[Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership
Delirium
delirium at hackish.org
Mon Oct 24 16:57:49 UTC 2005
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> The press release, and the text posted by Angela in various locations,
>> was certainly not clear on the nature of the agreement, especially
>> regarding the rules relating to placement. Accordingly, I've updated the
>> page on Wikipedia on the subject, with some help from Jimbo:
>
>
> Thanks, that's a great deal clearer! As I've mentioned previously, the
> initial press release sounded greatly like Answers paid to get their
> tool prominently displayed on Wikipedia.
>
> Now it turns out that Answers are simply making a new tool with
> advertising, and are giving some of the revenue to the Foundation, and
> are asking nicely if we'd put the tool on the Tools page.
>
> Hopefully the lesson learnt from this is that the detail should be
> provided right from the beginning, rather than confusingly-worded
> which creates false impressions right from the start.
The new wording is still a bit confusing to me, if "asking nicely if
we'd put the tool on the Tools page" is all it's supposed to mean.
Simply putting the tool on the tools page was not an issue---the tools
page is for listing pretty much any tool we know about, so of course it
should be listed. The controversy was over an agreement to give it
"charter placement" on that page.
Some people object to even having a profit relationship in the first
place (and did with Amazon anyway), but I haven't generally been among
them (I supported the Amazon referrer revenue way back then, so long as
it was disclosed and not displayed any more prominently than other
bookstores' links). The objection, from me anyway, is to displaying
such partners' links in a more prominent location. Amazon referrer
link: fine. Putting Amazon link at the top of the ISBN page in larger
font (or otherwise highlighted uniquely): not fine. The present
situation is pretty much identical, imo, and it's a bit bizarre how
directly the board seems to have completely ignored the community
consensus that was reached the last time this issue came up.
-Mark
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