On this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedia_articles_based_upon...

we have a link to http://www.questia.com/

Questia has offered to pay us $12 per signup through that link, but we would have to change the link to a tracking url.

I almost just went ahead told them no, but then I thought, hmm, maybe we should talk about this. It's not likely to generate any significant revenue -- that's a pretty obscure page I think -- so it's really more a question of the general principle here.

I guess the problem I have with it is that the text of that page is pure editorial content, and should remain that way. It's different even from the book sources page in that respect. Putting a paid link on a page can be perfectly fine to do, but not unless clearly marked as such. But starting down the path of embedding paid links with disclaimers all over wikipedia is a pretty huge _stylistic_ change if nothing else, and I'm not really comfortable with it.

Linking to booksellers and having a mix of paid and unpaid links on that page is not likely to give rise to doubts about our neutrality. But linking for money *within* the content of actual articles, not in the margin or whatever, that sounds pretty bad to me.

I think I would be a lot more comfortable with a link in the margin, a link to their search engine for the topic of the page, with us getting paid, with a disclaimer. That would be *outside* the editorial content of the article itself.

(I am not proposing that we do that, I am just saying that it would be different.)

--Jimbo