[Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links

[Oliver Pereira]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> We already list Amazon and several others, and we've consciously made
> the choice not to boycott anyone or have any particular editorial policy
> on this.  I think that's the right thing to do, because it's really
> outside our mission to make controversial political statements about
> booksellers.
> 
> We let the end user decide, and wash our hands of the matter.
> 
> So this does raise the natural question: if we're sending people to
> Amazon anyway, is there any reason we should not accept a commission for
> doing it?

Listing several booksellers and not picking any out for special treatment
is all very neutral. But if we list several booksellers and then add, "By
the way, if you go to *this* one, Wikipedia gets some money," then that is
a clear encouragement to the users (or at least the ones who support us!)  
to go to *that* bookseller rather than the others. So it starts to look as
if we are supporting that bookseller. Of course, we could just not mention
the fact that Wikipedia gets money from one of them, but that could be
considered dishonest.

> If you think they are not evildoers, then there seems to be no problem.  
> If you think that they *are* evildoers, then at least this will help to
> reduce their profits.

I think it is very likely that more people will buy from Amazon if they
think they will be helping Wikipedia by doing so. And so Amazon will quite
likely make more profits.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+