/Culture/ What’s the deal with Wikipedia?
05/12/2008 | Filed under Discover > Culture
Wikipedia holds 9.25 million articles, written in over 250 languages – and it’s absolutely free to use. But will the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle still fit together if the site accepts advertising, or will it compromise everything Wikipedia stands for? Ian Harris reports
Wikipedia is the world’s ninth most popular website. But last year Wikimedia Foundation’s chairperson Florence Devouard revealed that it’s never more than three months away from closure. Although she later played down her statement, it highlights how funding is an ongoing issue for the world’s encyclopedia, which faces perpetual uncertainty thanks to a model that relies on donation drives rather than selling advertising.
Now in 253 languages, the project attracts 683 million visitors a year. Its soaring success has resulted in a need for more servers and bandwidth. Although Wikimedia has less than 10 full-time employees, who collectively earn just over $107,000, it has huge expenses: bandwidth alone costs up to $100,000 a month. Regular donation drives only raise about a third of what’s needed. The rest comes from benefactors like Bono and Seagate’s Stephen J Luczo.
So how could Wikipedia generate more income? One obvious solution would be offering advertising. But currently none of the site’s 9.25 million articles, written in over 250 languages, carry any commercial content. Each time the issue of advertising is raised, Wikipedia diehards rally against it. “Advertising cheapens the encyclopedia,” says Axel Boldt, one of Wikipedia’s top contributors. “An article about breast cancer loses a tremendous amount of credibility if it carries an ad for a drug-company-sponsored ‘self-help site’.” Also, if Wikipedia was suddenly flush, he reasons, the site’s dedicated community would lose interest. “Partly because of the cheapening effect mentioned above, and partly because they don’t want to contribute to advertisers’ profits, many Wikipedians would lose loyalty to Wikipedia, maybe stop working altogether,” he says.
Do ads add up?
Wikipedia’s one experiment with advertising ended in uproar. During Wikipedia’s 2006 fundraising drive, the charity Virgin Unite offered to match every dollar raised in return for a logo atop each page. The backlash caused by a 25x25 ad for a charity was deafening – imagine the cacophony over a 300x300 ad for a Land Rover.
That’s not to say that everybody’s against it, though. “Firefox makes $50million a year from Google AdSense,” says Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis. “Is there anything wrong with Firefox? Have they been corrupted?” Wikipedia is already fairly beholden to Google anyway: the encyclopedia already relies on Google for much of its traffic. (Google’s algorithms are skewed in Wikipedia’s favour. Wikipedia SEO blogger Michael Gray examined the Google results for 35 US actresses and found that for all but two, Wikipedia was one of the first three results.)
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says it’s not his decision to make: though he personally dislikes the idea of advertising on Wikipedia, any decision to utilise ads would have to come from the community. To run ads, he says, the community would first have to agree on it. And, as anyone who knows anything about Wikipedia will tell you, there’s fat chance of that happening.
Just look at the fuss that ensued when Jimmy Wales posted a brief stub that read: ‘Mzoli’s Meats is a butcher shop and restaurant located in Guguletu township near Cape Town, South Africa.’ Within a few minutes, the article had been deleted by a 19-year-old administrator called Chad Horohoe. He cited guideline CSD A7, which says that an article can be summarily deleted without debate if it isn’t of ‘importance/significance’.
Wikipedians can’t agree on what should be in the encyclopaedia – let alone what shouldn’t be. You only have to visit www.wikirage.com to see what’s kicking up the dust among editors. Wikirage’s top article was the listing for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with editors unable to agree as to correct spellings, and whether to include spoiler alerts.
Although Wales stresses that the community owns Wikipedia, he’s seen by many as its ‘spiritual leader’. Some argue that he’ll never call for advertising because it conflicts with Wikia, his commercial project which does run ads – a source of contention for many. “Oh wait, Jimbo is doing a highly profitable, advertising-based Wiki project for personal gain while pitching that Wikipedia not have advertising,” says Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo. “Perhaps Jimbo doesn’t want advertising on Wikipedia because he knows that his for-profit Wikia would suffer if it did.” Those in favour of ads contend that the Wikipedia community would be sitting on a $50m nest egg like the Mozilla foundation if they ran just one advert on the Wikipedia homepage. “Jimbo’s stance is killing Wikipedia,” adds Jason. “They could have 50 fulltimers and a huge endowment if they would follow Firefox’s example and stop listening to Wales and his hypocritical anti-advertising stance.”
Knowledge is power
However, Wikipedia may be in better shape than people suppose. The Wikimedia Foundation’s latest financial statement reveals that it’s sitting on cash totalling just over $1 million. And since traffic has been essentially flat since January 2007, it doesn’t seem that the site is in danger of collapsing any time soon. “For the first time in Wikipedia’s history, the activity rate of the community has been declining,” says researcher Robert Rohde. “This can be seen in the rate of editing articles (-17 per cent), the rate of new account registration (-25 per cent), protections (-30 per cent), uploads (-10 per cent), article deletions (-25 per cent) ... overall the community appears to be doing less now than it was six months ago.” The timing of the dip coincides with the ‘Essjay’ scandal, where it emerged that a top contributor who claimed to hold doctoral degrees in theology and canon law was actually a 24-year-old college drop-out.
In the long run, though, whatever happens to Wikipedia, its future is assured thanks to its open source model. Even if the Wikimedia Foundation were to crash and burn tomorrow, somebody could just throw up another site using its content. Ads or not, Wikipedia’s immortality is assured.
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Comments
Robomilk / 07/12/2008 / 22:07 / http://www.wikifur.com/
Personally I think that advertising would actually have a "cheapening effect" on the site. A few months back when Wikia introduced advertising to the site many people dropped tools and complained.
However this was not just due to advertisements, Wikia was also forcing a new theme onto all of it's hosted wikis (all aside from Uncyclopedia, which curiously got to keep good old Monobook), intrusive advertising WITHIN articles, and a variety of authoritarian tactics to prevent resident wikis from moving - including registering domain names related to wikis and redirecting them to Wikia webspace, refusing to remove wikis abandoned by their users, and other things: which can be found at the Complaints Wiki - http://complaintwiki.org/
Two of the wikis I frequent there, Illogicopedia and WikiFur - which I administrate - have already or are in the process of leaving Wikia. Illogicopedia has found it's intended moving domain cybersquatted by Wikia, and their existing site has been taken over by Wikia staff. WikiFur, thanks to having administrators who also work for Wikia, have managed to broker a deal where the Wikia wiki will be closed, however it will not be redirected to the new one, the new site will also have to carry advertising on behalf of Wikia, however not as much as if the wiki stayed.
In short, advertising on Wikipedia isn't just a bad idea - it's a horrendous idea, and will likely drive away swathes of the community. Of course this entirely depends on the "forcefulness" of the advertising, which was very strong on Wikia.
Harry O'Connor / 09/12/2008 / 09:27 / http://www.voodoochilli.com
Great article.
I don't think the issue here is how can Wikipedia make more money, but how can it spend less, and how it can clearly justify what it gets already. You say that the bandwidth comes to 100k per month and there's another 100K per year on staff, well that's 1.3 million dollars. Given that the hosting is going to be a lot also (although not enough to be mentioned instead of bandwidth here, so presumably less that 100k per month), and also given that many companies donate resources for free such as Google - there is an excess over what is actually being generated by donations. Unless there are other expenses, big ones that I am not aware of, Wikipedia should be making a healthy profit.
For £500 a year, I can hire a good spec dedicated server. Ok, lets assume that Wikipedia needs dozens and dozens of these plus loads of over expensive bits of hardware. Lets be generous and say their hosting is 1 million USD per year. That still means their physical costs are around 2 million USD - how come they have already generated 3.5 million through donations and are hoping for 6 million? What's happening to the other 4.5 million they want to get?
Don't get me wrong, I think Wikipedia is a great site, probably the best site and a brilliant free resource. I just don't trust the numbers and I am suspicious of a free service like this that is strongly associated with profit making companies such as Wikia. I am equally suspicious of Jimmy Wale's and Angela Beesley's involvement also - don't they have ulterior motives? I am probably just paranoid, but one thing I have learnt over the years is that nearly everyone is out for themselves, and if something looks suspicious, it probably is.
I know they do yearly reports and I could sift through them all and probably the numbers would add up just fine, but all I ever hear is the shock and horror that Wikipedia could close any minute now, so we better give them more money. I don't think this is true, I think the physical aspects of the hosting and bandwidth are covered (or could be done for a lot less), and even if every member of staff and all of the trustees were fired today, the community behind Wikiepdia would keep things running just as well, if not better.
hindleyite / 11/12/2008 / 14:57 / http://www.illogicopedia.org
Wikipedia would be playing a very dangerous game if they allow for advertisements to be placed on their pages.
Taking the example of Wikia, Jimmy Wales's commercial wiki hosting venture, things are going down the pan in terms of service. Wikia themselves are doing the best they can to please their users but unfortunately it is not always possible with the advertisers looming over them like hawks. It begins with "Oh, can we just add one advertisement here...?" but escalates into the fiasco that was New Monaco. I won't go into details here, but it involved Wikia shifting the advertisements pane, present on all wikis, to the very top of the page, distracting from the information in the articles themselves. Needless to say, many are cheesed off and have left Wikia in their droves. Result? Staff cuts, Jimbo resigning, mild press interest harming Wikia's reputation and even more users going out the door - Wikia is on the slippery slope to ruin. You may ask "well, why haven't I heard of this before?" Well, naturally Wikia sweep it under the carpet - this stuff has been bubbling under for over six months.
Whilst Wikipedia is much larger than its commercial counterpart, it would do well to learn from Wikia's mistakes. From what I've read in a separate article today, Wales is planning to make Wikipedia's user interface "more easier" (sic). Was he using Wikia and the new, advert-heavy skin as a testing ground for Wikipedia? Time will tell.
A. Acevedo / 13/12/2008 / 05:36 / http://www.media-selections.com
I recently noticed that Wikipedia was using a graphic of a scale on the top of its site, with the number of users on the left side "outweighing" the donate button on the right. It's a world-renowned website...how could it be wanting for funds? That's my question on first impression anyway. I think that the idea of the organization being better off than people suppose sounds plausible and accurate. I certainly wouldn't want it to change much because it's fine the way it is. I think people should leave well enough alone. If it ain't broke, don't fix it...right? Maybe not having alot of funds keeps the organization lean, "mean", "scrappy", efficient, and adds to its character. I agree there's a good chance advertisements will compromise alot of what Wikipedia stands for.
