Wikipedia risks getting left behind over anti-advertising bias

8 September 2007

In April, Wikipedia's co-founder, Jimmy Wales, used an interview to announce that he was considering ways of making the operation more commercial. Although he continues to eschew advertising, he aired the possibility of hosting sponsored trivia programs and games to boost revenue. Wales is adamant that no decisions have been taken but his comments were clearly intended to open a debate on how Wikipedia should be funded. The site is currently supported by donations to the Wikimedia Foundation which raised $1m (£0.5m, E0.7m) in 2006. But the foundation expects to spend $3m before the end of 2007; it doesn't take an options trader (Wales's former occupation) to work out that this is unsustainable.

The Wikimedia Foundation has already started exploring other ways of boosting its funds. Last month it released a CD-Rom of the encyclopaedia with 2,000 English language articles on science, geography and the arts. Retailing at $13, the product is aimed at schools that do not have fast or reliable internet access. But it is unlikely to make a significant profit; Microsoft's established CD encyclopaedia, Encarta Premium 2007, costs $27 and contains 64,000 articles. A CD-Rom also misses the point of Wikipedia, which changes quickly according to contemporary events.

In December, Wikipedia made tentative steps towards advertising. Virgin Unite, the charitable arm of Richard Branson's stable of companies, offered to match every dollar raised during a fundraising stint in return for a logo at the top of each page. But the uproar among the website's core users was deafening, with one prolific contributor resigning his membership amid high publicity.

This taps into a core problem with Wikipedia. Although it is often spoken of as an encyclopaedia written by millions of users, the reality is quite different. While there are 4.5m registered Wikipedia users, the majority of page alterations are carried out by a small, hardcore group of contributors; 2% of all users make 73.4% of all edits. And, according to Wells, the real community behind Wikipedia consists of a few hundred volunteers who know each other personally and have regular face-to-face meetings.

For this group of hardcore users, advertising is a serious problem. Around a hundred of them have signed up to a group called ?Wikimedians against Advertisements? out of concern that commercial content could damage Wikipedia's success. But more prevalent is a misplaced anger towards advertising in general; one user argues that it ?consists of half-truths, omissions, misrepresentations, irrelevant associations and outright lies? and ?is the very antithesis of verifiable and neutral information?.