[WikiEN-l] Questia link

Wed May 19 19:16:43 UTC 2004

On this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedia_articles_based_upon_websites

we have a link to
http://www.questia.com/

Questia has offered to pay us $12 per signup through that link, but we
would have to change the link to a tracking url.

I almost just went ahead told them no, but then I thought, hmm, maybe
we should talk about this.  It's not likely to generate any
significant revenue -- that's a pretty obscure page I think -- so it's
really more a question of the general principle here.

I guess the problem I have with it is that the text of that page is
pure editorial content, and should remain that way.  It's different
even from the book sources page in that respect.  Putting a paid link
on a page can be perfectly fine to do, but not unless clearly marked
as such.  But starting down the path of embedding paid links with
disclaimers all over wikipedia is a pretty huge _stylistic_ change if
nothing else, and I'm not really comfortable with it.

Linking to booksellers and having a mix of paid and unpaid links on
that page is not likely to give rise to doubts about our neutrality.
But linking for money *within* the content of actual articles, not in
the margin or whatever, that sounds pretty bad to me.

I think I would be a lot more comfortable with a link in the margin, a
link to their search engine for the topic of the page, with us getting
paid, with a disclaimer.  That would be *outside* the editorial
content of the article itself.

(I am not proposing that we do that, I am just saying that it would be
different.)

--Jimbo