Wikipedia Pages Now On Amazon — With Product Links

An anonymous reader writes "Last month, e-commerce marketplace Amazon.com launched a relatively unnoticed new feature that brings content from Wikipedia pages to its own servers in a shadowy new project that appears to be called 'Shopping Enabled Wikipedia Pages.' Hosted on the Amazon.com domain, they replicate Wikipedia's content but have added links to where a book can be purchased on Amazon. Amazon representative Anya Waring told CNET when asked via e-mail, 'As of November, we have rolled out in the books category, however [it] will be expanding to new categories in 2011.' If Average Joe scrapes Wikipedia and adds affiliate links to it, Google will remove and punish the domains with duplicate pages."

Comments

Average Joe

[Alrescha]

From Google:

"Duplicate content on a site is note grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results"

ie: the 'Average Joe' can scrape wikipedia all he wants and Google will not punish him unless his intent is to deceive. But thanks for the conspiracy theory attempt just the same.

A.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[jeffasselin]

No, they don't. Wikipedia will not be getting a SINGLE DOLLAR out of this, and this is almost certainly not something that was decided by any of the wikipedia administrators.

Amazon can do this legally on their own.