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

[Florence Devouard]

Durova wrote:
> 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

Indeed, that makes sense.

For the record, I am about against ads (and against private investors), 
but I am also open minded and try to listen to other opinions.

My husband does not participate to Wikipedia, and we had about 100 times 
this discussion over "links to purchase books". Sometimes quite heated :-)
He actually do not really care links to Amazon for mainstream books. You 
are right that it is the "easy" situation to solve in one search on 
Google. He is a collector of old books in mineralogy. 100, 200, 300 
years old, you name it. As a researcher, his problem is also to find a 
paper version of a book printed only once 20 years ago, super high 
quality, super specialized, but unfortunately printed only once because 
the editor have no interest to produce a mineralogy book in for 300 
fanatics more than once. So, for researchers, the game is to either find 
a used-version of the book in sale somewhere on the net (ebay or 
similar), or to try to find an electronic version of the book (if 
another fan took the time to digitize it).

Sometimes, he is completely excited to find an article about such books 
in Wikipedia (probably a fan added it). And usually, he asks ME to go on 
the net and to try to find him a new or used version. That's when he 
argues that proposing links for sales to online libraries would be a 
fabulous service to add to readers, as it would help them to get access 
to information (right ?). I usually try to explain him how difficult it 
would be to maintain such a service :-)

Now, his other best dream would be to find the book in electronic 
version in wikibooks. He considers that the job of the local 
associations and Foundation should be to identify out-of-print 
specialist books, contact and visit their editor, and convince them to 
release the books under a free licence :-)

Which is... yeah.

Ant