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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[herojig]

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

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.

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.

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!"

Re:Amazon

[TheRaven64]

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

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?

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.

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?

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?

[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.

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.

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.

Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons

[t2t10]

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

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.