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

[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

[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

[larry bagina]

citation

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

[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

[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.

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?

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?

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.