[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

Tue Mar 18 17:30:16 UTC 2008

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Gerard Meijssen's mail client expels the following stream of bytes on
18/03/2008 07:29:
> Hoi,
> How do you substantiate your assertions? It reads like arguments of faith.
> Adds do not say "buy this" when they are so unsophisticated they will not
> sell much.
Advertisements usually do not say "buy this".  However, when an
advertiser is contracted to financially support an individual or an
entity, the advertiser wants something in return.  That something in
return is usually the placing of an advertisement on the venue(s) that
the individual or entity owns, but that can be different in every
case.  In Wikimedia's case, the advertiser(s) could edit, or force
someone to edit, a Wikipedia or Wikinews article about the advertiser
or something related to the advertiser to make them look good.  The
advertiser(s) could also spam external links to the point where there
would be too many that violated the specific guideline(s) about
external links.
> You assert that we will lose volunteers. The question you do not
> ask is what will balance this loss. The question you do not ask is what the
> value is of the contributions when we have more staff. When we had more
> staff we could work on things like a GUI for our data, one of the biggest
> impediments for the use of our data. We could improve our software and
> support the languages that we currently do not support properly.
Actually, when an individual or an entity is paid to contribute, the
quality (and thus, value) of the contribution(s) will go *down*.  This
is excessively prominent in the People's Republic of China, where
public signs in Chinese are badly translated into English (the English
Wikipedia article on Chinglish has examples of this).  The
translations are usually done by advertisement companies, which wholly
explains why the translations are [almost always] rubbish.  If
advertisements were to be placed in Wikimedia, the same would happen,
though to a wider scale, with the quality of Wikimedia as a whole
going down.
>
> You speak as if advertisements are fundamentally incompatible with our
> mission. For you it is an article of faith. For me advertisements are a
> potential way to ensure that we have sufficient money for the budget that
> has been approved by our board. I doubt that you have a clue how much more
> of an impact we would have when we had substantially more money with the
> same frugal outlook on spending.
They /are/ incompatible.  As what I said above, the advertiser(s)
could edit, or force someone to edit, a Wikipedia or Wikinews article
about the advertiser or something related to the advertiser to make
them look good.  This breaks NPOV.
>
> In my opinion our aim is in bringing information to the people of this
> world. We could do much better if we had sufficient funding. This whole
> notion that there is fat in our budget is based on what, more faith ?
>
>
> [snip]
No duh.  However, many people do not realise that Wikimedia *is a
charity*, proven by Jimbo's Facebook poll.  Only businesses or "funded
by a rich guy who started it" would have run advertisements earlier.

- -- 
Charli Li (vishwin/O)
Hmm, what should I say?  Last week, my approval ratings were in the
30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice
president has just shot someone.  Ah, those were the good ol' days.
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