[Foundation-l] Advertisement and service at the same time

[Durova]

or if the advertisement also was a bringing a benefit to the reader ?

I ask the question because my husband opinion is very clear on the
matter. When he reads an article about a BOOK, he would like that we
provide as a service, a link to a website where he can directly buy the
book. Typically, an Amazon link. It would be an advertisement of course,
 but it would bring a service to the reader. It would not be a
GoogleAds.  We would be able to exactly select which articles we want
the ad to be on (for example, all articles about books. all articles
about DVD). It is not damaging the NPOV of the article. It could be
identified in a special area. Deals could be made with one, or several
providers. It would bring some money, but not huge amounts of money (who
could disrupt the organization...).
ant
******
That's exactly the kind of example that looks sensible to a casual reader
and causes monumental headaches for volunteers.  After all, why should
Amazon.com pay to have an outgoing link from that book article when anybody
can insert that link for free?  And Amazon's competitors can insert their
own external links for free also?

This problem seriously detracts from encyclopedia-building.  For example,
the textile arts project on en:Wikipedia. has about 500 articles and 5
active members.  The topic sees large numbers of of cottage entrepreneurs
whose only interest is in generating links to their own particular online
stores, and smaller numbers of professional PR folks who pepper articles
with pitches for this or that brand name.  Extracting that dross is no fun.
Look away for a few weeks and linkspam even creeps into the navitational
templates.

The problem drains the productivity of the most active individuals and turns
off the fair weather volunteers from helping at all.  To be specific, the
time I've wasted on linkspam is why our featured portal drive isn't
completed yet, and why the "Sumptuary law" article isn't in good article
candidacy by now, and also why I haven't started a new article on
traditional Maori textiles.  We've also got basics to put in place: 16 of
the project's 28 top-importance articles are start-class or stub-class.

So Florence, I have an invitation for your husband.  If he really wants
Wikipedia to save him ten seconds of looking up a product on Google, please
ask him to come help expand "Beadwork".  Five line top-importance articles
are the price of linkspam management.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beadwork

-Durova