bg3wiki:Ads Announcement 2

But may be rolled back if they don't pay off!

(See here for the original announcement: About plans to put ads on bg3.wiki)

Dear Baldur's Gate 3 fans and wiki enthusiasts,

Here are some detailed updates. I've since gained a lot more knowledge on the situation with copyrights and licensing, made some preliminary plans about how the money would be split, and we're well on track with Publift to decide on the types of ads to show, though things are still subject to change.

Copyrights and Licensing

New contributions to the wiki going forth are dual-licensed under the Creative Commons licenses BY-NC-SA and BY-SA. (Previously, it was purely BY-NC-SA.) This ensures that new and old content can coexist and be mixed freely. See this article for an explanation of dual-licensing.

The authors of old contributions, insofar they can be reached, will be asked to dual-license their content as well, so that as much content as possible is under the dual-license model with BY-NC-SA + BY-SA. They will receive potentially significant compensation for this; more on that later.

When the site starts showing ads, most content will probably be still under BY-NC-SA only, but that's fine. As I've mentioned in the original announcement, there is no clear legal conflict between serving BY-NC-SA content and displaying ads. Though there's different opinions, there's a lot of precedence showing that it's fine in practice, such as the existence of other BY-NC-SA wikis that display ads, and even the opinion of Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. As such, my understanding is that bg3.wiki is fully in the clear here where the law is concerned.

The wiki will nevertheless honor the decision of any past contributors who ask for their content to be removed, based on good faith towards them. So far, this has been requested by a very small number of people, and the plan is to replace their content with newly written content of equivalent quality (instead of removing their content immediately), so the community doesn't suffer from any information going missing. That said, authors who had written guides (such as in the Guide: or Modding: namespaces) could of course choose to have their guides hosted somewhere else and have them removed from bg3.wiki entirely if that's their wish. Upholding good faith towards everyone is paramount for bg3.wiki, including those who choose to part ways.

You can read the exact details of the copyrights & licensing situation in legalese here or in plain English here.

How the money will be split

It's still way too early to name any numbers. But preliminary revenue estimates, and a good look at the number of people who had significant contributions in the past, tells me that I should be able to redistribute the majority of incoming funds, for a good while, to over 100 people, who contributed to the wiki at any point from its creation until now and had a minimum of 100 edits. (Despite millions of visitors, there are only about 115 people who had 100+ edits on the wiki so far.)

This is not going to be a perpetual arrangement. The contributors in question may receive their share for e.g. 12 months, or 24 months, or maybe for as long as the revenue is high enough for it to make sense. I'm undecided on how to define the time-period during which they get a share, since it's unclear for how long bg3.wiki will continue to have so much traffic.

Of course, not everyone would be receiving an equal share. The amount of work people have put into the wiki is vastly different (from 100 edits to many thousands), and some people's contributions go beyond just wiki editing. I'm taking as many factors into account as I can, and trying to remain as objective as possible, to decide on a fair distribution.

It should be noted, by the way, that people may not be paid monthly, but for example on a 3-monthly or 6-monthly basis. That is to reduce the amount of administrative overhead involved in processing the payments of so many people.

Note also that the share of most people will be rather small. Even if I paid 1% to every person on average, then 100 people would mean 100% of the money, and I'd have nothing left for me. A more realistic distribution, taking my salary and business expenses into account, may be something like 60% of the money being redistributed. At about 115 people, that means the average share would be about 0.52%, so if the wiki only made $15k per month, that would only be $78 per person per month on average. (So if I paid them for a 12-month period, $936 per person on average.) This is just an example with made-up numbers. The real numbers are likely to be significantly higher, and I may increase the redistributed funds above 60% if the total is high enough.

Please remember that there are no plans to pay people for new contributions going forth, since it creates an incentive to put quantity over quality. We might end up doing it anyway if the earnings are good enough, but it would be in the form of spontaneous gifts, not promised in advance. People should be contributing to the wiki out of a genuine desire to improve it, not due to financial incentives.

Redistributing the majority of revenue to the community means that, in the unlikely scenario that the revenue isn't very high after all, I may be left with a relatively small sum. In worst case, unlikely as it is, I may end up only living from this endeavor for a few months before I put the ads down again.

My role as "employee" of bg3.wiki

Some people have asked whether it's fair for me to take a whole salary out of the earnings, while others get less. Indeed, I will be working full-time, not only to make this whole thing work, but also to improve some technical aspects of the wiki.

There are a few bugs we're suffering from which, while not critical, make the experience on the wiki sub-optimal, and solving them requires delving into the guts of MediaWiki extensions or other such technical work. Examples include: Broken mouse-over page previews due to a bug in the TextExtracts extension, and the mobile version of cached pages not refreshing for 24h even when a page is edited, due to an outdated Nginx module whose newer versions haven't been packaged yet for Debian GNU/Linux.

Then there are continued updates to MediaWiki that I have to install, dozens of extensions we use that each have their own updates, and the underlying operating system. Our backup situation also isn't the best right now. (There are backups, but restoring from them would take some work because they aren't structured optimally.) I've also been meaning to write in-depth technical documentation of the entire wiki setup, so other wiki admins can benefit from it. In particular, the Nginx-based caching method we use for MediaWiki is not, to my knowledge, documented anywhere on the web (I pieced it together myself) and I'd like to document it thoroughly to give back to the MediaWiki community.

Other than that, there is going to be the administrative overhead of paying so many people all around the globe, some of whom may be living in places that PayPal and other common payment processors can't reach. This will also involve accounting work, as I will need to make tax declarations and whatnot. There may be some business expenses I haven't even thought about yet, because I've never been fully self-employed before.

Ad types and placement

It looks like we will be serving the following ad units.

Desktop:

• A sticky vertical ad on the left-side panel, where you currently see the ads announcement. Just like the announcement itself, this vertical ad will follow when scrolling. If it annoys you too much, you are always welcome to use an ad blocker, or just log in.
• A small horizontal banner at the top right, just beneath the search bar. We may put it somewhere else if it annoys people too much due to its proximity to the search bar.

Mobile:

• A single, thin footer that's always at the bottom of the screen, but only if your screen resolution is at least 720px tall in CSS units (not to be confused with physical pixels) because we don't want to steal valuable screen space from smaller devices.

The above may be slightly adjusted, depending on feedback and how well the ads perform, but no crazy changes.

There aren't going to be any pop-ups, interstitial ads, auto-playing videos, or huge surfaces dedicated to ads.

The ads are going to be personalized, which at this point seems to be standard practice and necessary for good revenue. This means that, based on other websites you visit which also serve ads, the ad company creates an anonymous profile of your interests, and tries to show you ads you're more likely to be interested in. This is also called "tracking" of users, which makes it sound slightly more ominous than what it really is. But if you're uncomfortable with it, please feel free to install an ad-blocker that supports the "Acceptable Ads" protocol (this disables tracking/personalization), or you could install an ad blocker with a scorched-earth style approach like uBlock Origin.

Visitors from the EU/UK region may not get personalized ads at the beginning, so there won't be a cookie consent banner. This is probably going to be added later, so EU/UK visitors will be able to choose between personalized and non-personalized ads via their choice on the cookie consent banner. This is sadly not supported for other regions yet.

And remember: If you're logged in, you won't see ads anyway. Creating an account is quick and easy.