Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzury | Hacker News Reader

135 pointstzury80 comments

If we're using it on a daily basis (as I do) we've already seen the banner many times and this post is redundant, no?

My brain has re-wired itself to completely ignore advertising. Never occurred to me to donate until I read this post, because I just flatly ignore ads, even from nonprofits.

Just an observation about myself that might perhaps hold true for others.

Or maybe I'm just abnormal.

I see the banner and it annoys me. I'm much more likely to respond to this sensible third party encouraging me to give money to wikipedia than I am to listen to "A Personal Appeal From Jimmy Wales, Founder Of Wikipedia" begging me personally for money.

There's a close button next to any of them that you see. It'll get rid of it for good if it annoys you that much (or if you already donated...)

The close button is way too small, and difficult to use from a tablet.

It's called "Banner Blindness". We probably all have it.

Pretty hard to ignore their ads (very large and intrusive).

I think it might also have to do with the mental conditioning of Wikipedia, which is to say, you're not used to seeing ads on there, so the 'Appeal' is all the more apparent.

If that ad were on TechCrunch, I'd never have noticed it, but on the otherwise stark canvas of Wikipedia, it's all I can do to disregard it.

I haven't looked at the page code but it seems like there's a deliberate delay after the page loads and you start reading before the banner pops in right in your field of vision. It drives me crazy every time.

> "My brain has re-wired itself to completely ignore advertising."

This post is an advert :/ You didn't ignore it... Perhaps we have different definitions of 'advert'.

Here's my question: what's wrong with advertising?

If users don't mind adverts on commercial sites that offer free content, why would they mind it on a not-for-profit site?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for donating to charities in general (and do, regularly), I'm all for donating to Wikipedia (and have done more than once), and I'm all for websites that allow people who donate to disable adverts. But despite having donated to Wikipedia, I'd have no problem with seeing adverts on every page (as long as they're reasonably subtle, and don't consist solely of the cheapest of the cheap adverts, such as "omg you won an ipod lol!!"). In fact, I think I'd prefer seeing normal adverts than the constant reminder that they want donations.

"No ads. No agenda. No strings attached."

Why does being a "community website" mean they shouldn't use advertising revenue to support their growth?

Commercial pressures present conflicts of interest. No form of media can claim to be truly impartial if advertising is displayed in amongst content.

One of the defining features of Wikipedia is absence of advertising - introduce adverts and the brand will lose a great deal of its power.

In theory, yes. In practice, no. A single big donor, or a network of donors, might threaten to withdraw support unless some change is made, in exactly the same way a commercial entity might do it (which is very in a very subtle way, typically no smoking guns).

But probably the best shield against pressure: Wikipedia is a property of such a high quality that no single advertiser will ever have larger value than the mass of high quality competitors standing in line to take his place.

It probably wouldn't have a effect, but because these things are impossible to measure, there's no way to know for sure.

It seems clear that even the perception of possible bias created by ad revenue is of negative value to Wikipedia. It's possible these effects are small. However, as an organization, they've clearly decided that the total costs of advertising outweigh the benefits.

This is exactly what happened last May:

"Pressure on the organisation had increased after Fox News reported the story, contacting a number of high-profile corporate donors to the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and related sites."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10104946

The way to counter this is to operate as much organisational transparency as possible. Bribery can only take place in private.

A large proportion of internet advertising is automatically served with no direct contact between advertiser and content provider anyway. User-generated and mostly user-moderated content for a non-profit organisation leaves very little room for people to make credible claims of conflict of interest. I don't think any of the Wikipedia content clones are any the less impartial for choosing Adwords over the begging bowl; their written content is literally identical.

Sure, maybe it dilutes the "brand power" of Wikipedia, but I'm not sure the "brand power" of Wikipedia is a particularly worthy cause for my donation dollars anyway.

Would people contribute as much if the site was supported by advertising?

Would people use and trust the content as much if the site was supported by advertising?

I think the answer to both of these questions is 'no'.

When I talk about the Wikipedia brand losing power, this is what I'm thinking about.

As I pointed out, exactly the same content with exactly the same contributors is syndicated by profit-making entities like Answers.com anyway. There's certainly no shortage of content on Jimmy Wales' own openly-commercial and frequently-interfering Wikia (arguably Wikia making it's reputation off Wikipedia association is a far bigger conflict of any interest than any conceivable advertiser could manage...)

I'm sure most people use Wikipedia because they've heard of the site and/or it's almost invariably within the top three Google results of a search on any given topic and usually the most informative page. Maybe lack of ads helps maintain the illusion that it's "more neutral" than other user moderated communities, but I'm still not convinced that's an illusion worth paying for.

Well, I disagree.

The fact other commercial sites syndicate Wikipedia's content is beside the point.

I believe Wikipedia _is_ more neutral than other user moderated communities; it's not perfect, but it serves a very good purpose.

I think it's worth paying for, which is why I donated.

Surely that's a redundant concern? Wikipedia is already open to being edited; companies can and have been caught editing entries relevant to their interests.

Now, Wikipedia is not a reliable source, and never will be in its current guise, i.e. with the anyone-can-edit philosophy. It's no bad thing, I love Wikipedia and can spend hours enjoying articles there.

Where I'm going with this is that claiming conflict of interest or impartiality problems if advertising is to be introduced, well that just doesn't make sense - there are too many other factors that make Wikipedia unreliable.

Personally, I think it's a convenient excuse for an otherwise noble cause: advertising is ugly and intrusive, and in a perfect world it wouldn't be required.

No - it's not redundant, because at the moment, the companies who wish to (try to) use Wikipedia for marketing have equal standing with other contributors and members of the public.

Completely disagree. Even in corporate life, I work for a publishing company and our sales and editorial departments are completely seperate from that point of view, in that if a bad review is going up, we won't stop it going up or edit the content just because it's for a product made by a company who currently have an advertising campaign with us.

And even more so in Wikipedia's case. They could even just have an external advertising company deal with all sales, so that even if advertisers complain their feedback doesn't get through to Wikipedia staff.

The point is, a company can try to artificially shape public opinion by placing an advert.

Without trying to be moralistic (or take any view on its relative merit) advertising _is_ largely an art of manipulation.

In the context of Wikipedia - advertising would destroy any value Wikipedia has, because it would mean that companies with commercial interests would have a way to counter (and artificially influence) opinion. It would also create a situation where companies with the most money, would have the most clout.

I think it would amount to a disaster if advertising was allowed in.

In the US, our public radio (NPR) has similar fund-raising drives a few times a year. They're very annoying but must be effective.

The bottom line is that no form of media can claim to be truly impartial. Period. But some are better than others.

Because the community of contributors has on multiple occasions strongly objected to advertising, on several occasions resulting in fracturing.

In 2002 when the idea of banners ads was seriously raised the majority of the Spanish Wikipedia contributors forked and started Enciclopedia Libre, despite the fact that Wikipedia decided not to go ahead with adverts it took two years to attract enough contributors back to rival the forked site. That's not an experience the Wikipedia community want to repeat.

Back in 2004 I proposed that Wikipedia made opt-in ads so people who wanted to support Wikipedia by watching ads could do so, but there wasn't enough support for the idea to gain traction.

Furthermore, if they did take advertising it would generate a lot of revenue, enough that the Wikimedia foundation would then spend all its time arguing what to do with it.

They they should only have ads on for X days out of the year. Adjust X depending on how much money you get from ads and how much money you need.

And you have the winning answer to my question. Thanks :)

Because at times, the interests of advertisers can conflict with the interests of Wikipedia. And should that happen, Wikipedia's reputation and value becomes seriously undermined.

I consider it somewhat analog to BBC being funded through a license fee rather than commercial advertising - aka Sky (BSkyB, owned by Murdoch).

BBC does show adverts to non-UK viewers online, though. And while I love that there are no adbreaks on BBC TV, I'd have no problem seeing adverts on the website. (I also fully support the license fee, would never want to see that replaced by advert revenue, just supplemented.) The difference is that adverts on TV actually stop you seeing what you want to see, online they don't.

What kind of examples are you thinking of where advertisers can conflict with the interests of Wikipedia? For one thing, if they had an actual sales team rather than just getting adverts from Google then they could filter them out. For another, surely most users can understand that showing an advert doesn't mean the service supports whoever is behind it. People don't want X Factor and think "wow, Simon Cowell must really love Dominos pizza" (is that their main advertiser? Can't remember.)

Some non-UK programming do show adverts, yes, but that is for different reasons - largely so that the British license fee isn't being seen to subsidise commercial content for other countries. But conversely, the BBC World Service does not including advertisements.

I would think the best examples of a conflicts of interest is where particular articles detail unethical behaviour or any content in the public domain that an advertiser would prefer not to be included or made easily accessible.

Obviously, its not to say that it will happen but just that it could. And it is naive at best to think that a separate sales team solves the problems of commercial bias or influence.

Wikipedia is the single largest body of freely available knowledge in the history of mankind. It must remain so and the best way to do that is to continue accepting donations. I see no reason to change.

You raise an interesting question. I wonder if Wikipedia had steady advertising revenue, then would it have both resources and incentive to drive off many of the point-of-view pushers who now skew so many Wikipedia articles to fringe points of view? From the point of view of many onlookers, that could be either a feature or a bug. The Wikipedia projects worldwide have had a static number of active editors for the last few years

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...

and I have to think that one thing that turns off conscientious editors who refer to reliable sources is drive-by POV-pushers who can edit more article text per day, because they don't bother looking up sources to verify their opinions.

But reasonable minds can differ both about this description of the problem, and about any proposed solution. So far Wikimedia Foundation still prefers the approach of seeking donations.

Among other reasons, because it may work. Should it make a load of money (and it isn't at all unlikely, given the traffic), you'll have a big pull to turn it into a commercial entity and maximize profits. And at the end of the day, what do you do with the money? Start paying contributors?

Free donation supported model works, so no reason to risk the change.

In what kind of world do charities have to avoid making too much money?

If they were the kind of people who would say "shit we're making loads of money, lets start getting rich" and they also believe that advertising might make that much money, then they would have done it already.

The fear might be that many Wikipedia contributors believe that advertisements are wrong and evil. Introducing ads might cause serious upheaval among contributors and corresponding public relations problems. (Think: Digg.)

The banners are advertising. It's just the people that want the money are from Wikipedia, rather than Coke or Apple.

After reading about the money they spend... no thanks. I'll find the link, but apparently they spend over $10,000,0000 a year and this year they're aiming for $25,000,000. That to me is just ever so slightly ridiculous.

Actually that was easy, here is their financial information: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports and a specific outline of what they want to make/spend is on page 12 of this PDF: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1... (Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/43973767/Untitled?secret_password=... )

Edit: To clarify, the issue I have is with the increase, not the costs for this year. They're going from 10m to 25m and I don't understand how, if there's an explanation somewhere please do link :-)

Given the scale of Wikipedia, the fact that they can run it on only $10M/year is rather impressive.

Glancing at the docs you reference, roughly $6M of their spending goes to straight operating expenses (servers, bandwidth, travel, etc). I don't think anyone would disagree that is completely reasonable for an organization Wikimedia's size with the amount of traffic they have (it seems quite lean, even compared to most startups).

The other big chunk ($3.5M) is salary for people.

There you have to take into account that they have ~70M unique users a month. Assuming $150K/engineer/year all told (office space, computers, salary, benefits, etc) and that all the salary were just going to engineering, that's only enough cash to hire about 23 engineers (or about 1 engineer for every 3M users). In practice, not all their employees are engineers, so it's probably closer to 5M users per engineer. As a point of comparison, Facebook brags about having only 1 engineer per million users.

Wikipedia is being laudably frugal and efficient. I can't imagine running a site their size with much fewer resources.

With due respect, BS. Utter BS.

plentyoffish.com has around 6m monthly and is run by a tiny team. (1 person for a long time afaik, maybe 2 now?)

It's pie in the sky to think that you need to spend so much to run what is essentially, a very simple website.

Wikipedia isn't some massively social website. Majority of people accessing it are READ_ONLY. It's not streaming video. The majority is static text. So it doesn't make sense to care how many people are on it... 10m users will not require twice the engineers or servers as 5m.

  Wikipedia: 70m users/month - hosting costs $6m or so? ($.086/user)
  Reddit: 10m users/month maybe? - hosting costs $33k or so? ($0.0033/user) [July]
  Mibbit: 1.5m users/month - hosting costs $500 or so ($0.0003/user)

(numbers from quantcast, yes I know they're not exact but they're usually not orders of magnitude out).

eg Wikipedia spends 250 times as much on hosting per user as I do. I'm not even saying I'm efficient with hosting costs. I'm sure I could host mibbit on $100/mo at a push.

And I thought Reddits hosting costs were obscene.

Do you really think that 8 cents per month, to host each User of a website is not ridiculously expensive?

Technically, Wikipedia is a PHP+MySQL wiki with an echeloned cache system (squid). http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers They currently try to expand into video, but IMO there are some bottlenecks of social nature. The current average video on Wikipedia is 5-10MB, retrieved by the user in 15% of cases, so nothing special at all, technically. The mass of content is no longer growing exponentially, more like steady-state. The user base is slowly expanding, AFAIK.

Using PHP+MySQL for something where the vast majority of pages are static seems a bad design choice. I guess the caching can aid with that, but it seems a better idea to optimize for reads in the first place.

What are you using as users, uniques?

I understand that things cost a lot, I just don't see the justification in going from ~$10m costs to ~$25m costs. Unless I'm missing something, what does it offer me (as a person who is supposed to donate)? I don't see anything, although based on the other people like you saying they're expanding maybe I've missed something.

They state that they have 47 staff. 22 tech is fair enough as you say there is an operational overhead. However I don't see why they are paying for programming work required when the majority of that can be done by open source volunteers.

10 people are described as 'other program': I'm guessing this means "Support strategic volunteer work" and "Bootstrap community programs in key geographies". But why not just let the site grow organically? Why do they have to spend time encouraging people to be editors? The volunteer model has worked so well in the past that it seems to me that the motivation behind this is purely expansionism.

5 members of staff for fundraising: again why act like a corporation instead of letting people donate if they think the site is valuable.

There is also $1.8M spent on external contractors: what for?

$380,000 on travel works out at $8000 per person. That's a lot to get to wikimania and 3 nights in a hotel.

Overall it is a bit galling to me that they have built the site on data contributed by us, it is edited by us and now they want money from us at the same time becoming more and more dictatorial over the type of content that may be submitted and unresponsive to users complaints.

Running a site with 70M users/month and relying on the "majority" of new development work to be done by volunteers. I think that is highly optimistic.

The irony here is stunning, because that is what they rely on for their content, volunteers.

Regarding contractors I might say that their multimedia-related code (ie the in-browser audio/video player) is done by Kaltura, an external contractor. http://kaltura.com Penny counting is a bit too much, folks should be paid properly. But their drift away from "organic" growth is a bit disturbing indeed.

That was pretty easy to find from the Link you provided http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2010-2011_Annual_Plan_Qu...

The top five spending increases for 2010-11 are: 1) An additional $3.8 million will be spent on technical operations. This will include funding to establish and maintain a new data centre, increased spending on bandwidth to support our growing readership, and five new positions supporting technical operations. 2) An additional $2.6 million will be spent on ten new (non-ops) technology positions such as a QA engineer and a community liasion position, annualization of salaries of existing tech positions including some positions that were previously paid under restricted grants as well as development of a database to track relationships with editors, readers, donors and others. 3) An additional $1.3 million will go towards administration supporting all Wikimedia Foundation activities. This will include rent for additional office space, plus nine new support positions to support the work of staff and community members. 4) An additional $1.1 million dollars will be spent on community outreach and volunteer convenings. In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been increasingly offering financial support for, and/or staged itself, volunteer convenings of various kinds, including for example the Berlin chapters/developer meetings, as well as paying some travel costs for volunteers, including more funding for Wikimania scholarships. We intend to do more of this in 2010-11 as key activities to grow and strengthen the movement. 5) In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to spend $400,000 on various forms of support for the chapters. This will include an expanded grants program for mission activities, staff positions supporting our chapters network, and a board-sponsored project designed to help the Wikimedia movement develop clarity around roles-and-responsibilities across the network.

How does it matter how much they're spending if they are indeed spending on something fruitful? It's not like they're wasting those $25m away. It's been properly invested in education. As you pointed out on those .pdf, they're transparent enough to make it clear what they're doing with the money. Specially on page 30, where they detail each top spending increase.

It's very clear from visiting their site and the sister sites, that they are indeed improving.

It's an important investment in education. For those of us who believe more investment in education is needed on a global level, but can't rely on your government for that. Donating to wikimedia is a great alternative.

I donated and I'm sure it was a great move.

You're not very specific or constructive in your complaint. I assume that money is spent freely serving encyclopaedic content to the masses via the web on a nearly incomprehensible scale, which I assume donors already know about.

Their current annual spending is $9.2M. Of which $1M is spent on hosting. $3.5M on salaries. It seems they want to grow really fast - 185% growth in salary expenditures next year to $9M.

Yep, they have huge expansion plans. At the peak of their growth (circa 2006) they had ~4 employees. Currently I think they have ~40, expanding to 80, projecting 180 in some future. The 40>80>180 plan was announced at Wikimania'10, I believe.

What bothers me a bit, enwiki got into steady-state like 3 years ago and some people claim the activity slowly goes down. Meanwhile, the staff expands. I do not really understand the process.

this is my same question, and others have voiced it. Why do they want to grow this way?

The main reason is they are expanding to an additional data centre, so a lot of the increase relates to capital outlay, new staff and operating costs on the new facility.

> In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to increase revenue 28% to $20.4 million.

From page 12 of said pdf.

Yeah sure, but the Jimmy Wales's picture on every page annoys me ! IMAO the last year compaign is better ...

For 15 times as many donations as text based ads (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1912983) I think it's worth it.

+ 1

Even disabled the banner with 'Special:BannerController' in AdBlock.

Thought, I'd give again this year but after the banner didn't go away and the equally annoying pledge email they lost me (no donaion for this year).

Annoyed me, too. Feel free to discover the tiny 'x' in upper right corner. Closed once, Jimmy's pitch will stay away thanks to cookies.

I think it will automatically disappear once all of us would donate...

There's something about that picture that makes me really not want to donate. I understand it's working on others and its probably silly of me but something just puts me off.

I suspect that particular one has the highest "conversion" rate.

For the love of all that is good, how, once I have donated, do I stop the ads?

There is a small "x" top right and it disappears, no need for special adblock

Click the little cross; that will hide them for your current session.

Just try to adnore them.

'adnore' could be a good name for an ad-blocker.

(maybe)

I use it daily, but I wouldn't donate. I wouldn't pay for it, and if it was gone, I'd expect its hole would be filled by other websites.

Sorry if that sounds uncharitable, but I don't agree with donating to such a large bureaucratic organization.

I don't think there would be anything seriously wrong about Wikipedia displaying ads to support itself. If I were in charge, I'd probably do just that. That being said, though, there's something very cool about the 5th most visited website in the world being completely ad free and 100% visitor-supported. That's why I donated.

I know I shouldn't promote tabloids, but I am always reminded about his, Jimmy Wales, IM transcripts with his former girlfriend, Rachael Marsden, where he discussed buying a jet after starting up wikia.

I think this is a good example of why the profit motive is important. Maybe they could figure out how to lower costs instead of almost tripling costs if they had some incentive.

This is not your typical fundraiser, unfortunately.

A few questions I'd like answered:

1) How much money do they need?

2) How much of that have they raised so far?

3) Is this going to be an annual fundraiser?

4) Do they have an endowment which can fund Wikipedia going forward?

5) Have they relied on donations thus far?

6) What happens if they can't raise the money?

I want Wikipedia to stay around in it's present form, but I'd really like to know what my commitment for that needs to be for the next 40 years, not just right this second.

It's an annual campaign - where were you last year?

All of the information you require is available - some of your questions have actually been directly answered in the comments here.

None of them are available on the page the banner links to.

How many of us coming up with these nuanced concerns because we just don't want to fork over $20?

I would prefer the money to go to http://www.wikinfo.org at https://secure.ibiblio.org/gift/ because:

* Original Research - Wikipedia does not allow any. Wikinfo's solution: Allow original research with editor registration.

* Wikipedia only allows certain types of information, as it is purely an encyclopedia. Wikinfo's solution: All types of information are allowed

Replace the donation ads on top for billable ads.

There, a steady income source way better than asking for $20M every year.

I just made a small donation. Wikipedia+DBpedia == great source for structured text for text mining and NLP. Well worth supporting.

When Jimmy Wales stop trying to sex me with his eyes, I'll think about it.

I find it hard to "donate" to megalomaniacs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com