<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />[b]Wikipedia Experts Call for No Donations to Wikipedia[/b]
Sacramento Bee
By WikiExperts.us NEW YORK, Dec. 15, 2010 -- /PRNewswire/ -- Large images of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales have for weeks dominated each and every page ...

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Bump to recommend this one. Friggin brilliant, if nothing we don't already know.

It's our new-found pal, Alex Konanykhin -- not a former Russian KGB front for bank money laundering, no sir.

Sounds like someone is angry with WP about something. I notice they are now "WikiExperts" instead of "WikipediaExperts". I guess someone got a cease and desist letter...

COMMENT:

Nice, on-target stuff, here. The donation model and lack of WP ads, making it difficult to pay for expert review, the adversarial relationship of doofus editor with subject-matter-experts, and even a whack at the BLP defamation problem. Whee. If WMF had been nicer, they could have avoided all this.



Have we discussed the Carl Hewitt article here on WR? The link given in the article above is bad, but here is the Google Knol paper by him. As bona fide expert's expert, he really has some juice about the nastiness of WP. It's almost as though he's been reading WR. (Of course he has, as there are many cites to WR in the article).

http://knol.google.com/k/carl-hewitt/corru...pcxtp4rx7g1t/5#

Is this what spurred Jimbo to send me creepy emails yesterday and today?

No worries: I know the world doesn't revolve around me!

Mods, could we merge to here?

Moderator note: Done. Also moved to News Worth Discussing.

"tasteful ads of advertisers like Rolex and Audi" Seriously, wikiexperts? Seriously?

So, it would be ''preferable'' to have banner ads? Flash-ladden, flashy, cumbersome ads. Which would slow significantly the load of pages because you have to load dozens of kilobytes from third party sites? Which would be displayed all year long instead of just a few months a year? Which couldn't be collapsed by unlogged visitors because advertisers won't allow it? Ads that can carry malware from ad networks? Which carry cookies and flash files that can keep track of which articles you visit and edit? Which can and will share that information with the big ad networks that carry ads in most major sites that you also visit?

I think wikiexperts are understimating the average intelligence of wikipedia editors by a couple of orders of magnitude. This is comparable to selling fur coats to naturists of ecologist inclination. Or giving away smallpox-infected blankets to American indians.

Untwist your panties, then consider that the amount of revenue which could be obtained from "exclusive" ads on Wikipedia would probably mean that the WMF could collect $20 million from twenty sponsors ($1 million each), running the ads in random cycle for twenty days, then take them all down until the next year.

The Super Bowl might get 100 million viewers in one evening. The English Wikipedia gets about 60 million American viewers in 20 days. Super Bowl ad lasts 30 seconds and costs about $2.8 million to buy the time, plus who knows how much in production costs. Wikipedia ad (as I've described above) would cost only $1 million, and probably get (since there are 4 page views per user, on average) 12 million unique person-impressions.

You Wikipediots never really think things through.

My God, are you tiresome or what?

You misspieled “maggotude”, Dude —

Jon

Didn't want this one to slip through the cracks.

Analysts advise Wikipedia to stop asking for donations
- by Molly McHugh, for Digital Trends (Alexa rank #3,718)

+++++++++++++++++++

Jimbo is practically uncorked in his rebuttal to McHugh, and he's even ENGAGING A PERMANENTLY BANNED EDITOR in the comments field!

It never fails---whenever a blog or news site runs an item criticizing the WMF or Jimbo, the
"Wiki-faithful" come out in droves to blubber (in the comments section, if any) about the
wonderful, magical, pure-hearted Jimmy, and how all these critics simply must be ignored.

I put my 2 cents in:

The use of claques is a way of life on WP. Successful editors also, such as for instance Bali ultimate, never go anyplace on WP without their claque.

Implying that website ads get paid at exactly the same price as TV ads. What would this be, CPV? Cost Per View? How much would advertisers pay per unique visitor? Nah, it's CPM, Cost Per Mille, Cost per every thousand views. Let me see, paying $1 million dollars for 60 million page views gives a CPM of, hum, 1/60 = 0,01666..., let's say 0,02$ CPM. How much is paid usually in the internet these days?

Implying that the presence of ads wouldn't affect the usage of wikipedia in any way.
Implying that the public image of wikipedia wouldn't be eroded to almost nothing.
Implying that page views would remain at exactly the same level in spite of key elements of the site being destroyed (low load time and lack of ads).
Implying that people want to be spied by ads while searching or editing sensitive information.
Implying that numbers of viewers wouldn't tank, forcing to display ads more often and for more days.
Implying that the lack of ads is not a key element for the identitification of editors with the community.
Implying that it doesn't totally go against the idea of "free software" that guides the website from the very start.
Implying that the community and the quality of articles wouldn't be seriously damaged by the retirement and refusals to edit of the anti-ad editors.
Implying that editors wouldn't migrate in mass to other projects or simply stop editing.
Implying that Wikipedia wouldn't become Wikia.
Implying that donations wouldn't run dry because "they already get money from ads".
Implying that advertisers wouldn't have a say in the editorial policy of wikipedia, once most funding depends of them.

So many things wrong with placing ads in wikipedia..... Getting a complex system, changing a vital variable in a way that will undoubtely conflict or cancel with other vital variables, and expecting that everything remains the same? Who is not thinking things through? Me? Think again.

What you fail to think through while viewing Wikipedia from rose colored glasses and side blinders combined into one optical instrument is that funding by small individual donations far from being the best of all possible worlds is method of financing the project that best promotes the continued social irresponsibility and insular narcissism of the project. While funding from the established "giving community" of foundations would be the preferred means of bring Wikipedia into the fold of normal grownup and responsible non-profits, paid advertising remains infinitely preferable to small donations. At least advertisers would be able able to wield some influence with the threat to withdraw ads in mass when WP chooses to pursue grossly anti-social policies that promote child pornography, malign innocent BLP victims or loot museums of national treasures. Small individual donations from a community of insular nerdy geek kool-aide drinkers assures no external pressure whatsoever.

Not surprisingly, you didn't understand me. I suggested $1 million dollars for 12 million page views.

CNET recently reported to Wall Street that it's getting $8 in advertising proceeds per 1,000 page views. Examiner.com pays its writers about $6.80 per 1,000 page views, which means they are almost certainly taking in at least 30% more than that, gross.

Enric, your numbers are way off (by at least two orders of magnitude), which is no shock, since it's doubtful you have any business experience at all.

Preferable to what, the current banner ads?



None of that, of course.

It would be preferable, if they're going to have BFAs at the top of the screen anyway, to put something I might be interested in in them, instead of repetitive urgent appeals for donaions.

I would love to see what corporate sponsors would approve, say, their ad appearing on the "Hogtie bondage" article!

From http://www.wikiexperts.us/faqs.html




$295 for something I do for free?!? Where do I sign up?

Yes, I also wonder how taxi services stay in business, just to shuttle you a few blocks in the city for $7 or $8 -- when you could just walk for free?!?

Same goes for eating out at a Chili's or Five Guys and spending $30 or more to feed a family, when you could raise your own cattle in your back yard, slaughter them, then make hamburgers at home -- for free?!?

I was joking.

Oh, sorry, then. Let me know if you need some extra work.

Greg

I can raise my own cattle in my back yard, slaughter them, and make hamburgers at home for free?

Yep -- that's the WikiWay to free WikiBurgers! You only consider the output, without addressing any of the collateral costs! Did you lose your Free Culture handbook or something, Anthony?

I thought the WikiWay to free WikiBurgers was to convince other people to raise cattle in my back yard, slaughter them, and make free hamburgers for everyone, all the while disclaiming any liability for the toxic runoff caused by my WikiFarm and/or any food poisoning experienced by those who eat the burgers. After all, I'm not making hamburgers, I'm just a farming service provider.

+1

The comments are really getting fun now!

The collateral damage is all at the end of the product. Once you create a burger (a page gets posted and there's no cost) it gets virtually replicated for any consumer that wants to get it (user accessing a page), but anyone can add crap to the burger at any moment after its creation (instant editing!) and whoever gets to eat those additional temporary ingredients is going to enjoy all of them! Surely the burger template will be corrected, but how many customers have got sick in the meantime, without even knowing it?

Hershey squirt. Learn something new every day.

Obviously, I just brought a toothpick to a gun fight. Well done, Anthony. That's what I call taking it to the next level.

Mod Note: Combined two active threads on same media topic.

Hershey squirt

How about a double frogman instead? Or marsbar tennis?

To really pull it off you have to be careful not to bother asking them if they actually own the cattle, be sure to make them do the slaughtering, and then finally hand over the management of the farm to them so you'll have time to strut around the world giving paid speeches about how wonderful WikiFarmed WikiBeef is!

I guess Wikipedia really is dying.

You can point out to the Wikipediots that the phrase "Hershey Squirt Lamb" resides on their pages, but they don't even bother to remove it.

Yes, Anthony's spot on. The odd thing is that sounds like "socialism" gone awry. But this is an illusion that is easily pierced. It amounts is one of those occasional supercharged "opportunities" for really squeezing the peasants or proletariat like chattel slavery, serfdom, child labor or 21st Century Chinese "Communism." At the end of day under the PeculiarInstitution 2.0 the producers (content providers) are left empty handed while the capitalist and fat cats get an extra nice payday and walk away from any harm they do in the process.

It's a "possible joke".