On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:10 AM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: It would be for free (I mentioned "free" inside of the topic), as the most simple advertisements are usually for free inside of the newspapers. To be honest, I don't have a precise idea. I've started to think about advertisements which are useful to the most of Wikinews readers, like job offerings, buying or selling [used] cars, hotel/hostel prices and so on are. I am not talking about advertisement for money which intention is to promote some product or so. (I hope I've defined that clear.) The first idea was about listing job offerings (one page per day) from one site initially, then from other such sites. However, continuum of thoughts brought me to the broader definition of advertisement (buying/selling, listing various prices and so on). However, if the idea develops, it is possible to have one page per advertisement: "I am selling a Peugeot 207 one year old [[image:photo of my peugeot 207 on commons.jpg]] for XX EUR. My phone is xxx.xxx.". (BTW, privacy reasons are the same as they are on other wikis and on other advertisement places: abuse is always possible.) Besides the primary reason -- making Wikinews more useful for readers -- it may bring a lot of free media to Commons. Possibly, some other benefits, too. I understand that there are a lot of possible problems and I would like to hear them. But, again, I would like a kind of constructive discussion about possible problems, not an ideological discussion. (Again, this is not about payed advertisement.)

I think the idea of allowing advertisements of things which are free, and allowing it for free, sounds great. I agree that it would bring more people into the project. And it would make it seem more similar to other news services. I'm not so sure about allowing, for free, advertising things which themselves aren't free. Will Johnson

I'm also with brian and Terin. I just can't see how it fits in with either the wmfs aims or wikinews. Think of news Sources like the BBC, they have nothing like this. even sky and CNN don't, although they display ads alongside for money, that is something we are definitely not going to be doing. Regards On Wednesday, November 4, 2009, Terin Stock <terin.stock(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:

On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 22:56 -0500, wjhonson(a)aol.com wrote: Public-service broadcasting does not have advertisments. This is what Wikinews is functionally equivalent to. -- Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> Wikinewsie.org

On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 00:06 -0500, wjhonson(a)aol.com wrote: I suggest - before anyone else wastes *any* time on this they read the WMF and Wikinews mission statements quite carefully. This can't be done as part of a WMF project - I'm surprised anyone even proposed it. -- Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.

On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 06:00 -0500, wjhonson(a)aol.com wrote: No. The community cannot act outwith with WMF mission and project guidelines. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement * Adverts do not qualify as educational content http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Values http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Mission_statement Note in the Wikinews mission statement that the project is compared to AP and Reuters - which are newswires who do not carry *any* advertising. I'm not wasting any more time on this. Allowing people to post adverts would be a magnet for spam and repeat upload of copyright violation images. That's before we even get into the potential for abuse I raised earlier. If people can abuse the system to gather personally identifying information they will. "Useful" or "a cool idea" does not magically put something within the Wikinews project scope. The idea is not to emulate the local newspaper. -- Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.

On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 11:38 -0400, Nathan wrote: Yes I did. It still violates all the WMF principles and policies I've left above. If the Serbian mission statement allows it - the WMF will withdraw approval for that mission statement and demand it be revised. -- Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.

I haven't commented on this yet, but I do have one little comment about the non-ideological, practical portion of this advertising thing. The key here is that this isn't some randomly place Yahoo!/Google/MS ad on our site (that's another topic of discussion entirely), it's us purposefully choosing a product or service to push or help propagate. We therefore aren't talking about regular advertising, but rather about community endorsement of a product or service. By endorsing a product or service (free or not), we would be inherently biasing ourselves to an entire range of stories about competing products. Here an example that is so far removed from the current topic of discussion that we can examine it from an objective point of view: Say we as a community officially endorsed ...Ubuntu, one particular version of Linux . Let's make this easy: by endorsing Ubuntu all we would be doing was placing a download link on Wikinews to ubuntu.com and saying "we think that this is cool!" But that simple act would mean that we would be connecting ourselves to Ubuntu, and, by that association, calling down all of their competitors as an unintended side effect. Because of this we could never write a story about Windows, OS X, or any version of Linux again, or about the companies or groups who produce those products. We endorsed Ubuntu, so we're biased against their competitors in the eyes of our readers. Since we couldn't write about Microsoft without being accused of inherent bias , we couldn't write a story about Sony (PS3) or Nintendo (Wii), since we wouldn't be able to mention Microsoft (Xbox 360) in a non-biased fashion. Following that train of thought out farther, we basically couldn't write about the whole electronics and software industry, due to our minor, seemingly insignificant "endorsement" (if you even want to call a simple link an endorsement) of one product. Now I realize that is a rather extreme example, but there is a reason why most *real* news organizations take pains not to be seen to endorse things, services, people, or places. If you endorse something, you're screwed forever. We can *never* be seen to endorse *anything*. Not ever. gopher65 -------------------------------------------------- From: "Tristan Thomas" <tris(a)waterhay.co.uk> Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 6:07 AM To: "Wikinews mailing list" <wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] RfC: Free advertisements on Wikinews