Should Wikipedia run ads that ask for money, or ads that make money?

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 <i>want</i> advertising. In fact, Spanish Wikipedia already forked once, out of concerns that Wikipedia would become too commercial.<p><a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en#Why_doesn.27t_Wikipedia_use_ads_for_revenue.3F" rel="nofollow">http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en#Why_doesn.27t_Wik...</a><p>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".<p>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.<p>Disclaimer, I work for the WMF, although not on fundraising.

One of the best things about wikipedia, some might argue <i>the</i> best thing, is that it is free from all the conflicts of interest invited in by money changing hands in exchange for services.<p>This applies to all free culture, including the OSS world. It would be a tragedy to change it.<p>(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.)

Ask for money. If this model works for them (it seems to), then there's no reason to change it.<p>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 <i>extra</i> income and don't depend on it <i>at all</i>, you are vulnerable (no matter how many levels removed you are from the advertiser).<p>It's also extremely difficult to have a steady source of income and <i>not</i> 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.<p>Note that I'm not <i>against</i> capitalism, but once you depend on it for your income, you and your free speech are at its mercy.<p>I completely agree with Wikipedia for not running ads. It would open a door that once opened is very difficult to close.

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.<p>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.<p>People don't give you money for nothing.<p>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.

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"?<p>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?<p>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"...

<p><pre><code> Capitalism won, try it. </code></pre> 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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.

I've said it before, I think they should just get <i>one</i> sponsor per year and be done with it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Sponsors would certainly wait in line for this ad-spot and personally I'd prefer it over the constant begging on every page.

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

Ads that ask for money: the readers are wikipedia's customers.<p>Ads that make money: the readers are wikipedia's product.<p>Incentives matter.

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).

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.<p>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.

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.

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.

Do we really need an explanation about why a public reference resource should be free from potential conflict of interest?<p>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 <i>nagging</i> its users.<p>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.

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

I've always wondered why Wikipedia doesn't include affiliate links to Amazon on all their book and movie articles.<p>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.<p>Look at the page they send you too when you do try to buy a book in an article: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0802130984" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0802130984</a> . 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.<p>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.

Imagine Google made a live read-only Wikipedia mirror, with AdSense advertisements. Then, donated all resulting revenues to the Wikimedia Foundation.<p>Would that action be lawful evil or chaotic good?<p>What if it multiplied the WMF budget by 20X or more while reducing server expenses?<p>What if Bing did it? Blekko? DuckDuckGo?<p>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"?)

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.

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

There is another issue here as well that isn't being considered.<p>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.<p>That's money that isn't going to other non-profits and potentially non-profits that <i>wouldn't</i> be able to sell advertising and raise money that way. They can only rely on donations and foundation money to support their cause.<p><a href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2011.E2.80.932012_fiscal_year" rel="nofollow">https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2011....</a><p>(pdf:) <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common/4/48/WMF_AR11_SHIP_spreads_15dec11_72dpi.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common/4/48/WMF_AR11_...</a>

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

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

Both, ads that make money while asking for money.<p>This plea brought to you by Encyclopedia Britannica, please support Wikipedia with a donation.

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.<p>Why not?