[JonnieCache]

One of the best things about wikipedia, some might argue the best thing, is that it is free from all the conflicts of interest invited in by money changing hands in exchange for services.

This applies to all free culture, including the OSS world. It would be a tragedy to change it.

(Obviously in the OSS world, people do pay for services, but the important thing is you can always choose not to. Just as you can choose not to send money to wikipedia.)

[jaylevitt]

I don't know Wikipedia's donor requirements; how do they avoid that same conflict of interest via donations? Is there some maximum donation per individual, reporting requirement, etc. that prevents corruption any more than using an automated ad network like AdSense would?

[baddox]

As far as I know, donators don't get any special treatment, and there aren't any conditional donations (e.g. I'll donate if you delete this article), so why would donations cause a conflict of interests?

[wpietri]

It is a very common problem in ad-supported content businesses. Reputable newspapers and magazines work hard to make sure advertising doesn't influence content but it's always a struggle.

For example, suppose that Coke buys $10m of ads a year. It's small money to Coke (with a $1.6bn ad budget) but that's 60% of Wikipedia's annual revenue. Then suppose that there's a press furor over the "Criticisms of Coca Cola article" and Coke threatens to withdraw their ads. It would be impossible for Wikipedia to be perfectly chill about maybe having to fire half their staff.

It might even be less direct than that. Might people make more content that garners high-paying ads, even if the quality is low? Could editors be tempted to make the content less accessible (or harder to tell apart from the ads) if that gets more click-throughs?

Accepting ads mean there is always a conflict of interest between getting paid and serving readers. Even if Wikipedians make the right decision 100% of the time, readers will still be more suspicious, and that's the last thing Wikipedia needs.

[naz]

Say if Facebook donates a million dollars a year, Wikipedia would be incentivized to treat Facebook favorably.

Obviously this doesn't happen, but that is one of their arguments against advertising.

[lambda]

Right, and one of the reasons this doesn't happen is that Facebook doesn't get any benefit out of donating all that money, other than the (potential) control they could get by threatening to stop funding Wikipedia.

Businesses have an incentive to buy ads, and users have less incentive to donate to an ad-supported site, which means that the funding would be skewed drastically in favor of advertisers. With donations, yes, you can have large donors using their clout, but you don't automatically skew the pool of money towards a few particular interests.

Ads also have problems in that they are juxtaposed with the content of the site. That can create an implicit sense of endorsement of the ad by Wikipedia, and vice versa. People manipulate content providers all the time, by mentioning to advertisers that their ads are juxtaposed with some objectionable content, and even threatening to boycott those advertisers if they don't remove their ads. By only accepting donations, you are supported by people who are much more likely to be dedicated to the free exchange of information that is your mission, and you aren't putting their name up next to content that they might object to.

[JonnieCache]

I suppose you're right, but the psychology of donations versus purchases is very powerful. Plus there's the issue of customer vs. product that someone else mentioned.

[neilk]

There isn't a maximum donation that I'm aware of. In some cases, individuals have given a lot of money, publicly and anonymously. I believe the WMF has turned down some large donations when there were too many strings attached.

[charliesome]

The OSS world isn't free from conflict of interest either - just look at the Merb vs. Rails thing a couple of years ago.

[wycats]

As someone who was involved in that, I'm genuinely interested in what you mean.

[charliesome]

Apparently EngineYard was pressured behind the scenes into merging Merb with Rails because they didn't want to lose their status as an 'official' Rails host.

You're probably in the best position to shed some light on this, since everything I know about it is hearsay.

[danneu]

Can you explain? Wiki just explains that Rails pretty much slurped up Merb's featureset/advantage in Rails 3.

[snowwrestler]

It is naive to think that money is the only conflict of interest. Wikipedia is rife with ideological conflicts of interest now, and much of the growing edit bureaucracy is designed to protect these conflicts of interest.

[dextorious]

"""One of the best things about wikipedia, some might argue the best thing, is that it is free from all the conflicts of interest invited in by money changing hands in exchange for services."""

As an organization, maybe, as an encyclopedia, not so true.

For one, we have a lot of examples of people working within companies to add content that they like. A lot where exposed, but others surely are not.

Especially in non technical issues (politics, history, etc), I find Wikipedia to be an assortment of western media biases. It's only natural, of course, given the majority of content editors origin, training, the selection bias inherent in wanting to contribute to such an effort, etc. I wouldn't give it any more worth on such subjects than I give to the CIA World Factbook.

[mc32]

>I find Wikipedia to be an assortment of western media biases.

That you find that I won't contest. I'd point out that one might also see local biases in non-western language wikipedia articles. So to me, that point is kind of tangential. I'd rather say that everything has some inherent bias, rather than couching it as wikipedia having an especially (western) bias, as if other sources could be bias-free.

[dextorious]

I agree, that everything has some inherent bias, the problem I see is that Wikipedia is often taken as the "gospel", from both western and a lot of non-western residents, and because of it's status as a "world-wide, collaborative, encyclopedia" it's assumed that it is unbiased --while people treat other sources with more caution.

[angus77]

Funny, I seem to run into people everywhere saying you can't trust Wikipedia. Where are all these people who take it as Gospel?

[dextorious]

For everyone telling you "not to trust Wikipedia", there are 100 out there citing it for their blog post/article/school paper/personal research...