Author: Richard

Wikipedia is having a donation drive and annoying you about it on every page. They’ve done this before. Here’s a summary of what they’re doing via an article from 2 years ago:

In his letter to Wikipedia readers, Wales notes that the Wikimedia Foundation has a relatively small staff (23 members) and that all of its content is free. He says that donations help the organization cover the increasing cost of bandwidth and help improve the site’s software.

I don’t mind the beggar-banners but evidently a lot of others do. I still don’t understand why Wikipedia just doesn’t run ads on it’s site to raise revenue. Not annoying flashy banners or popups or anything that would compromise it’s integrity – but just some content-relevant text ads at least. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is super-against that notion for some reason:

“Like a national park or a school, we don’t believe advertising should have a place in Wikipedia. We want to keep it free and strong, but we need the support of thousands of people like you,” reads the letter.

Of course, I think national parks and schools should absolutely be funded by advertising instead of donations or taxes. What’s wrong with that? Other than it being too awesome to implement. Or maybe that’s it..

Wales’ appeal has been compared to a PBS pledge drive—annoying at best, unnecessary at worst. Critics have long suggested that Wikipedia simply give up harassing its members with endless donation requests and turn to the ad-based revenue model that supports many other sites that offer free content to users, but Wikipedia has so far been adamantly against this option.

Here is the full text of Wales appeal for 2011:

Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 400 servers and 73 staff. Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 454 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.

When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.

If everyone reading this donated $20, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that’s fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.

This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Thanks,
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder

Stephen Chapman in ZDNet says everything I’ve been saying about Wikipedia and advertising, except better, so i’ll just defer to his words:

As such, the non-profit “free encyclopedia,” as Wikipedia is sub-titled, is only really free to the people who don’t donate. It costs money to operate, and without money to support it, it could be the non-existent encyclopedia. But the way I see it is that there’s nothing wrong with making money for providing a useful service. I get it that he wants to be a non-profit who harbors a site where people can freely access information, but Wikipedia can still be all that even with ads.

Above, he states their desire to keep Wikipedia “lean and tight,” but a site can still be that with ads as well. All they needs is the right person to come on board and discuss options for ad placement, ad sizes, etc. A/B testing would be a cinch with as many pages and visitors as they have, and it’s not like people would stop using Wikipedia if ads were implemented, because Wikipedia is of value to millions of people, daily. Sure, if ads were implemented, I’m fairly confident we would see a vocal few writing sensationalistic posts like “The Death of Wikipedia,” but that would be a short-lived venture and, in my humble opinion, completely inaccurate.

Would it take Wikipedia falling into dire straits before they implemented ads, or would Mr. Wales let the ship sink? I mean, it just seems ridiculous to me that he’s so adamant about not implementing ads. They don’t have to be pop-ups or pop-behinds or bright, seizure-inducing flashy ads or whatever else. The ad environment can be policed, controlled, clean, and facile for users. They could even be rolled out with extremely small, perhaps text-based ads to start with. You don’t have to jump in with both feet right off the bat. There is so much flexibility with ads these days, it’s crazy to continue writing them off.

Now, I understand that implementing ads would shift the direction of Wikipedia away from the ad-less one they’ve been heading in from day-one — as well as whatever that would imply for them as a non-profit organization — but monies gathered via ads could be used not only for sustaining running costs, but other noble facets as well… like donations! Hey, imagine Wikipedia doling out the donations instead of asking for them!

As for the people who would want to keep using Wikipedia without seeing ads, here’s the deal: if someone doesn’t want to see ads that badly, then they most likely already have Firefox with the Adblock Plus extension installed. And if it’s a matter of not wanting to show ads to specific people/regions, then you can control that as well! Display ads to just the top-3 richest cities in America if you want.

This interesting little list claims Top 10 Reasons Not to Donate to Wikipedia and is worth a read.

Then there’s the ad placement jokes…

Previous Wikipedia drives displayed the donation banner like this:

But this round of pleas show pictures of Wikipedia employees and other connected individuals to the left of the message, looking like this:

The images appear over every Wikipedia entry, causing some funny juxtapositions…