On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
We already list Amazon and several others, and
we've consciously made
the choice not to boycott anyone or have any particular editorial policy
on this. I think that's the right thing to do, because it's really
outside our mission to make controversial political statements about
booksellers.
We let the end user decide, and wash our hands of the matter.
So this does raise the natural question: if we're sending people to
Amazon anyway, is there any reason we should not accept a commission for
doing it?
Listing several booksellers and not picking any out for special treatment
is all very neutral. But if we list several booksellers and then add, "By
the way, if you go to *this* one, Wikipedia gets some money," then that is
a clear encouragement to the users (or at least the ones who support us!)
to go to *that* bookseller rather than the others. So it starts to look as
if we are supporting that bookseller. Of course, we could just not mention
the fact that Wikipedia gets money from one of them, but that could be
considered dishonest.
If you think they are not evildoers, then there seems
to be no problem.
If you think that they *are* evildoers, then at least this will help to
reduce their profits.
I think it is very likely that more people will buy from Amazon if they
think they will be helping Wikipedia by doing so. And so Amazon will quite
likely make more profits.
Oliver
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| Oliver Pereira |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton |
| omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk |
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