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."
very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Are the quotes around the word "mistakes" meant to suggest that the very thought of Wikipedia being wrong is somehow strange to you?
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.
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
Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
How can somebody be biased against an objective fact with proper authoritive references supporting it?
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How can somebody be biased against an objective fact with proper authoritive references supporting it?
As your sig's reference to shades of gray suggests, the choice of which objective facts to include and which to leave out or delete can be a political choice.
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You've attempted to apply rational logic to biases, but biases don't subscribe to logic; they represent bugs in rationality.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that attitude, which is prevalent in many fields, very troubling.
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Unfortunately, what you say is true. Wikipedia should only be trusted for things known by enough people. (What's "enough"? That's the question, isn't it...) I've heard the same information from every person I know that has truly expert knowledge on a
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Are you talking about Wikipedia or situation in science in general? It's applicable to both.
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A lot of experts have a problem with having no authority on Wikipedia and having to cite sources like anyone else.
Actually, a lot of experts in a field may be coming up with original research in the field, and thus have no authority to comment in the wikipedia article as no original research [wikipedia.org] is permitted.
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You should checkout Citizendium. People there edit under their real name*, mostly experts in their own respective fields.
* this encourages real-world credentials to be taken into consideration, when resolving disputes
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I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.
I really don't get it, why not just fixed those factual errors?? It sounds like you saw those errors in wikipedia in 2005 and never bothered to do anything with it other than acknowledge something is wrong. Then, recently, you read the same article and again noticed the same error you registered in 2005 but complain about it? When you say "they've never fixed" you do realize you are really saying I never fixed it right? Because "they" is "you"!
Why are you complaining over something you have control ov
Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:5, Interesting)
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..
I can certainly vouch for the GP's sentiment in my own area of expertise. I actually use Wikipedia primarily as a tool for finding out what kinds of misinformation there are floating around in the wild; it's a useful gauge of what misinformation is popularly perceived to be "true".
Experts have much better things to do than edit Wikipedia; it's abundantly clear that all editing is controlled by people with vested interests who use opaque processes to silence dissent. Experts do have a responsibility to write popular science, targetted at educated non-specialists. However, there's absolutely no point doing so in a venue that will invariably introduce errors after it's been written.
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I highly recommend Citizendum. It was created Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. (He was disappointed with it too.) People use real-world names, and real world credentials there. Articles are peer reviewed before published. Of course being more selective means there're less articles.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Introduction_to_CZ_for_Wikipedians#Citizendium_is_not_a_mirror [citizendium.org]
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Do you know of a good alternative? I agree, the pages related to my field are horrible and at looking at the discussions, practically uncorrectable [...] I do appreciate what is there though, particularly for subjects that other resources would neglect.
Well, there's always a trade-off between expertise and general coverage. So when choosing what to devote my efforts to, I'll go for more specialised venues, basically.
For academic subjects, a partial solution in print/e-book format is specialised, ad hoc encyclopaedias with references (so NOT like the Britannica, which is a horribly awful example of an encyclopaedia in almost every way). Still better is the current trend for "companions", i.e. volumes on a specific topic with entire in-depth chapters on sub
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perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing
Experts who are members of the Wikipedia Fraternity, perhaps. Of which there are decidedly few, unless their expertise is in Nerd Culture Politics. Legitimate experts, no matter how well-intentioned, inevitably have better things to do than fight the in-grained biases and deletionism.
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if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..
I used to, but I got tired of making the same corrections over and over again.
If I publish an article or book or even my own blog, I can set down what I believe to be true and people can consult it or cite if they accept my authority; they can also dispute my statements or just ignore me if they choose to. But with Wikipedia, everything I say is written in the sand at low tide.
All this is off-topic to the main point of the news item, of course, but it's a second thing (besides Amazon pseudo-ads) that so
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Perhaps it would be better to put the article in a blog posting and show its errors. Make sure you explain why you're qualified as an expert and try to give us references to other resources that contradict the Wikipedia article.
Shame the wikipedia cabal publicly, and perhaps they might fix their article. Even if they don't, if your blog shows up in google, then those of us researching the topic might see your corrections.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wikipedia will be the first encyclopedia to have a version which actually directly pushes readers to more authoritative sources (specialized books, etc.) How many other encyclopedias will be able to say that they have such integration?
Uh, any with a decent bibliography and cites?
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And which ones would that be? Certainly not EB...
They already did (Score:2)
Wikipedia has always had the ability to look up where to get books that are cited as references [wikipedia.org]. People tend to cite online sources more often because it is easier, and because the admins prefer references that they can check without having to do much work; I've seen arguments where admin threatened to remove something because the reference was an (unclassified) military manual which was only available in large libraries.
If you click on an ISBN you'll get this unweildy page [wikipedia.org], which links to searches in more
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What's this I don't think you are reading it right. Wikipedia has done nothing, this is a unilateral action from Amazon, an action that will fail because it depends on people visiting Amazon to read Wikipedia, I guess they are hoping business partners will link to their version of Wikipedia rather than the free one but I doubt it will have any traction.
Wikipedia might not be perfect but if you read those articles full of mistakes with that awesome reading skills of yours, I think Wikipedia is doing just fin
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I wish more people would do this. I think people rarely look up pages in which they are expert, or have good knowledge of. I have found errors, misrepresentations or bad explanations in most pages I've looked at, where I am knowledgeable in the subject. This leads me to the reasonable conclusion that ther
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Importantly also, almost all Movie pages, for example, have content that's clearly stolen directly from IMdB.
At least in the United States, you can't "steal" factual information about movies. As for IMDb, I have no sympathy for them, since they got a lot of work for free from people under the guise of a community project, which was then sold for a profit to Amazon.
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I guess there's nothing that doesn't end up being commercialized. Wikipedia has certain problems — when I look up topics in which I'm an expert, I always find the articles full of mistakes — but it was nice to see something that was relatively free of commercial spin. No more, it seems.
Wiki is still there without going through Amazon. For those subjects with mistakes, there's Google's Knol [google.com] which only publishes articles by experts.
Falcon
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Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
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:5, Interesting)
Well, that will happen until Wikipedia directly blocks Amazon IP addresses because of a sudden uncontrollable spike in bandwidth usage/bandwidth bill.
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Well exactly, or they could just shuffle the database about a little bit so some of the busier links go somewhere else.
Now, that could be a lot of fun....
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Commerce - the basest of casual human interactions - becomes the lowest common-denominator for human activity and interaction.
In a commercial relationship, for anything to be valued, it must not then just be assigned monetary equivalence. Indeed, that token monetary assignment becomes the most significant evaluation of a thing, to the exclusion and actual detriment of its other possibilities, qualities and merits.
This is what is meant by the expression "degradation of the marketplace."
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No, they've taken a local copy, they're not hot-loading. WMF was not consulted in any way before they did this, and I believe the only outstanding issue is the perception that WMF has anything to do with this. But I'm sure this will be straightened out in short order.
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How was that local copy obtained?
It had to have SOME performance impact on the site. Most likely still will, given how often Wikipedia updates. Even doing diff incrementals would still be taxing.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download [wikipedia.org]
Amazon haven't added any more impact to their servers than that whcih they have said they are willing to accept from any one.
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Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Aww, don't be so cynical. Not a single dollar? Do you know what Wikipedia's biggest expense is? Serving their pages. It's a burden for them.
Answers.com, Amazon and a bunch of other sites host mirrors of Wikipedia for free, in exchange for putting some of their own ads on it. Wikipedia serves their information to more people, while serving less traffic directly.
Everybody wins.
Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Google had lots of Wikipedia copies at one point, I remember that well. But they have purged the Wikipedia copies from the search results since then.
Yeah... (Score:5, Informative)
From the very page linked
I don't think Amazon is doing this to boost their pagerank.
Yes, but... (Score:2)
I don't think Amazon is doing this to boost their pagerank.
Sure, but they still "manipulate search engine results".
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Don't we all...?
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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.
Yet another bad summary (Score:3)
Google will not punish and remove.
Google will discount the PageRank (Page, as in Larry) to nothing for prior published content. That is the one and only "penalty."
Amazon, whatever the value of this, has enough related value content for this not to matter much-- there's (probably) a PR+ value to presenting the relevant Wikipedia content next to similar information.
Yes, it's darn annoying and another reason to boycott those **** at Amazon. But it's not the things the OP summary says. //karma-whoring
Loosey-goosey Creative Commons (Score:1)
That's what Wikipedia gets for using a not-restrictive-enough Creative Commons license: Amazon has now figured out how to monetize Wikipedia and make money from the unpaid efforts of other people. Wikipedia should have used a license that specifically denied that sort of "capitalization".
Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons (Score:5, Interesting)
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Your example is silly, a non sequitur: nothing in such a license would prohibit READING Wikipedia... which is all you'd be doing if you were "checking sources". If you COPIED the article into your own research-for-profit, though, you'd be begging for a smackdown.
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Let's play this game. Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian licence that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material. If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia, not even to check their sources, out of fear of getting sued for copyright violations. Do we really want more of that?
If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia *anyway*. It *might* be an OK source for grade / high-school and *some* undergrad papers / projects, but NOT for research grants.
Wikipedia is a great resource, but not for anything more than a very preliminary starting point for things above a certain level.
Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons (Score:4, Insightful)
If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia *anyway*. It *might* be an OK source for grade / high-school and *some* undergrad papers / projects, but NOT for research grants.
Wikipedia shouldn't be cited as a source at any level. But it can help you to understand a topic, and hopefully point you to some better sources if you need to cite something. There's no arbitrary limit at which you can't use it like that. Even when you're an expert in some field, you're still going to want information on related fields quite often.
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Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian license that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material.
That's nonsense, Wikipedia's license applies to redistribution, not use. You would have as much freedom with Wikipedia using non-commercial license as with any regular old book, you could use and quote it all you like, just not do plain verbatim copies of it. Or have you stopped using regular books to while working on your research grants too?
Do we really want more of that?
Depends, once up on a time there was some use for allowing commercial redistribution of freely licensed stuff, as otherwise you wouldn't have all the Linux distributio
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You're using an encyclopedia for grant-level research?
Re:Loosey-goosey Creative Commons (Score:4, Insightful)
As a sometimes-wikipedia editor (aren't we all) I have to say "MEH".
I contribute to wikipeida because I want a useful reference. If Amazon is willing to mirror it (with a couple of ads) what is the problem?
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Huh? The equivalent for software is perfectly fine under either BSD or GPL.
Better as add-on? (Score:2)
I am however against the commercialization aspect of Wikipedia (especially since, like others have said, I doubt Wikipedia makes any money off of this due to its open nature).
Why not just create an add-on that does this across all web pages, similar to how skype lets you call any phone number on a web page, or g-mail identif
Shoving what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are they redirecting people from wikipedia? Are they stomping on search result pages? Nothing is being "shoved" here.
This is an incredibly useful feature. I use wikipedia all the time for research papaers, but most research papers do not allow online sources or allow only a limited number. Citations to actual books are needed, and to draw quotes from those books we need access to at least a bit of the content. Amazon provides this, meaning now I may be able to just click a citation and be directed to the proper page at amazon where I can access a few sample pages from the book - ba-bing, now I have a citation for my paper. What's amazing is not how amazon was crass enough to do this, but that jimmy wales was so shortsighted as to not offer to do this from the beginning. That's potentially a lot of revenue they'll never claim now.
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Citations to actual books are needed, and to draw quotes from those books we need access to at least a bit of the content. Amazon provides this, meaning now I may be able to just click a citation and be directed to the proper page at amazon where I can access a few sample pages from the book - ba-bing, now I have a citation for my paper.
So, you think research is just "accessing a few sample pages" and then linking to that.
How very scholarly...
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Research? Who said anything about research? I was talking about completing papers for class. And it doesn't matter what I think or don't think about completing a classroom assignment - my grades speak for themselves. So far I see little difference in the pages anyway. It's just sad Wales didn't think to tap that mine before Amazon jumped his claim.
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Research? Who said anything about research? I was talking about completing papers for class. And it doesn't matter what I think or don't think about completing a classroom assignment - my grades speak for themselves. So far I see little difference in the pages anyway. It's just sad Wales didn't think to tap that mine before Amazon jumped his claim.
I think you're confusing "original research" with the type of research you do to complete assignments. In essence, by doing what you are saying the grades don't have to speak for themselves. It isn't a matter of doing well on assignments, it is how you complete the assignment. There's nothing really scholarly in what you are doing, which was ColdWetDog's point.
To understand (which you are clearly too young to understand), imagine a world without the internet or wikipedia. You would not be able to do a
On the internet... (Score:2)
No one knows you're an old dog.
I may be "too young to understand" whatever it is you blathered on about, but at least I'm old enough to know not to make silly assumptions about anonymous voices in the ether.
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> I doubt Wikipedia makes any money off of this
Why on earth should "Wikipedia" (I assume you meant the Wikimedia Foundation) make any money off anything? That whole organization exists to enrich themselves (I'm referring to everyone who draws a salary from WMF) from the work of the actual contributors(normal people who write the content), none of whom are paid for their trouble.
I read "wikileaks pages now on amazon" (Score:1)
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but aside from that I am not sure what I am reading here? is wikipedia turning into some kind of fancy amazon catalog? FUCK ME! I am outta the intertubes, enough of this commercial bullshit!
Fortunately, most of the rest of us actually read TFS.
Yet another Amazon-Wikipedia Problem... (Score:2)
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Epic Fail? (Score:3)
It appears that you have to find a way to click yourself out of shopping-enabled Wikipedia into regular Wikipedia in order to be able to search Wikipedia for anything that's not already on the main page.
Also, the shopping-enabled main page is under the impression that today is October 23. When you live near a Marine Corps base, stuff like
1983 – Lebanese Civil War: Suicide bombers destroyed two barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers of the international peacekeeping force.
tends to catch your eye.
In...5...4...3...2 (Score:2, Funny)
...1, May the wiki-fiddling begin....
You can replicate wikipedia if you want (Score:3)
Contributing to Wikimedia? (Score:2)
This may be about Kindle (Score:1)
I'd guess that this is mostly about enhancing things for Kindle users. Perhaps when reading a Kindle book there'll be an embedded link to the Amazon enhanced Wiki content. Same for Shelfari, Abebooks, etc. They may have no intention of making the Wiki content available to casual surfers, and may opt-out of indexing by search engines entirely.
how many copies does it take? (Score:1)
If not, what is required? Ten more sites copying wikipedia content, so all ten results on the first page point to the same page?
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Yes, efreedom are bad people. It looks like they popped up right after the last time Google rejiggered their algorithm (or at least around an announced/confirmed change), but who knows how long they've been around and whether their prominence is due to new science or a lucky SEO windfall finally rewarding them for something they'd been doing for some time (lurking at the 50th SERP. They have been falling off my searches somewhat since then.
Actually a good feature (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have just written a Greasemonkey script for that: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/91959 [userscripts.org]
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I agree with you on that. Plus it should be a feature Wikipedia benefits from. They should receive a fee for any redirect or any book sold that way. But to be fair Wikipedia should offer an API to any booksellers to do this. A feature that would help customers choosing their bookseller.
1) a person browses Wikipedia (the portal of knowledge) ;-)
2) she finds an interesting book referred from Wikipedia
3) chooses her bookseller to buy the book (the deposit of knowledge)
4) ???
5) profit !
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Wikipedia does benefit from this service - the pages are hosted and served by Amazon and so do not cost Wikipedia any bandwidth.
Funktionality (Score:2)
Is it just me or have they removed the ability to search articles? So far, it appears to show me the main page by default and I can't freely choose an article. I don't see any adds and links to Amazon content only seem to work with ISBNs. As is, it's pretty useless.
Cold day in hell. (Score:2)
It is going to be a good long while before I will do business with them again.
Re:Amazon (Score:5, Funny)
"I said we should host Wikipedia, you idiot!"
Re:Amazon (Score:5, Funny)
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No, it's a wikiphile. But it's not so funny.
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Sarah, is that you?
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Well, there are basically two problems that I see:
1) If the data is a copy, how do you keep the copy synced with the original.
2) If the data is a hot-link, who pays for the extra bandwidth?
Those are both minor, and only one will apply. But to me it seems that there should probably be an update cycle. The main question is "how fast?". If it's a slow update cycle, then there should be little on-going expense, and it should facilitate Wikipedia doing it's job.
Ideally, Amazon should host Wikipedia in the clo
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The extra bandwidth that I was talking about was that bandwidth used by Amazon in making the periodic backup copy. Which happens repeatedly. The frequency with which it happens determines the amount of extra bandwidth.
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Yes, it's a part of the cost of running an open web-site. That doesn't mean it's not a cost. (Possibly not a major one, though.)
This is an identified on-going cost. That others do the same thing doesn't mean this isn't a cost. (And I *did* originally say that this was a minor problem.)
The actual point was that I couldn't find anything BUT minor problems. Perhaps I should have been more explicit.
(OTOH, I don't really trust Amazon. That incident with removing already purchased copies of 1984 still stick