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

[Ziko van Dijk]

How about a button at the lower part of an article, beneath "References",
"Weblinks" and close to the link to the Wikimedia Commons. The button leads
the interested reader to "Commercial offers related to this article", to a
different page or site, provided by our commercial partner.
This would be commercially less powerful, but hardly an annoyance to any
reader.
Ziko





2008/3/21, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>:
>
> 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
>
>
>
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
Roomberg 30
NL-7064 BN Silvolde