[Foundation-l] Is a research banner "advertising" of the evil sort?

Fri Dec 9 15:23:37 UTC 2011

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 10:06 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9 December 2011 14:58, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't accept your false equivalence between Harvard/Science Po and
>> McDonalds, nor do I believe you misunderstood my point: that
>> advertising is commonly rejected for its potential for various harms,
>> while even those who object to this banner have not rationally
>> presented any possible harm that could result.
>
>
> It increases acceptance of advertising logos at the top of the page.
>
> Getting your logo at the top of a top-5 website? That's *rather* valuable.
>
> Note that this was one of the big objections to the Virgin Unite logo
> in the fundraiser five years ago. Logo = advertising, however much
> equivocation one applies to the point.
>
>
> - d.
>

Perhaps, although I hardly think that was part of the nefarious plan
on the part of Harvard and SciPo. They are both among the institutions
in the world with the best and most positive name penetration; the
connection benefits Wikipedia as much as it does them, and none of the
three are much in need of PR work with the small subset of Wikipedia
editors who saw the banner.

In reply to Tom Morton's point about privacy - the exposure is no more
(and as we now know, considerably less) than we experience every time
we visit any other site on the 'net. I suppose if there are some
people who use Wikipedia (or a very small number of other sites where
they can be familiar with disclosure policies) exclusively, and they
were somehow surprised that the banner took them to an external site
(despite the URL being available via float)... Then those people might
have a legitimate privacy complaint.

Nathan