Jimmy Wales wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
I'm not sure why we list individual booksellers in the first place.
Some users, like me, have a preferred bookseller and would rather just click straight through. I'd rather pay a little more sometimes than go through the hassle of entering my credit card number and address again, so meta-searches aren't that interesting to me.
Different people have different preferences, and we can easily accomodate them all, so, you know, why not?
The only reason why not, that I've seen so far, is that some people not only want to boycott Amazon, they want to force others to do it as well. I'm not persuaded that *that* is what we want to be doing.
First of all, that's not /my/ motivation for questioning the link. While I personally will not do business with Amazon, I oppose Wikipedia's steering people away from them. My motivation is to avoid swamping the list of links with individual booksellers when the meta-searches are more useful.
Remember that those (like you) with preferred booksellers can continue to use these with the meta-search sites. OTOH, newcomers can be harmed by not knowing that the meta-search sites aren't just another bookseller.
As for those that /are/ motivated by opposition to Amazon, I don't know what they would really hope to get out of removing individual booksellers from the list. After all, Amazon is listed on both AddALL and PriceSCAN.
Also, Fred and I are the only people in this discussion to question the list of individual booksellers (and neither of us has come out in /opposition/ yet!); I don't know what Fred's motivation is, but even if it's to force a boycott on others, that makes only 50% of us. ^_^
Anyway, I have a new idea: Just explain on the page what the difference is -- then people can make the decisions that they want. So see my new version of [[en:Special:Booksources]].
-- Toby