[Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links

Wed Jul 9 14:36:27 UTC 2003

I've got a suggestion to make. Now that Wikimedia is in place and has a bank account, I think the issue is ripe for discussion.

The Wikipedia special page 'Booksources' serves as a passthrough link to various bookstores. When a book reference in Wikipedia includes an ISBN, any reader clicking on that number gets to the Booksources page. A further click on "Find this book" links to the external vendor's web site, pasing on the ISBN when practical.

Many of book sellers have programs that permit an affiliate or referring site the potential to earn revenue. In general, we could sign up then include our organization ID in a link along with the ISBN. Amazon dot com is an example of this usage. Based on the experience of other sites, there shouldn't be any great income expected, but there's not much effort either. The use of this option is totally transparent to the reader or user (unless they can interpret the data passed in the URI).

I wanted to discuss possibility for two reasons: to see if there are objections, and to look at presentation alternatives.

OBJECTION ARGUMENT:

I do not view this as a commercialization of Wikipedia. I have a guest card at a local university library. They charge a small annual fee for this service, but that doesn't make their library a business. Nor can I see this as any danger to non-profit status, unless the revenue would exceed Wiki's expenses, which seems incredibly remote. So, why shouldn't we take advantage of this?

PRESENTATION:

We do need to consider how of if we inform the reader of this 'feature'. There are three broad choices available:

1.  Just do it.
2.  Implement the idea but inform the user.
3.  Don't do it.

My own choice is 2, but I'd actually propose 2(A), along the following lines.
Explain to the reader (or user or editor) that Wiki may get a commission at no added cost to them if they buy the book. Also explain that they if they want us to get revenue, they need to buy it in one session, or come back through Wikipedia if they decide on a later purchase. We could even offer two options for passthrough, one with and one without a refer back to Wikipedia.

Any comments?

Regards, LouI on Wikipedia

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