[Foundation-l] Advertising and service at the same time

Fri Mar 21 05:55:57 UTC 2008

On 3/21/08, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Brion writes:
>
> > Advertising brokers such as Google already attempt to make ad
> > selection
> > based on contextual information as relevant to the reader as
> > possible --
> > there is a direct commercial advantage for them to provide ads that
> > readers will want to click on.
>
> This is my understanding as well, although I think it should be clear
> that the "broker" function is typically highly automated (for
> countless good reasons, including privacy-related ones).
>
> > That sort of direct dealing with individual advertisers and articles
> > is
> > *exactly* the sort of thing that would be considered suspicious.
>
> I absolutely agree. Historically, this has been a problem for
> newspapers and other traditional media -- so much so that, at least in
> the American newspaper tradition, there has been an attempt to build a
> cultural barrier between "church and state" (between the business side
> and the news side of a journal) in order to diminish or circumvent
> this hazard.
>
> A sufficiently clever set of algorithms could, at least in theory, do
> an even better job of separating "church and state." The question
> becomes whether you trust the people in charge of the algorithms
> (Google, say).
>
> Obviously, no one should reflexively trust Google (or another other
> large commercial entity), even as a broker. But it should be noted
> that Google's value in the marketplace lies precisely in the extent to
> which it can convincingly demonstrate that it is a comparatively
> neutral broker (a "featured" link is clearly labeled as such, and all
> other links are algorithmically ranked). To that extent, Google as an
> advertising broker is in many ways more transparent than the
> traditional organs of journalism (newspapers, magazines, TV news
> programs, and the like).

Just to be clear, this is not the view all people hold about Google.
In fact there is a notable minority who feel that in a wish for great
relevance to the reader, google slipstreams their browsing habits
and thus is far likelier to link to sites like wikipedia, than to some
sites under their own customers radar, and thus their readers -
according to this view - are more likely to get more of the same,
rather than something new.

>
> This discussion is meant to underscore that the discussion of the
> effect of advertising is complex. Not least is the assumption (or
> assumptions) one brings to the question of whether a reader can
> perceive bias. I happen to believe that most readers in a
> complicated, media-rich culture like ours are capable of making many
> reliable judgments about bias (or, to put it in our own language, lack
> of NPOV). That's why, even in ad-free Wikipedia and other projects,
> countless editors are alert to NPOV problems even in articles that
> don't appear anywhere near ads. Is there a reason to believe that our
> editors will become less able to see such problems if we were to carry
> advertising? I see plenty of credible arguments against advertising,
> but this doesn't strike me as one of them. I have a lot of faith in
> our community of editors as a whole.
>
> So, then, the next question becomes, do we believe we can't trust
> *readers* to distinguish between biased and unbiased content in the
> presence of advertising. If so, then I think we have a moral
> obligation to end all agreements with Ask.com and any other commercial
> enterprise that accepts Wikipedia and other project content and
> redistributes it with advertising. But I think that's probably not a
> correct assessment of our readership, who, after all, consult us out
> of intellectual curiosity, the impulse to ask questions, and the
> desire to do basic research. They're not such a vulnerable population
> either, in my view.
>
> Almost all questions about commercial partnerships for Wikimedia
> Foundation projects boil down to questions about the extent to which
> we trust the wisdom of our readers -- not just active community
> members, but everybody -- to recognize bias when they see it, and to
> make things better when they find things wrong. I worry that if we
> make a top-down decision from the "elite" of our community, we run the
> risk of distrusting the larger community that we have grown up with
> and have grown to rely on.
>
>
> --Mike
>
>
>
> >
>
>
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--
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]