2010/12/4 Milos Rancic <[email protected]>: > Personally, I think that this is a good opportunity to get money from > payed ads. It is not even on Wikimedia servers.
As I said on wikien-l, the current Amazon.com use is not part of any official relationship. We're concerned about the degree to which the Amazon.com pages resemble Wikipedia pages. The content use itself is clearly permitted, and we're not opposed to commercial use per se. On the contrary, free licenses encourage this kind of experimentation by anyone. The potential issue with this kind of commercialization is that it creates confusion about the "Wikipedia" brand and what it stands for. Wikipedia is currently understood to be one of the few mainstream sources of information that isn't commercialized, and which aims to provide a neutral and inclusive view of any given topic. A third party adding single-vendor shopping ads into the content, while the way the content is presented closely resembles Wikipedia, threatens to undermine that perception, as Amazon.com visitors may assume that this is something that's part of our operating model. This is why we're first and foremost concerned about the risk of identity confusion here, about the impact of such confusion on how Wikipedia is perceived, and about finding ways to reduce that risk. We'll continue our exploration of this issue and will let you know as things develop. It may also well be that this turns out to be a short-lived experiment on Amazon.com's part. In general, our relationship with businesses is shifting from revenue-focused trademark licensing agreements to mission-focused partnerships closely aligned with our strategic plan. For example, we're trying to find the best possible partners to distribute very large numbers of offline copies of Wikimedia content (e.g. on low-end mobile phones used in the developing world, or as part of computing projects targeting disadvantaged communities). -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
