It's a joke parodying http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA032/en/US
I can't imagine Scott or a tiny git website is in need of money.
Amusingly, if you try to enter an amount greater than $25000, google checkout just dies.
I can't imagine Scott or a tiny git website is in need of money.
Amusingly, if you try to enter an amount greater than $25000, google checkout just dies.
even if such 'influence' is disallowed, just the possibility of it occurring would hurt the site
They should just get one big sponsor per year to cover their costs and be done with it. Why not have a McDonalds or Pepsi banner somewhere in the corner? Bargain branding for them, free wikipedia for us.
And to limit the influence they could make it a rule to switch sponsor once a year. Why not auction the ad-spot and donate the overflow to charity?
$("#siteNotice").hide();
I just wish there was some way I could pay money to turn off the Massive Banner Ad off for a year. I'm happy to pay around $100-$150/year for WIkipedia, but the user experience is starting to degrade when a signicant chunk of my screen is a Massive "Urgent Appeal" banner.
div#siteNotice {
display: none !important;
}Also, why would you prefer an ad to the donation banner? Ads tend to promote excessive consumption or try and manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money. They tend to be animated, or play sounds, or dance all over your content. They provide vectors for malicious code to be injected into your site.
Instead, we have the founder of a highly useful collaborative educational resource (or sometimes some editors of same) asking for donations to support that without being beholden to corporate interests. Where's the problem?
It seems like an ad could be much more profitable than the donation banner, because ads can be targeted, even with zero behavioral history. For example, if I'm visiting a page on the new Tron movie, show me ads for the Daft Punk album! Odds are I might buy it.
Also, all of the things you said about ads could be said about in-house donation banners.
* Manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money
* Tend to be animated... etc
* Could provide vectors for malicious...Yes, I'm sure that ads could be more profitable than a donation banner. This is why most websites have ads instead of donation banners. However, Wikipedia is not a for-profit enterprise. It is an educational non-profit. If it were a for-profit enterprise, people would trust it much less, not as many people would contribute to it since they'd wonder why they were donating time and effort to a for-profit enterprise, etc.
And none of those things you list are true of a donation banner. Donating to an educational non-profit is not a "baser desire." I have never seen an animated banner asking for donations on Wikipedia, nor anywhere else that I can think of off the top of my head. And donation banners are coming straight from Wikipedia, not a third party; if they wanted to send malicious code, they could do so directly. The point is that ad networks are notorious vectors to allow malicious code to be injected by third parties into other people's sites.
The decision to make money from advertising (or other services other than charitable donations) is independent of the decision to be a mission-oriented non-profit or a for-profit. A non-profit can still make most of its budget from selling considerations; see for example The Mozilla Foundation.
You'd be surprised to learn how many people have no idea wikipedia is non-profit. A lot have no idea that you can edit articles and just assume it's a regular encyclopedia written by paid people. I have witnessed people telling me this too many times, and yes, it's pretty depressing.
Such a system might generate 10X the revenues. If Wikipedia doesn't need them all, either for current year operations or a lasting endowment, they could liberally fund other free-culture projects with the surplus.
The biggest risk I see -- and what I believe to be the de facto reason ads haven't been more seriously considered -- is that a large portion of the editor community shares your (IMHO irrational) fear of ads, and this fear could become self-fulfilling if the introduction of ads drives away editors.
Even this might be addressable with careful handling, though. For example, what if there was one official Wikipedia mirror that had ads -- rather than the hundreds of unofficial ad-drenched mirrors? The default site would still be ad-free, for all editors, users who opt to visit or link-to the ad-free site, and inlinks from ad-free or primarily non-commercial sites. But, inlinks from major commercial entities (like say Google) would go to the ad site, unless that user had opted differently.
Doesn't that give everyone what they want -- lots more money for free culture projects with a large default sphere insulated from the 'corrupting' influence of money?
Wikipedia is a huge project with tremendous social value. It is sad to me that you may be right that an advertisement would bring in 10x the revenue, because it means we're in a culture in which one expects to perpetually be in commercial relationships. This makes the user more likely to purchase a consumer good than they are to donate to a service that has been consistently offering them more value.
The reason for this is that any direct donation based system is deeply damaged by the mass tendency to assume that someone else is in a better position to donate. In fact, the more valuable (and successful) a project is, the more this becomes a problem. But this problem is cultural, in an ideal world people would have a greater social responsibility without the need for assuming someone else is going to take care of important services like these. To push us in that direction, we get a giant fucking picture of Jimmy Wales to make us feel guilty and give. Personally, this has about the same negative impact on me that an advertisement would, albeit for different reasons.
I think the real solution is for Wikipedia to find a better way to fund itself in a grassroots fashion. I have trouble seeing how the Wikimedia Foundation can't come up with other ways to fund themselves. They have a tremendous amount of content and data. I'd love to see them build something they can sell that would support Wikipedia's operations.
There are other advertising models. For instance, why not Google ads or Bing ads? I don't see how there is much danger of those influencing editorial content.
(TBH I didn't actually recognise the parody myself and thought it was just a fairly crass call for donations that made a couple of silly claims. I guess I should read the small print).