Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 December 2

= December 2 =

advertisments
can you guys just use advertisements already, i dont care its just a way of life on the internet i just ignore them anyways, no one cares about adds ok — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.148.248.162 (talk) 21:00, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Do you mean advertisements from third parties, posted on wikipedia pages for revenue? No. Any ad would bring the appearance of conflict of interest. Any ad would encourage editing of the subject's page by biased actors. Advertising also eats up usage on people's data plans, which disproportionately affects information access to the poor and those in underserved areas. Temerarius (talk) 21:11, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
 * WMF (formerly the organization we formed to delegate some infrastructure and paperwork tasks to, but now our corporate overlord) is getting far too much revenue already and we should be looking for ways to make it get less rather than more. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 22:15, 2 December 2019 (UTC)


 * You ignore ads and you don't care about them. Yet, despite this, you want us to use them. Do you see a gigantic mismatch there?  I do.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:21, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
 * The OP must be lonely. He could fix that by encouraging telemarketing calls to his phone. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:26, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * See also Perennial_proposals and Funding_Wikipedia_through_advertisements.--Shantavira|feed me 09:19, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * What the OP is referring to is the irritating advert by Wikipedia that pops up every few weeks asking us to make donations to help save Wikipedia. I would guess that if Jimmy Wales wants his baby saved he has enough to pay for it himself.  Further to this, all that really needs to be paid for is the website domain and the housing and servicing of the servers, which could be moved somewhere much more cost effective that the USA.  Thanks. Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 10:16, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't know how you read that into the OP's post. He's actually complaining that there aren't advertisements, not complaining about the occasional fund-raising banner (which is a notice, not an advertisement, and I think can be turned off anyway). --Viennese Waltz 10:27, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I interpret the IP's complaint about there not being ads as an implicit complaint that there are banners (else why complain at all). However, it's a debatable nuance.
 * As an IP user myself, I can't turn off the banners by default, but despite using the site on a daily basis I don't think they appear annoyingly often, they don't bother me in the slightest, and they can be closed with a single click. My suspicion is that people who do complain about them feel guilty about not responding to them: I assuage my conscience with the thought that I regularly contribute with expertise rather than money. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.217.209.178 (talk) 11:04, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Don't rule out the possibility that the OP is being sarcastic. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:50, 3 December 2019 (UTC)


 * I don't know about logged in users, but if you are an IP like me, the nonstop "please donate to us" banners are getting larger and larger. The current one takes up my entire monitor - a full screen banner begging for money so Wikipedia can avoid using ads. What's next? Auto-play videos? The banners are getting worse and worse which, in my opinion, is why this person would prefer small ads that are easy to ignore instead of a massive banner that you can't get rid of. 135.84.167.41 (talk) 13:59, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * It would be interesting to hear back from the one-shot IP that started this section. I don't know about banners taking up the entire screen. If so, there's nothing anyone here can do about it. You could take your concerns to Wales' talk page and see what he has to say. Can you make a print-screen of one and upload it? (Of course, if all else fails, you could create a registered account.) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:11, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I can tell you that I was absolutely planning to donate $25,000,000,000 to Wikipedia, just this moment actually, but ever since ol' Jimmy popped up on a little corner of my monitor asking for the cost of a cup of coffee to keep the servers up, I felt eternally insulted and vowed to never furnish a single penny to the Satan-incarnate that is Wikipedia ever again. Mind you, I could easily have logged in and spared myself the immeasurable migraine, but as the immortal Groucho Marx once said, "Whatever you're for, I'm against it." And now I can sit back in my adirondack chair, sipping my Arnold Palmer, smug and content with the knowledge that without my precious donation, Wikipedia will suffer greatly.--WaltCip (talk) 18:04, 3 December 2019 (UTC)


 * I use adblock to hide the banners. And imho the WMF is currently overfunded, allowing it to pursue programs orthogonal to or to the detriment of wikipedia.  And yes Virginia there is such a thing as overfunding.  There is plenty of funding to keep the servers up.  The additional money is being spent on stuff that's not merely wasteful but actually harmful. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 18:55, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * "The additional money is being spent on stuff that's not merely wasteful but actually harmful." Like what please? I would be very interested to know.  Thank you.  Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 09:43, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * How about using Wikipedia as a tool to keep a congressman from discussing a proposal to hinder online illegal file trading? It is well documented that the Mediawiki team used multiple servers they own around the world to voice support for blacking out Wikipedia, making it appear that there was overwhelming support for the idea. To ensure they were the majority voice, the discussion was done over a holiday weekend, when most users would not login and have no knowledge of the discussion. How is censoring discussions in the United States government considered a "good" use of Mediawiki funding? 135.84.167.41 (talk) 14:12, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * You've told a pretty outrageous story there. Can you provide somewhere I can read more about this?  -- Jayron 32 14:19, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Preferably a reliable source.--WaltCip (talk) 14:32, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * SOPA. That is why I left Mediawiki. It was a farce, all done to pump Jimbo's ego. 135.84.167.41 (talk) 14:58, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Ah. So they did one thing 8 years ago you personally disagreed with, and so you've written off the entire project.  Two things.  1) That doesn't sound like a particularly healthy way to interact with a giant, diverse, and evolving movement and 2) You're still here.  Can't have been that big of a deal to you if you keep coming around.  -- Jayron 32 15:01, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree with the IP. Perhaps Jayron can stop carrying the MediaWiki's water. 107.77.215.175 (talk) 15:05, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I wasn't aware that I was carrying anyone's water. Again, no one asked you to be here.  If the Wikipedia project you are currently spending time contributing to is offensive in someway to you, you don't have to be here.  You can just not load the website, not make comments on discussions, etc.  -- Jayron 32 15:10, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * It was, indeed, nearly 8 years ago that the anti-SOPA blackout occurred. How time flies. That thing violated Wikipedia's own rules about disrupting Wikipedia to prove a point. However, SOPA was a foot in the door for Big Brother government, and thankfully it was shelved. As to abandoned ("useless") WMF projects, I know there have been some, though the only thing that comes to mind was something about an editing option. I expect Wikipediocracy has plenty of info on the subject of aborted WMF projects. Maybe the editor making that complaint could review Wikipediocracy and report back here. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:05, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Whether or not that one event was or was not a good idea is perhaps something that individual people can arrive at on their own, and really not the purview of this board. There's probably some room for debate on the matter, and there's likely a wide range of opinions on it.  However, the idea that, regardless of that, a singular event from that long ago would somehow invalidate the work of the millions of editors on all of the various language Wikipedias, the other projects like Wiktionary, etc. boggles the mind.  Many of the people who may or may not have been involved in the movement at that date may or may not even be involved today, and Wikipedia has largely kept producing content over all of those 8 years, and to claim that such work of all of those millions of people makes them complicit (after the fact) in a single event that one disagreed with is just ridiculous.  And if one did feel that way, to continue to patronize said project also boggles the mind.  -- Jayron 32 17:17, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Mediawiki turned him into a newt. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:58, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * As expected, the IP who initially raised the question never came back. Maybe it's time to shut down this section. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:56, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Kainaw has been hanging out and telling ridiculous stories (like their account being 'shadow banned' or them being multiple people in a hospital) since they 'abandoned' Wikipedia over SOPA. I don't expect that to change any time soon. Nil Einne (talk) 03:16, 7 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Is that you, user:Kainaw? Matt Deres (talk) 16:31, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

SOPA keeps coming back in one form or another and they will probably make it stick eventually. However, the SOPA blackout was perfectly in line with our mission, which is to be a pro-free-content activist project (our neutrality policy applies to article content, not to the project as a whole). WMF among other things has conflated writing an encyclopedia with running a giant web site. Anyway this topic ought to be discussed more someplace, but per Bugs, this isn't the place for it. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 22:30, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I didn't say that, Jayron did. And blocking access to Wikipedia for a day violates WP:POINT. As to SOPA, there is certainly value in protecting copyrights - which is something Wikipedia itself tries to do. The complaint about SOPA at that time was that it could go too far. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:30, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I was referring to your comment about shutting down this section, i.e. this topic is being discussed in the wrong place. Wikipedia has never sought to eliminate copyright, but SOPA went ridiculously overboard and was a far greater threat to Wikipedia than the blackout could have ever been.  See Lessig's book Free Culture (book) for pre-SOPA historical and constitutional analysis, and Stallman's story The Right to Read about where the SOPA sponsors want us to go. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 01:35, 5 December 2019 (UTC)