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‘Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit’
As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, Wikipedia’s annual two month donation drive started a couple of weeks ago. This is accompanied, as usual, by an abusive ad banner which, as usual, is bigger than last year’s.
Why abusive? First of all, the thing is huge. This is especially significant on lower resolution devices – it takes up about a third of the screen on my EeePC, I shudder to think what iPhone users are going through.
Secondly, there is no option to remove the banner [EDIT: Unless you're a registered user who is logged in, see below]. Clicking ‘collapse’ simply displays a smaller one. If this were desktop software, it would be classed as adware – the inability for the user to remove obtrusive graphical ads is considered unacceptable in desktop software. Even on the web it died out in about 2001. Or perhaps I’ve been given mind-altering drugs and I’ve actually been contributing to GeoCities for the past four years rather than a communal encyclopedia.
Luckily for those of us using Firefox and the Adblock Plus extension, help is at hand. Simply stick the following into ‘Add Filter’ in ABP:
wikipedia.org#div(id=siteNotice)
[EDIT: As a couple of commenters have pointed out, this is case sensitive (I transcribed it from my Adblock Settings wrongly the first time)]
Credit for this goes to the Adblock Forums.
The wider question, though, is how much damage this will do to Wikipedia as a project. Most ordinary users don’t mind unobtrusive ads on webpages. Wikipedia’s ad banners, however, are far more intrusive than Google AdWords. If an ordinary, IE-using web surfer comes across Wikipedia in the next couple of months, they might well assume that Wikipedia has been bought over and is now profit-making. For the record, NEITHER HAS HAPPENED although one commenter suggests that there’s a professional fundraising organisations involved in these shenanigans. Abusive advertising is one of the reasons people came to Wikipedia from ‘freeware’ websites in the first place – these unacceptable ad campaigns (the banners for which get bigger every year) are the biggest threat to the project’s continued growth.
UPDATE: It appears that on enwikipedia there is an option to disable the advert in your user preferences (go to Gadgets, and it is ‘Suppress display of fundraising banner’ under ‘Browsing gadgets’). Cheers to Bduke for pointing that out
It’s case-sensitive… and the “N” in siteNotice is capitalized… so the correct filter line is…
wikipedia.org#div(id=siteNotice)
It works but is case sensitive:
It needs to be: wikipedia.org#div(id=siteNotice)
FWIW, I don’t see this banner with the browser on my Blackberry Curve. I don’t know the exact reason for this, beyond the obvious guess that my telco’s proxy filters it out for some reason. (I see the rest of the page.)
In any case, it is an abusively large banner ad. Score a big win for bringing in professional fund raisers.
Geoff
@Ilywrch:
All I can think of is that the WM Foundation have set it not to appear on mobile devices with a useragent sniffer of some kind. That would explain why it doesn’t appear on your Blackberry (which presumably identifies itself as a Blackberry in the useragent string) but it does appear (well, sorry, USED to appear
) on my EeePC – the useragent string just identifies it as Firefox running on Xandros Linux.
I scratch my head, wondering, how could anybody push any amount of money at the Wikimedia Foundation, when it appears from the budget that Sue Gardner and Erik Moeller are pushing, oh, about 30%-35% raises for themselves in salary, in THIS economy?
People should be saving their pennies for their kids’ college education, or for that “rainy day” fund for when they get laid off (millions will be in the next couple of quarters), or for heaven’s sake, the local interfaith shelter downtown.
Wikimedia Foundation has already shown us how they spend money — Moscow “health clubs” and $300 bottles of wine. Oh wait, wait, they didn’t actually reimburse those expenses, because “a disgruntled ex-employee” put his foot down over those in particular.
Lemmings with money… it’s a scary notion.
There is an option to remove it. It is in your preferences. Of course you have to have signed in. I found it did not work on meta but it works on wikipedia.
Umm, its been quite well published that on most wikis that the ad is disablable for logged in users via special:preferences (under gadgets), and on other wikis disablable by adding code to special:mypage/monobook.css. Doesn’t anyone read wikizine
-bawolff
@bawolff:
Hadn’t heard of Wikizine before. To be honest, people shouldn’t need to read Wikizine (or this blog for that matter) to remove the advertising banner. There should be a ‘remove’ button on the banner itself, rather than hiding it in userprefs.
Actually i never see ads/banner on wikipedia (english version) using any browser (opera, ie7, safari, and ff) and i’m not a registered user there. Perhaps the ads is targeted to a specific country