Wikipedia Pages Now On Amazon — With Product Links 130
An anonymous reader writes "Last month, e-commerce marketplace Amazon.com launched a relatively unnoticed new feature that brings content from Wikipedia pages to its own servers in a shadowy new project that appears to be called 'Shopping Enabled Wikipedia Pages.' Hosted on the Amazon.com domain, they replicate Wikipedia's content but have added links to where a book can be purchased on Amazon. Amazon representative Anya Waring told CNET when asked via e-mail, 'As of November, we have rolled out in the books category, however [it] will be expanding to new categories in 2011.' If Average Joe scrapes Wikipedia and adds affiliate links to it, Google will remove and punish the domains with duplicate pages."
Yeah... (Score:5, Informative)
From the very page linked
I don't think Amazon is doing this to boost their pagerank.
Average Joe (Score:5, Informative)
From Google:
"Duplicate content on a site is note grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results"
ie: the 'Average Joe' can scrape wikipedia all he wants and Google will not punish him unless his intent is to deceive. But thanks for the conspiracy theory attempt just the same.
A.
Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:4, Informative)
I doubt that, Wikipedia has thousands of revisions on even less important topics and mistakes get corrected out pretty quick, of course, if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..
Amazon is not the first and certainly not the last entity that puts or mixes Wiki content with commercial stuff. Mostly these copycat&link sites get removed from the indexes and from the ad serving companies pretty quick. This case is different though, Amazon has little to worry about its PageRank being damaged and they do not derive their revenue from ads, that means they can misuse Wikipedia with little backslash.
Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:5, Informative)
No, they don't. Wikipedia will not be getting a SINGLE DOLLAR out of this, and this is almost certainly not something that was decided by any of the wikipedia administrators.
Amazon can do this legally on their own.
Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:4, Informative)
In any case, correcting Wikipedia is a pain, since chances are that your edit gets removed since it contradicts someone's bias. Also, deletionism is still going strong.
Citation needed