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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."
Google punishes wikipedia clones with adverts? Are you sure, because one of the things that made me stop using Google was the large number of results that were either mailing list archives with ads (the same list post on the top 10 hits, just different ads), or Wikipedia copies with ads. In fact, the 'Google will remove and punish' link refers to domains that contain the same content on different pages, rather than domains that duplicate the content of other domains, so is completely inapplicable to pages hosting Wikipedia content plus adverts.
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Let's play this game. Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian licence that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material. If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia, not even to check their sources, out of fear of getting sued for copyright violations. Do we really want more of that?
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Well, that will happen until Wikipedia directly blocks Amazon IP addresses because of a sudden uncontrollable spike in bandwidth usage/bandwidth bill.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
Aww, don't be so cynical. Not a single dollar? Do you know what Wikipedia's biggest expense is? Serving their pages. It's a burden for them.
Answers.com, Amazon and a bunch of other sites host mirrors of Wikipedia for free, in exchange for putting some of their own ads on it. Wikipedia serves their information to more people, while serving less traffic directly.
Everybody wins.
I doubt that, Wikipedia has thousands of revisions on even less important topics and mistakes get corrected out pretty quick, of course, if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..
I can certainly vouch for the GP's sentiment in my own area of expertise. I actually use Wikipedia primarily as a tool for finding out what kinds of misinformation there are floating around in the wild; it's a useful gauge of what misinformation is popularly perceived to be "true".
Experts have much better things to do than edit Wikipedia; it's abundantly clear that all editing is controlled by people with vested interests who use opaque processes to silence dissent. Experts do have a responsibility to write popular science, targetted at educated non-specialists. However, there's absolutely no point doing so in a venue that will invariably introduce errors after it's been written.