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

very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[oWj9*7!7dsggh7]

I guess there's nothing that doesn't end up being commercialized. Wikipedia has certain problems — when I look up topics in which I'm an expert, I always find the articles full of mistakes — but it was nice to see something that was relatively free of commercial spin. No more, it seems.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[hoshino]

Given that the whole of Wikipedia is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, does Amazon even need to pay them for this?

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[whiteboy86]

..always find the articles full of mistakes

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..

..something that was relatively free of commercial spin

Amazon is not the first and certainly not the last entity that puts or mixes Wiki content with commercial stuff. Mostly these copycat&link sites get removed from the indexes and from the ad serving companies pretty quick. This case is different though, Amazon has little to worry about its PageRank being damaged and they do not derive their revenue from ads, that means they can misuse Wikipedia with little backslash.

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.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[ultranova]

if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..

Are the quotes around the word "mistakes" meant to suggest that the very thought of Wikipedia being wrong is somehow strange to you?

In any case, correcting Wikipedia is a pain, since chances are that your edit gets removed since it contradicts someone's bias. Also, deletionism is still going strong.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Khyber]

Well, that will happen until Wikipedia directly blocks Amazon IP addresses because of a sudden uncontrollable spike in bandwidth usage/bandwidth bill.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Requiem18th]

What's this I don't think you are reading it right. Wikipedia has done nothing, this is a unilateral action from Amazon, an action that will fail because it depends on people visiting Amazon to read Wikipedia, I guess they are hoping business partners will link to their version of Wikipedia rather than the free one but I doubt it will have any traction.

Wikipedia might not be perfect but if you read those articles full of mistakes with that awesome reading skills of yours, I think Wikipedia is doing just fine without your help.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[symes]

Well exactly, or they could just shuffle the database about a little bit so some of the busier links go somewhere else.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[ion]

In any case, correcting Wikipedia is a pain, since chances are that your edit gets removed since it contradicts someone's bias. Also, deletionism is still going strong.

Citation needed

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[suv4x4]

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.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[ColdWetDog]

Well exactly, or they could just shuffle the database about a little bit so some of the busier links go somewhere else.

Now, that could be a lot of fun....

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Commerce - the basest of casual human interactions - becomes the lowest common-denominator for human activity and interaction.

In a commercial relationship, for anything to be valued, it must not then just be assigned monetary equivalence. Indeed, that token monetary assignment becomes the most significant evaluation of a thing, to the exclusion and actual detriment of its other possibilities, qualities and merits.

This is what is meant by the expression "degradation of the marketplace."

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[larry bagina]

citation

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[owlnation]

Wikipedia has certain problems -- when I look up topics in which I'm an expert, I always find the articles full of mistakes -- but it was nice to see something that was relatively free of commercial spin.

I wish more people would do this. I think people rarely look up pages in which they are expert, or have good knowledge of. I have found errors, misrepresentations or bad explanations in most pages I've looked at, where I am knowledgeable in the subject. This leads me to the reasonable conclusion that there probably errors on most pages, some of them serious, some of them deliberate.

And no, I don't fix them. I simply do not have the time nor the inclination to play editing wars with some wikifascist. Until such time as wikipedia has a fair and transparent administration system there's no point in wasting your time trying to improve it.

It could well end up that Amazon's version ends up being more accurate and reliable due to the fact that they may well be more accountable and honest than the WikiFoundation.

I don't see an issue with this at all. Many wikipedia pages are already shilled, astroturfed, fancruft, blatant spam or copied as near as verbatim from commercial websites. Many "citations" are links to third party commercial sites, and nothing like primary sources at all. Importantly also, almost all Movie pages, for example, have content that's clearly stolen directly from IMdB. Since IMdB is owned by Amazon, it only seems fair that they'd return the favor and steal it back. I'm astounded Amazon hasn't already sued them -- the theft of their data by wikieditors has been blatant for years.

Anyway, how is this different from Jimbo selling off other people's wikipedia content to Answers.com for personal profit? This seems more honest than that to me.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[CRCulver]

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 stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.

And you'll find a lot of people disagree with your claim that fixing them is what "any experts in any field should be doing." My own specific branch of linguistics is tiny, it has a handful of experts. Several of them gave Wikipedia a try and then gave up on it pretty fast, as they felt that effecting any real beneficial change was impossible when you have cabals of non-expert editors. Besides, there's an occasional feeling in my field that our research doesn't really concern the public; it benefits them indirectly, but reaching out to the layman ourselves is a waste of time. Experts have a duty to do expert research, not writing popular science.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[David Gerard]

No, they've taken a local copy, they're not hot-loading. WMF was not consulted in any way before they did this, and I believe the only outstanding issue is the perception that WMF has anything to do with this. But I'm sure this will be straightened out in short order.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Petrushka]

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.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[mwvdlee]

In any case, correcting Wikipedia is a pain, since chances are that your edit gets removed since it contradicts someone's bias. Also, deletionism is still going strong.

How can somebody be biased against an objective fact with proper authoritive references supporting it?

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[RobotRunAmok]

perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing

Experts who are members of the Wikipedia Fraternity, perhaps. Of which there are decidedly few, unless their expertise is in Nerd Culture Politics. Legitimate experts, no matter how well-intentioned, inevitably have better things to do than fight the in-grained biases and deletionism.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[jcwayne]

...there's an occasional feeling in my field that our research doesn't really concern the public; it benefits them indirectly, but reaching out to the layman ourselves is a waste of time.

I find that attitude, which is prevalent in many fields, very troubling.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[oWj9*7!7dsggh7]

if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..

I used to, but I got tired of making the same corrections over and over again.

If I publish an article or book or even my own blog, I can set down what I believe to be true and people can consult it or cite if they accept my authority; they can also dispute my statements or just ignore me if they choose to. But with Wikipedia, everything I say is written in the sand at low tide.

All this is off-topic to the main point of the news item, of course, but it's a second thing (besides Amazon pseudo-ads) that somewhat diminishes my confidence in Wikipedia's content.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[severoon]

My own specific branch of linguistics is tiny, it has a handful of experts. Several of them gave Wikipedia a try and then gave up on it pretty fast, as they felt that effecting any real beneficial change was impossible when you have cabals of non-expert editors.

Unfortunately, what you say is true. Wikipedia should only be trusted for things known by enough people. (What's "enough"? That's the question, isn't it...) I've heard the same information from every person I know that has truly expert knowledge on a long-tail subject. If the valuable knowledge you happen to possess isn't already known by enough people, it will almost certainly get reverted.

This is the nature of truly democratic knowledge sharing. This is the one area Britannica has it all over Wikipedia. For almost all practical purposes, though, only experts need that level of information, so Britannica for the masses doesn't make a lot of sense.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[camionbleu]

How can somebody be biased against an objective fact with proper authoritive references supporting it?

As your sig's reference to shades of gray suggests, the choice of which objective facts to include and which to leave out or delete can be a political choice.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[datapharmer]

I had a certain large chinese search engine go haywire on one of my websites quite a while back. a disallow in robots.txt didn't seem to do the trick, so instead of flat blocking them I redirected hits from their IP range/UA string to their own search results and the problems with their bot ceased almost immediately.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[harvey the nerd]

Wikipedia has whole areas of distinct, anti-factual bias, medicine and climate being two large examples where conventional wisdom, and so-called consensus science, ride roughshod over inconvenient hard science and simple facts.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Josh Triplett]

How can somebody be biased against an objective fact with proper authoritive references supporting it?

You've attempted to apply rational logic to biases, but biases don't subscribe to logic; they represent bugs in rationality.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[herojig]

I agree, disturbing this is. Especially so when said research is funded by layman's tax dollars.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[imthesponge]

A lot of experts have a problem with having no authority on Wikipedia and having to cite sources like anyone else.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[imthesponge]

You mean they won't accept your "CO2 is harmless, trees breathe it in" edit, even though it's entirely factual?

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[CRCulver]

A lot of experts have a problem with having no authority on Wikipedia and having to cite sources like anyone else.

It really doesn't matter if you can cite sources. If you're a newbie, and there's a cabal around the article, you have little hope of ensuring the article develops healthily.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[falconwolf]

I guess there's nothing that doesn't end up being commercialized. Wikipedia has certain problems — when I look up topics in which I'm an expert, I always find the articles full of mistakes — but it was nice to see something that was relatively free of commercial spin. No more, it seems.

Wiki is still there without going through Amazon. For those subjects with mistakes, there's Google's Knol which only publishes articles by experts.

Falcon

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[hairyfeet]

Well I can only give my personal anecdote, but I think it stems from those that have decided "it shall be thus" and refusing to allow anything that affects their worldview, such as the article we had on /. recently that said when those that believe in a bias are confronted with evidence that goes against that bias it actually strengthens their belief in the bias instead of causing them to question it. Now my anecdote:

When I first heard of Wikipedia I thought it was a good idea, basically a FOSS encyclopedia, where crowd-sourcing could improve content and fix errors, so I thought I'd just read and if I ever found an error I'd do my part and fix it. I didn't actually go out looking for errors, just going about my normal business. Then I found an error. It wasn't a big error, in fact I personally thought it wasn't a big deal at all. It simply said a character in a show was supposed to be thus and end up with A, when I knew from watching the director's commentary that this was caused by executive meddling and both the writer and director wanted something completely different. so I pointed this out, linked to both the director's and writer's sites where they said the same thing...and was promptly banned and the page changed back to what it was. No reason given, or explanation why the director and writer were looked at as unreliable sources or whatever, just gone. Out of curiosity I started looking at the behind the scenes stuff like the talk boards and ...wow. You are talking factions, rabid deletionists, and plenty with agendas, like the Scientologist that made sure anything nasty said about LRH got quickly shitcanned.

So I'd say anybody that uses Wikipedia for any information more exciting than the chemical weight of a mineral or which wires to switch to make a crossover cable are just asking for it. Once one becomes a mod on that site you are talking about serious factions, admins watching their "favorite" entries like a hawk and wiping anything they don't agree with, just look on their message boards and you'll find some serious abuses of power and mods that love the banhammer and use it quite often. You of course are welcome to believe what you like, but personally if Wikipedia told me the sky was blue I'd want a second opinion.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[smagruder]

"And no, I don't fix them. I simply do not have the time nor the inclination to play editing wars with some wikifascist."

In place of preconceived notions and defeatism, perhaps you could give it a try. Even if you meet some resistance, it likely won't be on the majority of articles you attempt to improve.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Am I missing something? This "enriched content" is not hosted by wikipedia, it's hosted by Amazon. So if you want something free of commercial spin, keep using Wikipedia -- and don't use the Amazon copy of it.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[LauraScudder]

Because if there's one thing Wikipedia hates, it's people actually using it's articles. But that's beside the point because they're using an archived version hosted on their own servers, which is why the featured article and such don't match.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[sourcerror]

You should checkout Citizendium. People there edit under their real name*, mostly experts in their own respective fields.

* this encourages real-world credentials to be taken into consideration, when resolving disputes

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[sourcerror]

I highly recommend Citizendum. It was created Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. (He was disappointed with it too.) People use real-world names, and real world credentials there. Articles are peer reviewed before published. Of course being more selective means there're less articles.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Introduction_to_CZ_for_Wikipedians#Citizendium_is_not_a_mirror

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Petrushka]

Do you know of a good alternative? I agree, the pages related to my field are horrible and at looking at the discussions, practically uncorrectable [...] I do appreciate what is there though, particularly for subjects that other resources would neglect.

Well, there's always a trade-off between expertise and general coverage. So when choosing what to devote my efforts to, I'll go for more specialised venues, basically.

For academic subjects, a partial solution in print/e-book format is specialised, ad hoc encyclopaedias with references (so NOT like the Britannica, which is a horribly awful example of an encyclopaedia in almost every way). Still better is the current trend for "companions", i.e. volumes on a specific topic with entire in-depth chapters on sub-topics written by experts. For my own use (and not just in my field), the best series are currently those published by CUP and Blackwell. Either of these avoids the danger of cliques with tyrannical power, precisely because they're smaller, more autonomous, projects.

There are online equivalents, of course; here's one project that I have a great deal of respect for, though I'm not a contributor myself, and though I think it wouldn't take much for quality control to slip badly. But I think you'll agree it's pretty damn specialised. (Even there I have found errors, but the reason I haven't signed up and corrected them yet is because I'm still working on publishing the independent research that would serve as a basis for correcting them :-)

For areas outside my speciality, you're right, resources like Wikipedia are often unavoidable. That's the trade-off I was talking about. But I get the impression that we're more talking about the question of what resources an expert should be trying to contribute to. In academic areas, I'd say the most productive thing to do is edit or contribute to companions, specialist encyclopaedias, or moderated online equivalents thereof. And, when academics are not doing research or writing it up in journal articles, this is pretty much exactly what they do spend their time doing!

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Khyber]

How was that local copy obtained?

It had to have SOME performance impact on the site. Most likely still will, given how often Wikipedia updates. Even doing diff incrementals would still be taxing.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[register_ax]

I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.

I really don't get it, why not just fixed those factual errors?? It sounds like you saw those errors in wikipedia in 2005 and never bothered to do anything with it other than acknowledge something is wrong. Then, recently, you read the same article and again noticed the same error you registered in 2005 but complain about it? When you say "they've never fixed" you do realize you are really saying I never fixed it right? Because "they" is "you"!

Why are you complaining over something you have control over? Just curious.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[register_ax]

A lot of experts have a problem with having no authority on Wikipedia and having to cite sources like anyone else.

Actually, a lot of experts in a field may be coming up with original research in the field, and thus have no authority to comment in the wikipedia article as no original research is permitted.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Raenex]

Importantly also, almost all Movie pages, for example, have content that's clearly stolen directly from IMdB.

At least in the United States, you can't "steal" factual information about movies. As for IMDb, I have no sympathy for them, since they got a lot of work for free from people under the guise of a community project, which was then sold for a profit to Amazon.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[tnovelli]

I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.

Ok, let's see about my area. I found Wikipedia slightly helpful when I was looking for simpler approaches to computer-language parsing, around 2003. However, the material seems skewed toward recent research and tends not to tie in prior art. Oh sure, in 2006 someone added a stub for Schorre's influential "META-II" technique from 1962 -- exactly the kind of simple, practical approach I was looking for -- but in all the Wikipedia articles on parsing, there's nothing to point me in that direction. The META-II stub links to TREE-META, which looks interesting; I wasn't aware of that until now. So there's some value in Wikipedia, but primary sources are much better.

Encyclopedias in general provide a shallow overview of many subjects, and are not intended to be definitive sources. I've seen a few factual errors and unsubstantiated opinions in 'reputable' published encyclopedias, so it's not just Wikipedia. But since Wikipedia is open and unlimited in scope, quality control is problematic, and inevitably it becomes a breeding ground for little fiefdoms of self-aggrandizing researchers and such. What's worse: editor bias lurking in the Wikipedia backwaters, or the 'objectivity' that allows garbage to accumulate because nobody has the authority to purge it? I guess it's the latter, because it exacerbates the fragmentation of human knowledge... whereas 'proprietary' encyclopedic works tend to synthesize knowledge.

The internet is a great distribution medium for the inherently biased work of individuals and small groups, which I shall continue to rely upon. The dream of a superior 'hive mind' ('collective wisdom', 'community', whatever you want to call it) is just bunk. It's waste of time. Even compared to Slashdot.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[noidentity]

I think he meant that given his limited time and enthusiasm, it's best spent entirely on what he's researching, rather than trying to explain it to the average person.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[mapkinase]

Are you talking about Wikipedia or situation in science in general? It's applicable to both.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Dan Ost]

Perhaps it would be better to put the article in a blog posting and show its errors. Make sure you explain why you're qualified as an expert and try to give us references to other resources that contradict the Wikipedia article.

Shame the wikipedia cabal publicly, and perhaps they might fix their article. Even if they don't, if your blog shows up in google, then those of us researching the topic might see your corrections.

Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable

[Richard_at_work]

Wikipedia already provides full access to downloadable dumps of the Wikipedia database to all who wish to download them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Amazon haven't added any more impact to their servers than that whcih they have said they are willing to accept from any one.

Really?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Really?

[thue]

Google had lots of Wikipedia copies at one point, I remember that well. But they have purged the Wikipedia copies from the search results since then.

Yeah...

[jpmorgan]

From the very page linked

Duplicate content on a site is not 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. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

I don't think Amazon is doing this to boost their pagerank.

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.

Yet another bad summary

[theNAM666]

Google will not punish and remove.

Google will discount the PageRank (Page, as in Larry) to nothing for prior published content. That is the one and only "penalty."

Amazon, whatever the value of this, has enough related value content for this not to matter much-- there's (probably) a PR+ value to presenting the relevant Wikipedia content next to similar information.

Yes, it's darn annoying and another reason to boycott those **** at Amazon. But it's not the things the OP summary says. //karma-whoring

Re:Amazon

[pushing-robot]

"I said we should host Wikipedia, you idiot!"

Yes, but...

[Frosty Piss]

I don't think Amazon is doing this to boost their pagerank.

Sure, but they still "manipulate search engine results".

Re:Yes, but...

[M4n]

Don't we all...?

Re:Yes, but...

[mjwalshe]

still dupe content if amazon can get away with this the ill be doing the same after all if amazon can get away with it so can we eh Matt :-)

Re:Note from Amazon Political Subservience Div

[asvravi]

Sarah, is that you?

Re:Amazon

[TheRaven64]

Wikileaks was going to publish the fact that Amazon is a pediaphile.

Better as add-on?

[Dthief]

I think this is a pretty cool feature, allowing you to purchase a book or item based on seeing it on something you are reading (seems like most of them are the ISBN's in the sources).

I am however against the commercialization aspect of Wikipedia (especially since, like others have said, I doubt Wikipedia makes any money off of this due to its open nature).

Why not just create an add-on that does this across all web pages, similar to how skype lets you call any phone number on a web page, or g-mail identifies emails that are about shipments and posts a link to the tracking (though these are not themselves add-ons). If you could even further specify what types of things you are interested in getting info on (i.e. only books) it would be much less intrusive and subversive and less likely to turn away people.

Though maybe enough people wont care and this will be really profitable for amazon, even though they are shoving it down people's throats

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[Afforess]

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?

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[Anonymous Coward]

As a sometimes-wikipedia editor (aren't we all) I have to say "MEH".

I contribute to wikipeida because I want a useful reference. If Amazon is willing to mirror it (with a couple of ads) what is the problem?

I read "wikileaks pages now on amazon"

[McTickles]

but aside from that I am not sure what I am reading here? is wikipedia turning into some kind of fancy amazon catalog? FUCK ME! I am outta the intertubes, enough of this commercial bullshit!

Re:I read "wikileaks pages now on amazon"

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

but aside from that I am not sure what I am reading here? is wikipedia turning into some kind of fancy amazon catalog? FUCK ME! I am outta the intertubes, enough of this commercial bullshit!

Fortunately, most of the rest of us actually read TFS.

Yet another Amazon-Wikipedia Problem...

[Bieeanda]

When I read the summary, I thought it was referring to the delightful(ly stupid) practice some people have got into, of packaging Wikipedia pages and selling them on Amazon while printing the things through services like Lulu. That was a clear example of how badly their internal search can be gamed. This is just unbelievably crass. On the other hand, who on Earth is going to go straight to an Amazon mirror of Wikipedia?

Re:Yet another Amazon-Wikipedia Problem...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Somebody who wants the services that the mirror offers - eg the ability to purchase source materials directly from the article itself. There have been times I've come across book references in Wikipedia that I wanted to purchase (or check price).; or have seen references to an actual product that I want to get.

Epic Fail?

[unitron]

It appears that you have to find a way to click yourself out of shopping-enabled Wikipedia into regular Wikipedia in order to be able to search Wikipedia for anything that's not already on the main page.

Also, the shopping-enabled main page is under the impression that today is October 23. When you live near a Marine Corps base, stuff like

1983 – Lebanese Civil War: Suicide bombers destroyed two barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers of the international peacekeeping force.

tends to catch your eye.

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[macraig]

Your example is silly, a non sequitur: nothing in such a license would prohibit READING Wikipedia... which is all you'd be doing if you were "checking sources". If you COPIED the article into your own research-for-profit, though, you'd be begging for a smackdown.

Look on the bright side

[MikeRT]

Wikipedia will be the first encyclopedia to have a version which actually directly pushes readers to more authoritative sources (specialized books, etc.) How many other encyclopedias will be able to say that they have such integration?

Re:Look on the bright side

[Registered Coward v2]

Wikipedia will be the first encyclopedia to have a version which actually directly pushes readers to more authoritative sources (specialized books, etc.) How many other encyclopedias will be able to say that they have such integration?

Uh, any with a decent bibliography and cites?

Re:Look on the bright side

[t2t10]

And which ones would that be? Certainly not EB...

Re:Look on the bright side

[Bort Sarsgaard]

Britannica 11th Edition (1911) has thousands of footnotes with books as sources. Maybe you missed it.

Re:Look on the bright side

[ksandom]

It's interesting that you say that. I was reading a topic on wikipedia recently, that is a controvercial topic within its domain. The interesting thing is that every reference I checked was a link to a blog post. Every single one lacking references to the studies they alluded to. It's quite possible I missed something worthwhile, but after checking a few, I decided it wasn't worth the effort. I checked maybe a quarter of the references there. :)

Shoving what?

[poptones]

Are they redirecting people from wikipedia? Are they stomping on search result pages? Nothing is being "shoved" here.

This is an incredibly useful feature. I use wikipedia all the time for research papaers, but most research papers do not allow online sources or allow only a limited number. Citations to actual books are needed, and to draw quotes from those books we need access to at least a bit of the content. Amazon provides this, meaning now I may be able to just click a citation and be directed to the proper page at amazon where I can access a few sample pages from the book - ba-bing, now I have a citation for my paper. What's amazing is not how amazon was crass enough to do this, but that jimmy wales was so shortsighted as to not offer to do this from the beginning. That's potentially a lot of revenue they'll never claim now.

Re:Shoving what?

[ColdWetDog]

Citations to actual books are needed, and to draw quotes from those books we need access to at least a bit of the content. Amazon provides this, meaning now I may be able to just click a citation and be directed to the proper page at amazon where I can access a few sample pages from the book - ba-bing, now I have a citation for my paper.

So, you think research is just "accessing a few sample pages" and then linking to that.

How very scholarly...

Re:Shoving what?

[poptones]

Research? Who said anything about research? I was talking about completing papers for class. And it doesn't matter what I think or don't think about completing a classroom assignment - my grades speak for themselves. So far I see little difference in the pages anyway. It's just sad Wales didn't think to tap that mine before Amazon jumped his claim.

Re:Shoving what?

[register_ax]

Research? Who said anything about research? I was talking about completing papers for class. And it doesn't matter what I think or don't think about completing a classroom assignment - my grades speak for themselves. So far I see little difference in the pages anyway. It's just sad Wales didn't think to tap that mine before Amazon jumped his claim.

I think you're confusing "original research" with the type of research you do to complete assignments. In essence, by doing what you are saying the grades don't have to speak for themselves. It isn't a matter of doing well on assignments, it is how you complete the assignment. There's nothing really scholarly in what you are doing, which was ColdWetDog's point.

To understand (which you are clearly too young to understand), imagine a world without the internet or wikipedia. You would not be able to do a quick query, find a passage in a book, look up that single page on amazon, and use it as a reference in the assignment you are working on. You would have to do *scholarly research* to get the job done which is what you are NOT doing. This involves, going to the library, finding a category of the subject you are working on, choosing a selection of books and culling information from them not based on a few pages. As someone who has spent days on end doing this, and also done your way to quickly get an assignment done, the processes for each are world's apart.

I'm not really sure why you are depriving yourself of a really good opportunity to get an education. It's also disappointing that research is not an integral part of completing papers for your class. Why bother at all? If you are going to cheat, at least acknowledge that you *are* cheating. If you don't, it makes the people who actually do the work look bad.

In...5...4...3...2

[s0litaire]

...1, May the wiki-fiddling begin....

Re:What is the problem?

[HiThere]

Well, there are basically two problems that I see:

1) If the data is a copy, how do you keep the copy synced with the original.

2) If the data is a hot-link, who pays for the extra bandwidth?

Those are both minor, and only one will apply. But to me it seems that there should probably be an update cycle. The main question is "how fast?". If it's a slow update cycle, then there should be little on-going expense, and it should facilitate Wikipedia doing it's job.

Ideally, Amazon should host Wikipedia in the cloud, and Wikipedia should do periodic hot-updates to it's local database. This would decrease the cost to Wikipedia and facilitate Amazon doing hot-links. But there's the matter of control of the original sources, domain name, etc., and I'm afraid that I wouldn't trust Amazon enough for that to be an acceptable alternative. We don't live in an ideal world.

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[Frosty Piss]

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 I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia *anyway*. It *might* be an OK source for grade / high-school and *some* undergrad papers / projects, but NOT for research grants.

Wikipedia is a great resource, but not for anything more than a very preliminary starting point for things above a certain level.

You can replicate wikipedia if you want

[thetoadwarrior]

They give away their software and copies of their database so anyone an do the same thing. Amazon should throw some cash their way but they don't have to.

Contributing to Wikimedia?

[teslatug]

I hope they'll be kicking back some money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Though they don't have to, if they're getting some value out of it, they should make sure Wikimedia can keep its projects running. Bezos can certainly spare some change.

Re:What is the problem?

[Ash-Fox]

1) If the data is a copy, how do you keep the copy synced with the original.

Use Wikipedia's xml export periodically.

2) If the data is a hot-link, who pays for the extra bandwidth?

Extra bandwith is handled by Amazon, no?

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[larry bagina]

woohoo! GPL vs BSD flame on!

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[grumbel]

Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian license that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material.

That's nonsense, Wikipedia's license applies to redistribution, not use. You would have as much freedom with Wikipedia using non-commercial license as with any regular old book, you could use and quote it all you like, just not do plain verbatim copies of it. Or have you stopped using regular books to while working on your research grants too?

Do we really want more of that?

Depends, once up on a time there was some use for allowing commercial redistribution of freely licensed stuff, as otherwise you wouldn't have all the Linux distributions. But with the Internet being pretty much commonplace everywhere now there is much less need for physical redistribution, so using a non-commercial licenses could make a good bit more sense, as they would stop people from grabbing free stuff, slapping some ads on it and making money from that.

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[t2t10]

Huh? The equivalent for software is perfectly fine under either BSD or GPL.

This may be about Kindle

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd guess that this is mostly about enhancing things for Kindle users. Perhaps when reading a Kindle book there'll be an embedded link to the Amazon enhanced Wiki content. Same for Shelfari, Abebooks, etc. They may have no intention of making the Wiki content available to casual surfers, and may opt-out of indexing by search engines entirely.

They already did

[pavon]

Wikipedia has always had the ability to look up where to get books that are cited as references. People tend to cite online sources more often because it is easier, and because the admins prefer references that they can check without having to do much work; I've seen arguments where admin threatened to remove something because the reference was an (unclassified) military manual which was only available in large libraries.

If you click on an ISBN you'll get this unweildy page, which links to searches in more libraries, stores, and databases then you ever cared to look at. It would be nice if they used some sort of geolocation to show the most relevant at the top of the page.

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[zippthorne]

You're using an encyclopedia for grant-level research?

how many copies does it take?

[dr_blurb]

It happens all over the place (stackoverflow and that crap "efreedom" anyone?), and Google should do something about it.

If not, what is required? Ten more sites copying wikipedia content, so all ten results on the first page point to the same page?

Re:how many copies does it take?

[rhizome]

Yes, efreedom are bad people. It looks like they popped up right after the last time Google rejiggered their algorithm (or at least around an announced/confirmed change), but who knows how long they've been around and whether their prominence is due to new science or a lucky SEO windfall finally rewarding them for something they'd been doing for some time (lurking at the 50th SERP. They have been falling off my searches somewhat since then.

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[takowl]

If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia *anyway*. It *might* be an OK source for grade / high-school and *some* undergrad papers / projects, but NOT for research grants.

Wikipedia shouldn't be cited as a source at any level. But it can help you to understand a topic, and hopefully point you to some better sources if you need to cite something. There's no arbitrary limit at which you can't use it like that. Even when you're an expert in some field, you're still going to want information on related fields quite often.

Actually a good feature

[bourdux]

I might get bashed for this comment but I think that it is actually a good feature. As a researcher, I often use Wikipedia to get links to more more sources of authority that I can ask the laboratory to order on Amazon. As far as I understand, at the moment, Amazon just links ISBN and book titles back to Amazon so you can buy them. What I did before was copy and pasting the ISBN to Amazon or searching for the book title. The way they have implemented the shopping-enabled Wikipedia is close to the behaviour of customers looking for books on a specific subject and just spare some copy-paste. If I use wikipedia to get to know how I should spend my book budget, I think this is a very good approach.

Re:Actually a good feature

[Ann Coulter]

I have just written a Greasemonkey script for that: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/91959

Re:Actually a good feature

[fredboboss]

I agree with you on that. Plus it should be a feature Wikipedia benefits from. They should receive a fee for any redirect or any book sold that way. But to be fair Wikipedia should offer an API to any booksellers to do this. A feature that would help customers choosing their bookseller.

1) a person browses Wikipedia (the portal of knowledge)
2) she finds an interesting book referred from Wikipedia
3) chooses her bookseller to buy the book (the deposit of knowledge)
4) ???
5) profit ! ;-)

Re:Actually a good feature

[Tim C]

Wikipedia does benefit from this service - the pages are hosted and served by Amazon and so do not cost Wikipedia any bandwidth.

It's all about the SEO

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all about Search Engine Optimization and result relevance. Amazon (in particular, this team) is trying to make sure that their pages are the top results for search hits on keywords related to authors, musicians, movies, TV series, etc. By providing additional context (such as a full Wikipedia article) they can get not just relevance but related concepts or keywords.

There are no community features, no editing the page, and no discussion. This is solely about redirecting search traffic to Amazon for shopping, and website sessions resulting in purchases that enter through this page is how the feature is going to be evaluated and continued or discontinued.

Amazon is all about making the sale and the pages are relentlessly optimized to maximize the likelihood that you'll make a purchase through them.

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[Tromad]

If you're like most researchers you simply mass copy the research links sourced from a few studies without reading any of them anyways, don't kid yourself, you use wikipedia as a source to find other sources.

Re:Amazon

[sourcerror]

No, it's a wikiphile. But it's not so funny.

Funktionality

[bankman]

Is it just me or have they removed the ability to search articles? So far, it appears to show me the main page by default and I can't freely choose an article. I don't see any adds and links to Amazon content only seem to work with ISBNs. As is, it's pretty useless.

M*rch*ntC*rcle

[tnovelli]

And how about those stupid scrape-and-clone "business directory" sites? Why, when I search for a company by name, do 5 or 10 of these useless listings rank above the company's own website? Google (and/or its competitors) need to do something about that or the entire WWW will die. Hmm, that could be a good thing :)

Re:What is the problem?

[HiThere]

The extra bandwidth that I was talking about was that bandwidth used by Amazon in making the periodic backup copy. Which happens repeatedly. The frequency with which it happens determines the amount of extra bandwidth.

Cold day in hell.

[Jane Q. Public]

After what Amazon did to Wikileaks, I cannot believe they are anything but greedy Corporate bloodsuckers, ready and willing to sacrifice YOUR freedom for a few dollars.

It is going to be a good long while before I will do business with them again.

Re:What is the problem?

[Ash-Fox]

I don't understand. How is it extra? It's the cost of running a public website when you allow everyone to do that. I'm certain Amazon isn't the worst abuser of Wikipedia's resources.

Re:What is the problem?

[HiThere]

Yes, it's a part of the cost of running an open web-site. That doesn't mean it's not a cost. (Possibly not a major one, though.)

This is an identified on-going cost. That others do the same thing doesn't mean this isn't a cost. (And I *did* originally say that this was a minor problem.)

The actual point was that I couldn't find anything BUT minor problems. Perhaps I should have been more explicit.

(OTOH, I don't really trust Amazon. That incident with removing already purchased copies of 1984 still sticks in my craw.)

On the internet...

[poptones]

No one knows you're an old dog.

I may be "too young to understand" whatever it is you blathered on about, but at least I'm old enough to know not to make silly assumptions about anonymous voices in the ether.