Did you donate to Wikipedia? Why not?

Community
41

Would like to donate, but not a lot of money. So ashamed.:blush:

42

That you saw.

And where does this idea come from, that you’re entitled to PageRank from Wikipedia? Contributors are acknowledged and recognised, just not in a linkjuicy way. You still get massive traffic from Wikipedia when you’re referenced.

43

However, you’re completely missing the point why they don’t do this. Two of the important reasons:

  1. Having a completely ad-free environment eliminates the possibility of having biased editorial due to advertiser considerations.

  2. An ad-driven website inherently receives more revenue from more visitors. You attract more visitors by having more topical and popular content. This would mean there would be conflicting interests between wikipedia’s vision and it’s funding sources.

These are all slippery slope issues.

Like where? Not to be rude, but are you the moral arbitrator on what non-profits are the most worthy?

44

I donated $100 two weeks ago.

45

I donated my thoughts to Wikipedia and I donated my money to street children

46

Donating to wikipedia is a great help to some students who made research especially in identifying terms, etc. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to donate any topic there since anyone can change and edit a certain topic. I may doubt if wikipedia is reliable or not.

47

Simple reciprocity. We like things to have some sort of balance in the world. When a company is raking in billions of dollars, its employees expect to be paid a good salary as well. Wikipedia is raking in more PageRank than almost any other site on the net, naturally the sites that it feeds off of feel a bit unbalanced with no PageRank ever going back out.

There’s also the history of PageRank and Google to consider. PageRank is Citation Rank. The whole method was based off how academic papers are ranked in importance by how many other papers cite them. Wikipedia cites its sources just like an academic paper, but those sources don’t benefit from how often they’re cited since they’re blocking the PR process.

So the idea doesn’t come from nowhere.

Adding a web search box does not place any ads anywhere on the Wikipedia site. It’s simply a way out when people are ready to leave wikipedia that would also provide significant income to the site.

Firefox is largely funded by its search ad revenue, but that project has not taken any commercial turn for the worse, or implemented any features designed to make you use the search box more because of it.

I am the moral arbitrator on what non-profits are the most worthy of my donations, yes. This is a discussion, not a wikipedia page, it’s alright to give opinions.

The thread title is “Did you donate to Wikipedia? Why not?”. I answered the “Why not?” and you’re free to have a different answer.

48

You honestly think that Wikipedia is more “worthy” of donations than charities that actually help people like the United Way, Habitat for Humanity, etc…?

Wikipedia is a website dedicated to stealing content from other websites, it’s not much better than your average black hat scraper site they just at least make a small effort to change the text and to be useful to their visitors.

49

I personally look something up in Wikipedia at least once a day. Its one of the defaults in the Firefox search tool so I imagine I’m not the only one. They require nothing in return. No ads or subscription fee. Its definitely worthy of our support. Its like public radio or tv. If they received no donations, it wouldn’t exist. Maybe one day they will start monetize it, but they don’t yet. So it deserves our support.

50

Fair enough

51

I donated to Wikipedia in the past, and may donate again. I find the website useful, i appreciate the efforts of contributors, and i have no gripes against this project or the Wikimedia foundation.

I won’t feel bad if i don’t end up donating.

You may qualify a donation banner or any call to action on a website as an advertisement. But then you are using a broad definition of advertisement, and it should be clear that this definition will cover very different cases.

If you start describing the features of such messages, you could list a few questions:

  • does it come from the publisher or from a third party?
  • is it advertising a non-profit or a business?
  • does it sell a product, a service, or call for donations, or simply for attention (with no direct transformation goal)?
  • are you comfortable with the nature of what is being advertised?
  • are you comfortable with that advertisement in the context of the publication (which has its own purpose and audience)?
    (I may have missed a few important questions.)

The difference between a giant donate banner and a giant add banner is that you are likely to have very different answers for those questions in each case. Of course one could not care about those questions and adopt an “anything goes” take on advertisement (or the opposite extreme view: “any form of advertisement or institutional communication is evil”).

52

Wikipedia is entertaining and a great FYI site, but as far as I’m concerned, that should be the extent of it and no… I don’t donate to it.

I like Raena’s point. I don’t believe Wikipedia is a charity, even if it is non-profit. However, if it wants to call itself a charity, then let it go out and find donors like charities do, not from its end users. Do you suppose that the Red Cross asks the injured and starving to donate when they hand out medical care and food? Of course not.

I also agree with Tomovuk. Why should I donate to the competition? Wikipedia, first on nearly every search page, makes it more difficult to optimize my clients’ content for the search engines and multiplies my difficulty in finding good, authoritative, from-the-horse’s-mouth, information when I do a search.

If you download their financial plan, you’ll see they are projecting over a 50% increase in spending for the coming year. How many of you are considering an increase in spending like that over next year?

I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have a donate button for those who want to donate, but the huge banners on the top of each page are, in my opinion, a bit over the top and the recent “appeal” reads more like one of those “save the children” commercials, with the fat spokes person standing by the woeful looking child.

Moreover, although Wikipedia can be a good place to start research, it is not the spot where you should end. When I do use Wikipedia, unless the information is well-referenced, so that I can fact-check it at the source, it’s of no value to me. Wikipedia may be an encyclopedia of world knowledge, however I find it is often more an encyclopedia of opinion, rumor, and error.

There are many other research sites that do advertise on their sites and offer subscriptions as well. There are also many college sites that freely offer volumes of information. Not to forget the many organizations, for instance the American Cancer Society, and government sites that have in depth coverage of a topic.

In other words, information is freely available on the web. Wikipedia is not the be-all, end-all information source and certainly not the most authoritative source.

53

Wikipedia is my primary source of information for new subjects. I really like Wikipedia and I think, I go to Wikipedia once a day minimum. But the data available there cannot be trusted because anyone can change that. For important data, one should look for another source. For general information its great.

Regarding donation, Yes I have donated them and will do so in future.

54

I like Wikipedia I usually do all my research through books but sometimes when I need to look something up on the web it is nice to have Wikipedia.
Most of the time when I look something up on the web there is Wikipedia then a handful of garbage adsense sites with spun content or copied content from the other handful of sites in horrible English the makes no sense. Or you get sites like about.com with 3 sentences and 5 blinking click ads.

Usually Wikipedia has half knowledgeable people editing stuff and putting relevant links in there not just some 3rd world content spinners trying to stuff keywords and earn $7 a week off of the ads.

I would donate some $ if I had more to spare or used it more but I don’t. I don’t believe all of the “helping the underdeveloped world” or on the “brink of closing down” sounds like your typical fund raiser slogans to me.

But Wikipedia is a quality site in a sea of garbage it saves me some time looking through junk sites looking for some quick info.

55

I’ve been reading this thread and found the opinions rather interesting actually. What I would say is while I don’t have an opinion on Jimmy Wales I do think that Wikipedia has managed to niche it’s way into a potentially viable business which means I don’t feel that contributions from donations are the right way to go about it. One potential revenue stream they could follow through for example would be to allow people to select 100 articles and have them printed in book form, the amount they could make in relevant textbooks from the stuff housed on that website could be staggering. I certainly won’t be donating to Wikipedia as there are other non-profit’s who donate to charity which need the money far more than a business which could raise it’s costs very quickly and easily without resorting to begging. :slight_smile:

56

Adding a web search box does not place any ads anywhere on the Wikipedia site. It’s simply a way out when people are ready to leave wikipedia that would also provide significant income to the site.

Firefox is largely funded by its search ad revenue, but that project has not taken any commercial turn for the worse, or implemented any features designed to make you use the search box more because of it.

And then why not place text ads at the bottom of the page for certain items like, say, Nintendo Wiis? There’s a good chance the person reading a wikipedia article on Wikipedia could be interested in buying one anyways so all you’re doing is meeting a user’s needs.

It’s a slippery slope argument obviously.

57

When someone takes Wikipedia dislike out of proportions:

http://www.wikipedia-watch.org

58

Uh maybe if I didnt constantly see wrong information on there I would consider donating. I would have done it already if I was a wealthier person.

59

I will NEVER donate to Wikipedia-- in fact, I am waiting for this overrated meme and hack of a site to close so I can do a Mexican hat dance on its grave.

60

There’s also the history of PageRank and Google to consider. PageRank is Citation Rank. The whole method was based off how academic papers are ranked in importance by how many other papers cite them. Wikipedia cites its sources just like an academic paper, but those sources don’t benefit from how often they’re cited since they’re blocking the PR process.

This sounds like a good argument to me.