Wikipedia, stick some banner ads on your site and stop begging!

avatar33

avatar33

e-Hustler
Dec 5, 2009
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Calgary, AB
Anyone else thinks it's starting to get really pathetic that Wikipedia keeps begging us for money? Would we really care if they stick 1, 2 or 3 fucking banners on their page as long as their content is unharmed?

npk1f5u.png


"To protect our independence, we'll never run ads"... Most ridiculous statement I've read in a while. Sure guys, you might be independent from advertisers, but you're desperately dependent on your users donations, so what can of independence is that in the end?

The other thing is, I've been giving them $10 a month (paypal subscription) since they first launched their begging campaign a few years ago, and yet they're STILL asking me for more. So not only is this whole campaign pathetic to begin with, but on top of it they are pissing off existing donors like me by asking them for more.

/rant
 


Devil's advocate: Once you're accepting advertisers it opens up a question on whether they're biased on certain topics.

They also might make more from donations than advertisers would be willing to pay for their traffic and they would have to take on a high volume of advertisers to hit the same money. I believe that would mean more overhead for them to manage it all.
 
This page presents arguments for and against ads on wiki:

Wikipedia:Funding Wikipedia through advertisements - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It includes a mock-up showing how ads might be implemented (sorry for the large image, but it's worth seeing):


Wikipedia_with_adverts.png



The ads are relatively non-intrusive. But personally, I'd view some of wiki's content with suspicion if ads were present.
For example, if I'm on the page for gluconeogenesis and see an ad for Lipitor or Crestor, I'm less likely to trust the content.
 
lol at Forest Flakes. In reality that ad would read:

Lose 28 Lbs Of Fat, Add 12 Lbs of Muscle And 3.5 Inches To Your Cock Over Night With This WEIRD Trick!
 
Oh thanks for the reminder. It's time to make a donation to an organization that actually needs your help.

Wikileaks
 
They're missing out on a lot over bullshit liberal ideals, targeted ads could be fun to put in front of people wanting to find out more. But google would probably drop em if they made a wiki-adwords type thing for advertisers.
 
JakeStratham said:
But personally, I'd view some of wiki's content with suspicion if ads were present.
.
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Regardless of the ads, you should still "view some of their content with suspicion". Wikipedia is highly "moderated" when it comes to influential people and pages.

Most people think if it's on Wikipedia it must be true, and that's the end of it. No further digging or verification. And that gives them a tremendous amount of power.

Not that this has anything to do with Oppie and his begging thread. Disregard
 
They could make money even without any ads - by selling shit like pens, mugs, T-shirts, paper notebooks and what not.

amiwrong?

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I'm not talking about intrusive in-content ads here. I was talking about simple banner ads, in clearly defined locations. They would need to state that the content of their articles is 100% ad-free and untouched. Hell even an adsense banner would net them a huge amount of money, considering their colossal web traffic.

Also I don't know what their running costs are, but if banners aren't enough, I'm not against a combination of donation + ads either. Personally I would still be a monthly donor if they had ads, as long as they don't pester me every few months to give them more. They've been a valuable resource to me so I don't mind giving them something back. I'm sure they have thousands of donors on auto-rebill that wouldn't mind it either.
 
dzianis said:
They could make money even without any ads - by selling shit like pens, mugs, T-shirts, paper notebooks and what not.

amiwrong?

rvODirQ.jpg
Click to expand...

This right here. With some clever writing they would sell a fuck load of tshirts
 
Or decentralize the thing, and get universities to host it.

Or apply for various government grants that are available. If I was eligible for a $30k marketing grant from the Canadian govt, I'm sure they're eligible for a few here and there.

Or there's probably 100 different funding sources I could come up with if I owned Wikipedia, vs. acting like a beggar on the street, with this "please, just enough for a coffee" shit.
 
Kiopa_Matt said:
Or decentralize the thing, and get universities to host it.

Or apply for various government grants that are available. If I was eligible for a $30k marketing grant from the Canadian govt, I'm sure they're eligible for a few here and there.

Or there's probably 100 different funding sources I could come up with if I owned Wikipedia, vs. acting like a beggar on the street, with this "please, just enough for a coffee" shit.
Click to expand...

I have a serious question for you. How can you 'decentralize' Wikipedia or something like it without having some type of ownership/control? I'm struggling with the idea of decentralization I don't know if it's really possible. Even Bitcoin is centralized around a small core group.
 
dmnEPC said:
I have a serious question for you. How can you 'decentralize' Wikipedia or something like it without having some type of ownership/control? I'm struggling with the idea of decentralization I don't know if it's really possible.
Click to expand...

Not sure I quite understand, what do you mean? It's just simple content & load distribution. For example, I doubt the entire Wikipedia (or Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc.) site is sitting in servers in the same data center. Those sites are already spread across the world. Content distribution across servers (even in different data centers) isn't new, and we're quite good at it now.

I'm sure many universities would be willing to donate a couple 12U racks filled with servers to Wikipedia if approached properly.

dmnEPC said:
Even Bitcoin is centralized around a small core group.
Click to expand...

That's totally different. Wikipedia is a website. Bitcoin is more like e-mail -- there is no centralization to e-mail, and it's just a protocol that's uniformly adopted throughout the world. I work with bitcoin day-in, day-out, and I don't touch bitcoind anymore, so whatever the core devel group does has no bearing on what I do. The protocol and network is still going to act the same. I guess there might be changes in the protocol at some point, but that's the equivalent of changes in HTML tags, and getting browsers to implement them.
 
dmnEPC said:
I have a serious question for you. How can you 'decentralize' Wikipedia or something like it without having some type of ownership/control? I'm struggling with the idea of decentralization I don't know if it's really possible. Even Bitcoin is centralized around a small core group.
Click to expand...

+1 for this
 
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