Technology

Wikipedia and Advertising

By skenmy ⋅ March 23, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

There’s been a flurry of activity recently on the Wikimedia Foundation-l mailing list regarding placing adverts onto Wikipedia (and possibly sister projects, too). I’ve already made a post on my vague thoughts behind advertising - but I feel compelled to write about this particular “scandal” - and my view differs from most.

I think the simplest way for me to describe my feelings behind advertising on Wikipedia is that, given careful moderation of the adverts, they will not harm Wikipedia or any of the sister projects. Perhaps this would entail a special relationship with an ad broker, such as Google. They would also have to be relatively non-invasive. Perhaps only on search results? Slapping them all over articles is not a good plan. Intra-paragraph links, again, a bad idea. Why on search results?

Wikipedia doesn’t document everything. If I went there, and searched for a relatively unknown thing, or a service name, we might not get any results. With adverts, there is another layer of results for the user, who may find them useful if there are no results in Wikipedia. So not only are we assisting users, we are generating a bit of money for the foundation at the same time.

People have argued  that knowledge should be free - and I agree. Knowledge should be free, and Wikipedia makes it free. Introducing adverts doesn’t make it any less free. Unfortunately, we do not live in a free world, and until the Foundation is able to find a way of using the immense amount of bandwidth they use for free, they will always need to make money. Asking for user donations is fine, but that only happens once a year. A regular stream of income would not only be beneficial to the Foundation’s goals, but it would also bring around countless new opportunities, both on and off-wiki.

Of course, it’s always possible to just block the adverts if you don’t like them…

Tags: adverts, wikipedia