Talk:Sponsorship

Since its founding, Wikimedia has experienced exponential growth. It has been said that in the future, it will probably be necessary to purchase a new server every month. Obviously, this is an expensive proposal.

To date, other than Bomis, no company has officially provided any financial support to the project. Until now, Wikimedia has been funded exclusively by private donations. Given our projected growth, do we have the finances necessary to meet projected server demand?

Corporate sponsorship of Wikimedia is a touchy subject. Many of our users are sensitive to obtrusive advertising, or to the conflicts of interest it would create.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Money - The added money would allow us to keep up with the server demand.
Corporate imprimatur - Having a company sponsor us may increase our credibility, and show that we are not some 'two bit' project.

Note: many Wikipedians will look at this the other way around. Wikipedia credibility is good, partly because we are not affiliated to any commercial enterprise. (see also comments below)

Cons

Conflicts of interest - writing about a company that we take money from makes us susceptible to claims of bias. If there is no actual bias, there would be the appearance thereof.
Unwanted advertising - Cooperate sponsorship may require some kind of on-site acknowledgement. Advertising is obtrusive (albeit to different degrees) and diminishes the overall user experience. Jimbo has said that he is personally opposed to advertisements at this stage in time.

Filling a niche

Many open source projects make money from corporations that use their software and are obliged (morally, not legally) to give something in return. It has been suggested that Wikimedia could do the same. It has been suggested that we seek sponsorship from a publishing company to fill such a niche.

Alternatives to onsite advertising

Would sponsor mentions on something external to this site be more acceptable than onsite advertising? A mention on the WikiReader for example, or adverts on the back of flyers promoting the Wikipedia Topic Evenings, or being listed on the http//www.wikimediafoundation.org web site in the list of sponsoring companies.

Comments

Very, very problematic. Corporate sponsorship has many negatives:

Cf. Consumers Union—they have consistently refused corporate sponsorship—they perceive any connection to business would reduce, not increase their credibility.
How long before corporate sponsors will want some kind of quid pro quo besides a simple mention. Observe how brief sponsorship mentions have expanded to virtual mainstream commercials on public radio and TV in the US.
Are you ready for Exxon Wikipedia?
None of the contributors are paid. This makes editors feel that they are, emotionally, part owners. In other words, "this is my community; this is my baby. I give for the greater good." How many good editors leave when corporations set conditions for support.
Do we beieve we can manage an arm's length (long spoon?) relationship with corps? Yeah, "a little bit pregnant."
The most obvious place to raise money would be sale of Wikipedia materials and charging a license fee to the commercial sites that are built on Wikipedia content. Can't do that because of the GNU FDL? Then we're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
How about a foundation grant? With all the academics in this project, we should have some good grant writers. -- Cecropia 03:09, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)

If we need to, we can limit growth and cut back on services. There more important things than popularity ratings. However I doubt it will come to that. Many people have offered support to Wikipedia in terms of spare clock cycles on their own mostly idle servers. There's a huge potential hardware pool if some of our computing tasks can be geographically distributed. -- Tim Starling 05:01, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Sponsorship does not have to be negative:

Perhaps we can find a sponsor that wants a product rather than advertising. Surely somewhere out there exists a potential sponsor in the field of education that could have synergy with this site.
Editorial direction from a sponsor could be positive if limited. For example, it would be very bad for a sponsor to tell us what to delete or what to say, but would it be so bad if a sponsor gave us a list of articles they'd like to see written? This could be particularly synergistic if the nature of the organization was educational or had a background in library sciences.
Sponsorship could be in terms of hardware...perhaps remotely located cache servers or something. This might be particularly appropriate for commercial sites using our content already. We should solicit some of them for donations anyway.
Selling content: does the GNU FDL prohibit selling of this content? Perhaps a cdrom, dvd, or hardcopy excerpt from wikipedia could be marketed (with GNU copyleft, of course).

I think there are unexplored possiblities here. --Ssd 12:11, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)

"Would it be so bad if a sponsor gave us a list of articles they'd like to see written?" I think it would. For one thing, who would we require to write these articles? Moreover, why wouldn't the sponsors just contribute them themselves (via employees or some other means). I would love, however, to see Cecropia's idea about foundations bear fruit--even corporate foundations are better than taking money in exchange for advertising. Meelar 16:36, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I agree it would be bad if they required the articles to be written. I was thinking more along the lines of them suggesting subjects they found lacking that would make the encyclopedia useful to them as a training tool. --Ssd 14:54, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

We should always negotiate with sponsors so that we put the conditions. For example, ssd had some good ideas. When given a list of articles we should write, it should be on our conditons (NPOV, GFDL, etc). ✏ Sverdrup 16:36, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)