[Foundation-l] [announcement] new staff member in business development

[Yonatan Horan]

a) I was thinking of a mediawiki implementation (and here's an evil idea,
include it in the version everybody uses so they have to manually remove it
if they don't want to). That avoids the whole edit war thing.

b) Good point, but I don't see anyone removing the 20k links to amazon we
currently have.

c) Good point.

d) Actually they [should be] link[ing] to the page that has the image on it,
not directly to the image on amazon's servers, at least from what I
understand.

To everyone else, how about we try coming up with ideas on how to help the
foundation make more money rather than perpetuating this off topic flame
fest? I'd personally like to hear if any of my other ideas were
good\bad\stupid.

-Yonatan

On 5/20/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 19/05/07, Yonatan Horan <yonatanh at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Perhaps but the unavoidable fact is that we currently have 26,000 links
> to
> > amazon, many of them being sources for pictures, sources in articles or
> > otherwise non-policy violating links. Even if they are violating policy,
> if
> > we aren't removing them, the referral might as well be added. Also,
> there's
> > Special:Booksearch for which one could add the referral id to
> amazon\Barnes
> > and Noble links.
>
> a) Adding it to special:booksearch, one centrally generated URL, is a
> relatively sensible move. Adding it to anywhere *else* means that we
> have to manually patrol each and every use of the URL in order to add
> the referral ID, and check it doesn't get changed to another referral
> ID, and deal with people who will editwar to keep them out
>
> b) most material "sourced" from Amazon can be more appropriately
> sourced elsewhere
>
> c) it is inappropriate to give our editors a motive, no matter how
> well-meaning, to encourage the use of links to *specific* sales sites
> in articles. It effectively will create a single, or a group of,
> recommended commercial partners.
>
> d) as you say, a sizable fraction of those links are appropriate
> "image sourced from this URL" - and, as such, they link directly to
> the image generation URL. No-where to put a referral link, and no
> benefit to anyone from doing so...
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
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