One thing that Wikipedians often overlook: not everybody gets it
The LA Times’s article about the Wikimedia Foundation’s funding (read it quick before it goes to archive) has reanimated the undead prospect of advertising. It’s one of the oldest topics in Wikipedia circles, and it spawned one of the earliest project forks, and it still won’t die.
Proponents of ads-on-wiki argue that ad content won’t affect editorial decisions. As somebody who’s familiar with the way Wikipedia works, I see some merit in this point; my edits are never affected by the WMF’s revenue streams, and I probably won’t see the ads while I contribute anyway. However, this argument ignores a major counter-argument — the one thing that really irritates me about answering Wikipedia-related e-mail from the public —
Most non-Wikipedians still don’t get how Wikipedia works; they still think that its content is centrally controlled.
We try to let them know that we have neither editorial committee nor review board nor paid authors nor legions of paid staff fixing errors. We send ‘em off to the FAQs and tutorials and Help: pages and tell them “seriously, you can edit”. And yet our OTRS queues are always full of complaints, requests, demands, and generally-confused statements from people who cannot fathom the concept of decentralized content management. (If you need proof of this, I offer the thousands upon thousands of polite requests that we remove images of Mohammed; these correspondents meant well, but e-mailing the handful of active OTRS volunteers won’t change consensus on the English Wikipedia.)
If Wikipedia starts displaying ads next to content, then Wikipedians and geeks will know all about editorial independence. It’s these non-Wikipedians — the ones who don’t know how it all works — who will start seeing implied bias everywhere.
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