[WikiEN-l] Selling books to increase funding

Sun May 9 18:49:37 UTC 2004

Dear all,

Not sure if this is the place to do this, but it's something I'd like Jim 
Wales opinion on - and it may provide a bit of respite from the rather fiery 
stuff about trolls and (shudder) death threats.

I submitted a similar proposal to the Village Pump page, but I didn't get 
the impression it would meet the right eyes.

Basically I wanted to present an idea for increasing Wikipedia's funding by 
encouraging people to place more book references at the end of articles.

I understand that there was a controversy about Amazon in the past, but 
according to...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Book_sources

...Wikipedia earns a commission on people who purchase through...

http://www.priceowl.com/?site=wikipedia

So, it occurred to me that if publicity is given to this it may increase 
revenue.

This could be done by mentioning it in the style guides and maybe having at 
is a category within the 'Pages needing attention', ie 'Pages Needing Book 
References'.

You could be more aggressive about raising revenue this way, ie cutting down 
the list of links, at the first page I referred to, so it includes ONLY 
those that give Wikipedia a kick back - but I sense that would be regarded 
as against the spirit of Wikipedia.

Now, clearly one would only want to encourage references to worthy books.  
Perhaps this could be done by asking that contributors only list books they 
have actually read OR are written by the person named in the article title.

Anyway, figured it was an idea that wasn't going to do anybody any good if 
it just sat here in my head, so there it is.

Bodnotbod.

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