Wikipedia Questions Paths to More Money
March 20, 2008 By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
(AP) -- Scroll the list of the 10 most popular Web sites in the U.S., and you'll encounter the Internet's richest corporate players - names like Yahoo, Amazon.com, News Corp., Microsoft and Google. Except for No. 7: Wikipedia. And there lies a delicate situation.
Content from The Associated Press expires 15 days after original publication date. For more information about The Associated Press, please visit www.ap.org .
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There is no reason why they can't segment this part of wikipedia as to not infect its original intent. The common person wants to leave a mark on the world that they existed - I believe they would be willing to pay a little to immortalized some thoughts, family knowledge or heritage, funny stories about relatives, etc. This money could fund and keep the integrity of the entire wikipedia system and is a better alternative to advertising.
Besides, this helps to mitigate some of the implied elitism and the fact that common people may not have credible references to cite from other publications about things from their life experiences.
Having paid pages like that would completely undermine what wikipedia is about. It is suppose to stand for free and open information, not for paid vanity pages.
As an example of how this would work in real life, take a look at this very site, physorg.com. This site appears to get paid to place fake "articles" from companies like AMD and Intel which are actually press releases and paid advertising (we've all seen these on this site). And it seriously damages the reputation of news sites like this when they engage in that kind of shoddy behaviour.
THAT is what you are suggesting for Wikipedia. I'd far rather have a few text or banner ads rather than fake info advertisement pages which dilute the overall quality of the site.
I agree with you that sources can provide validity in some cases - especially matters that are significant to the scientific or historic communities - but they have no relevance to the average person when that person is relaying information about themselves and their life experiences. Since the wikipedia is not meant for average people to give information about their lives, one could see the logic of indirect elitism (though maybe I should have chosen a different word).
I was suggesting that wikipedia creates a separate or sister site (picture a completely different search form) this site is independent leveraging only wikipedia's brand presence to gain adoption. Wikipedia.org would remain unchanged from its current state with perhaps only a small promotion for its sister site which provides all the funding for both.
I probably shouldn't have used the word vanity, because I was picturing a site where my grandchildren (it will be awhile until then) can search for me and find out personal but relevant information for them i.e. how I met their grandmom and that they shouldn't smoke b/c there is lung cancer in the family. Certainly, some will find ways to abuse this type of forum, but I can think of so much other useful information that would be wonderful to pass on to friends and family in a easily searchable format.
I don't always agree with Wikipedia's notability rules, but in general they keep out what I refer to as "white noise" information. I'll also note that there are actually a significant number of sister sites that are associated with Wikipedia for various other uses. These include things that Wikipedia itself doesn't allow, like dictionary definitions, and plot summaries of movies/TV/books. So it isn't impossible that a social networking site exists (or could exist) that is affiliated with wikipedia.
But I ask: who would pay for such a service when they could just use Facebook or Myspace instead for free (or the numerous other *vastly superior* similar sites).
I think a site with standardized formatting, an emphasis on family history, and a guarantee of some degree of posterity would be a sell and I think there is a market for it. My facebook page may disappear in fifty years, buy my wikipedia page maybe costs a fee of ten dollars, but guarantees my page to still be there for future generations that's prepaid for pennies a year...
Just my two cents ;-)
Maybe something that was a cross between a personal webpage and a networking site (the contents aren't published for all to see, and you have to provide links to those who you want to be able to view it, but the formatting is similar to social sites)? I wonder if something like that already exists or not...