could give fifty million bucks to wikipedia if he felt like it, I don't think it'd be a good use of money.
I'm not talking about holding Brin himself up for more Wikipedia funds. I'm saying that throwing a party about a gift that is (literally) the equivalent of pocket change is a bad idea. It leads people to believe that gifts like this are an example of how philanthropy should work.
And it's not, it's a big lie. It's part of a public relations push to squeeze more money out of people (like me) with far less relative giving ability. And I find that distasteful.
You're looking a gift horse in the mouth.
That sounds nice on the surface. But imagine two people, each of whom, say, built a hospital for children:
One guy is greedy, and built the hospital only because he knows that parents will pay just about anything to heal their children. He used the best architects and materials to create a world-class facility to help attract the best doctors, because then he'd be able to charge top dollar.
The other guy has a heart of gold, and is just desperate to have something to serve those poor unfortunate kids. So begs for funding, and cuts every corner, to create a facility.
Flash forward a year, and we see:
#1 - Parents picketing outside, calling the owner of the hotel an evil 1% because it costs so much to treat kids there (because it costs so much to run the facility, and the greedy owner wants his share too).
#2 - A pile of rubble, with weeping parents because of the dozens of people killed -- including the child patients -- when the building, with all the cut corners, collapsed.
In these two stories, who is the bad guy?
My friend claims that #1 is evil, and #2 is a hero, entirely based on the intent of each. How can that be, when #1 is successfully making kids better, and #2 has caused their deaths? Do we want to have more of #2, and fewer of #1?
i'd be happy to upvote you as soon as you drop this $59 on them.
Maybe that will be my weekend project!
There is also a user-driven project to organize Wikipedia articles into books, although they currently just use the articles verbatim as chapters, which doesn't address things like redundancy between articles that makes sense when they're articles, but should ideally be removed if they were going to be printed as book chapters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...
Here's an example one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Compiler_construction
I have thought it would be a great revenue source for the WMF. Make little books based on certain articles like the List of Common Misconceptions. Sell them as impulse purchases near checkout counters in bookstores. Step 3, profit.
The fundraising team at the WMF isn't really into it, they don't want the hassle of making & distributing physical objects that may not even sell. But it would be a cool project for the right team -- maybe if you want to build your resume as a book designer.
Just joking, that's a nice donation. My wife was totally freaked out this week though...she had never seen the donation banner before.
1. She had no clue who this guy was suddenly staring at her 2. Didn't know Wikipedia needs $
Sergey: "hey Jimmy, how much do I have to pay you NOT to see your creepy face on every wikipedia article?"
Jimmy: "Well...."
Seriously, why are so many people complaining about this?
What makes me a bit uncomfortable is that these ads associate Wikipedia very strongly with a single person.
(I'm sure there are people who think Wikipedia is neither independent nor objective; I have no informed opinion on that. But for argument's sake, let's assume that it is and that this is what the contributors strive for)
>It was an excellent year for the Wikimedia Foundation from a financial perspective. The 2010-11 plan called for us to increase revenue 28% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million, and to increase spending 124% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million. In fact, we significantly over-achieved from a revenue perspective, and we also under spent, resulting in a larger reserve than planned. We closed the year with a reserve of $12 million, up from $7 million the prior year. This over-achievement is primarily due to the success of the 2010 WMF fundraiser. In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation refocused from a mixed revenue model to a strong primary focus on the annual campaign: this resulted in our shortest and most successful campaign to date, raising $15 million (up 72% from 2009's $8.7 million) in 50 days (25% fewer than 2009's 67 days). If you include the $6.5 million received by 12 chapters which acted as payment processors in 2010, the total raised by the movement in the 2010 campaign was $21.5 million.[1]
[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/72/Audit_...
If wikipedia wanted to survive, it'd trim back it's massive spending.
This is interesting because Anne's mother, Esther Wojcicki, is on the board of Creative Commons [1], which is what Wikipedia uses.
------------------------------
> Why can’t we have Stypi recording all changes made to Wikipedia articles?
Because Stypi didn't exist until a few months ago?
Ok, more seriously: I and my colleagues have talked to everybody else that ever did collaborative editing tools. We know the Wave guys, the Etherpad guys, and others, over the past year. I myself did a little analysis of Stypi a little while ago to try to learn some things from them.
We are working on this problem. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results shortly. The new editing "surface" is making progress by leaps and bounds lately.
See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future and others.
There are reasons why we can't just grab anything off the shelf like Etherpad, Wave, Etherpad-lite, or Stypi. MediaWiki already has a huge infrastructure of tools behind it and the entire community model is organized around chronologically ordered single-user discrete taggable edits of a very specialized format. Wikipedia wouldn't work well without all the bots and scripts that our community has written, and then we'd have to rewrite all of them too.
Etherpad has plain text with bold and italic. Stypi has even less, as far as I know. It is possible to use these editors to create a collaborative way to edit wikitext (I did an experiment this summer to do just that). But that doesn't get us any closer to a GUI editor, which most people think is a sine qua non.
Given the resources we have devoted to this -- basically some of the time of four or five engineers since March or so -- progress has actually been pretty good. Anyway, that's a slice of life at the WMF. Just so you know, in my corner of the world at least, we really are trying to make things awesome and it isn't costing the world a whole lot.
> Why can’t we create more engaging Wikipedia articles using > something like Popcorn.js for videos?
Again it comes down to the wikitext format. We do not have the liberty of banging out a new JS library and content model and then slowly adding features.
Because the Foundation is adamant about never deploying any technology that's not 100% open source, we missed the whole wave of Flash-based video. Only in the past few years has it become possible to seriously do open source video in the browser. Michael Dale from Kaltura has written some great HTML5 video libraries for MediaWiki; watch for them on Wikipedia in the near future. In the meantime we're also upgrading our APIs and storage infrastructure to support uploading longer format videos and so on.
This brings us into parity with maybe Youtube circa 2007 or so, with some more advanced editing and annotating tools due to the wiki-nature of everything we do. But better late than never.
Some areas are probably not suitable for advertising. Would an ad on "Holocaust" or "Lynchings" really be acceptable?
And so the problem then would be the megabytes of meta "discussion" about why some page should or shouldn't have ads.
Feels like a nonprofit.
Anything to keep Jimmy Wales off of my screen is good.
Wikipedia should consider experimenting with different business models to generate money. Mozilla makes most of it's money from Google. By placing Google.com as their start page, they split the revenue generated from ad clicks - it's around 80% of their revenue (I looked at their financial statements long ago but can't remember specifics).
$500k to Sergey Brin is pocket change.