Should Wikipedia Just Accept Ads Already? 608
Hugh Pickens writes "Large images of Jimmy Wales have for weeks dominated each and every page on Wikipedia, making Wales arguably the single most visible individual on the planet. Now Molly McHugh writes that Wikipedia is once again pleading for user donations with banners across the top of its site with memos from purported authors and this week, Wales stepped up the shrillness of his rallying cry by adding the word 'Urgent' to his appeal. Wales attempted the same request for donations last year, and failed to meet the company's goal until Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar donated $2 million and Google stepped in with another $2 million gift to the foundation. This time around the foundation is approximately $7 million short of its 2010 fundraising goal, and Wikipedia analysts are saying the site would be better off with a marketing scheme as Alex Konanykhin of WikiExperts explains that the donations-only, no-commerce model restricts Wikipedia to relying exclusively on free volunteers, losing opportunities to involve qualified professionals who charge for their time in addition to the thirty staff members already on the Wikimedia payroll. 'Advertising is not cool. You're not as cool if you have advertising. But you know what else is not cool? Begging,' writes Jeff Otte. 'We do not care if there is advertising on Wikipedia, so long as it is not ridiculously invasive. So please, replace your sensitive mug with a Steak 'n' Shake ad or something, and start making advertisers pay for people to have stuff for free and not feel bad about it. It's the Internet's way.'"
Blame Jimbo (Score:3, Informative)
I think a lot of people have grown annoyed with Jimbo Wales over the years, myself included, over his reactionary tendency toward censorship. All it takes is for one semi-famous person to criticize some aspect of Wikipedia, be it drugs, sex, or religion, and Jimbo would go in and radically truncate a bunch of pages. Nevermind that he was redacting factual information, he just wanted to "save face". Quality of information seemed to matter less than it's potential for scandal, which is a fantastic way to piss off the liberal-leaning intellectual elite (and by liberal I don't mean the imbecilic U.S. political label).
From day one, he's treated Wikipedia like his own politically-correct version of the truth, alienating countless key supporters in the process. Take him off those freakin ads and maybe, in a few years, people will forget that this megalomaniac took a big crap all over their masterfully crafted articles.
I might be tempted to donate if it was anyone else (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, I get that Wikipedia doesn't run for free. But plastering a big picture of "Jimbo" at the top of every page is precisely the wrong way to go about it. If I'm going to donate money, it won't be because Jimmy Whales himself asked, it'll be because Wikipedia is a mostly-reliable resource of knowledge.
This should have been a "We, Wikipedia, need money" campaign, not a "I, Jimmy Whales, want you to give money to Wikipedia" campaign. And showcasing the unpaid contributors doesn't make me want to give money either. Personal appeals for money work if the person is a celebrity, and they don't actually run, or work for, the charity they want you to support. Otherwise, stick to appealing to ideas, principles, and projects, and leave the individual out of it.
Re:Yo, Jimmy, I've got an idea: (Score:5, Informative)
I completely agree with Pharmboy. The issues I've ran into are:
-Paged fast-deleted for no reason (pages with external sources, links to other Wikipedia pages, etc)
-Trolls that maintain their pet topics to their standards, and lock out changes from others.
-A general attitude that limited information that the admin gang approves of is better than distributed information
I donate to other projects that are free. If I were still able to edit & post on Wiki & have it be used, I'd be donating both time and money. Since I've been run off (not banned at all, just all of my work ignored), I don't donate either.
Re:Big Empty Space (Score:5, Informative)
If you're using AdBlock, you can add a filter to block wikipedia.org##div#siteNotice.
Underwriting vs. standard advertising (Score:4, Informative)
Look, PBS has ads now.
PBS uses underwriting [wikimedia.org], which is a rather limited form of advertising. Non-commercial television and radio stations are limited to giving sponsors underwriting spots in the U.S. You can call them "ads", but they really aren't as obnoxious (although some I've seen recently push the distinction to the limit), and they only appear at the beginning and end of a program.
Wikipedia's article on underwriting [wikimedia.org] is okay, but not really good. The PBS information is clipped from elsewhere, and there is no mention of specific restrictions for non-commercial radio.
In any case, I just donated $35, seeing as how the plea is now urgent. Personally, I usually ignore the banners when I see them, as I assume a lot of people are donating to Wikipedia as something that is of interest to everyone. I generally make my donations to organizations that serve niche interests that don't see as much traffic. A lot of people probably take the same approach. If Wikipedia really needs the money, I hope they have a plan to make it quite clear to these people. This /. article did the trick for me.
Re:Yo, Jimmy, I've got an idea: (Score:5, Informative)
There are scores of people with the means to donate to Wikipedia, and were serious editors at one time, but the "system" turned us away from helping in any way.
Back in 2006 I developed a cataract in one eye [slashdot.org], so the first thing I did was to look it up on Wikipedia. After looking it up I saw a specialist for the surgery, who informed me of a new (FDA approved in 2003) device that replaced the traditional IOLs, an accomodating IOL that unlike older types, is on struts, is operated by the eye's muscles, and actually lets the eye focus like a young person's.
I checked Wikipedia again, and found no mention of this three year old technology on the page about cataract surgery. They had the single focus and multifocal (working much like bifocal or trifocal eyeglasses) lenses, but not the accomodating lens. So I edited it.
A week later the edit was gone. Re-edited, same thing.
Oddly, after I mentioned this in a slashdot comment in an article about editing wikipedia, maybe a year or so later, the accomodating lens was added to the article. Obviously, someone from Wikipedia had seen my comment.
But I'd already given up editing wikipedia; it makes no sense to take the effort to contribute, only to have your easily fact-verified contributions discarded.
just add paid memberships already (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yo, Jimmy, I've got an idea: (Score:5, Informative)
The Wikimedia Foundation isn't pissing people off? I take it you have never read much of the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list (sometimes called Foundation-l), where regularly there are people who do air issues and grievances... including pointed attacks against much of the leadership of the organization.
Some people try to take the issues up the food chain, and on occasion some of those issues do get resolved, but there are some endemic issues that seem to be regularly put off from time to time. One of the issues that seems to still eat at my craw is how the majority of the Wikimedia Foundation is still under the direct control of Jimmy Wales, as he appointed those board members personally and put them into that position. There are "elected" members of the board who as a matter of practice do most of the real heavy lifting work, but they still hold a minority position on the main governing board.
Jimmy Wales himself has sort of stirred the pot from time to time, most notably with his intervention into the governance of Wikiversity and the Wikimedia Commons.... both of which met with some extreme resistance from the respective communities where he was even "uninvited" due to his meddling and forced him to essentially lose his "founder's flag" as a matter of principle with his account. Wikiversity is still a fractured mess, and the Wikimedia Commons community (those who do most of the regular maintenance of that resource) has all but ignored the advise of Jimmy Wales... particularly as it applies to "obscene images".
There are indeed some reasons why there is some complaints about the governance of the Wikimedia projects, and some of it well founded. Perhaps the most current issue is mainly a complaint that the funds are somehow being managed inappropriately. The Foundation headquarters was moved from St. Petersberg, Florida to San Francisco. Perhaps there may have been some merit to that move for several reasons, but it certainly has ended up costing the Foundation much more to hire and keep support staff through financial incentives. Also, the number of staff members has grown considerable over the past couple of years, and there is also some questioning what exactly they are doing other than becoming a bloated bureaucracy of their own which is mainly busy trying to justify their jobs to donors. Most of the new jobs have little to do with the infrastructure of the Wikimedia projects (running the server farm, maintaining the network backbone connection, providing professional software development to the development of the MediaWiki software, etc.) but rather more to "public outreach" efforts or "community relations" issues. In other words, what exactly are those people doing that are spending the donations to the Wikimedia Foundation? In some cases they are duplicating volunteer positions, and those volunteers still exist.
If any of this is new, I hope you are somewhat enlightened. There are some complaints, and for me well founded complaints too. Some of the administrators do get rough from time to time when dealing with new contributors to Wikipedia and the other projects too. An "admin" really is just a volunteer position, which also brings in the problems with volunteer leadership and how to keep that under control. There really isn't an effective way to reign in admins unless they are being blatantly abusive, so for the most part the process to become an admin is usually set at a pretty high bar to begin with. Most of the time what happens when somebody gets upset with Wikipedia is that those new contributors usually have a different viewpoint about what Wikipedia is really all about, and if those new contributions go "out of scope" for what a typical administrator is looking for there are usually conflicts with those new contributors and the admins. Some admins are very blunt about the issues too and don't do a very good job of working with these new contributors either.... which is also why some people occasionally get a bad first impression about Wikipedia. Enough of those with a bad first impression exist where it is a negative factor for new contributors as well.