Why Google made this change, from the article, "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] and other international organisations."
When it comes to Israel/Palestine, every mapmaker in the world is taking a stance.
Another example: long form sales pages. They've been discussed here on Hacker News before, and many people here hate them, but they do (apparently) convert very well.
You're right, but money already is involved in these articles. Authors and actors (and agents, I've suspected in a few cases) are keeping a biased eye on their articles.
I think it would be difficult for Wikipedia to be corrupted by money. There's too much transparency, and there's too large of a community. The admins have already discovered with dealt with large-scale attempts to game the system.
What's actually at stake here is the appearance of objectivity. Affiliate links, which are nearly universal across the web, should be minimally objectionable.
I've always wondered why Wikipedia doesn't include affiliate links to Amazon on all their book and movie articles.
I think their current logic is that affiliate links force them to choose which online store they want to support, which is something they appear loath to do.
Look at the page they send you too when you do try to buy a book in an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0802130984 . It's so large and completist that it has two tables of contents, and it's so obsessively non-preferential that it does a good job of hiding the one amazon.com link that most people are probably looking for.
Personally, I've bought 100s of books and DVDs after reading their Wikipedia articles, and I'd be happy to let the WikiMedia Foundation get my affiliate dollars.
"Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold."
As someone with technical knowledge and no purchasing power, I dislike talking to salespeople and technical people. I just want the name of a product that I can recommend to my boss. I want that datasheet.
I recently tried to recommend a great product to my boss. I had used it in a past job, and I knew what company made it, but I had no idea what the actual product was called. I didn't want to waste my boss's time, so I tried to do the research on my own and figure out what specific product I was looking for.
Their website wasn't very helpful, it was filled with generic product names and an amalgamation of SEO-friendly keywords and the word "solution". I emailed them to find out which product I was looking for, and next thing I knew I was on a sales call. Then I was on a sales conference call. Then they popped in for a sales meeting, even though I never told them my company's address.
I came away with a vague idea that their products were both nameless and probably very good. I explained it all to my boss; he took a pass.
I could've saved everyone a lot of time if I just had that comprehensive datasheet.
Some bots auto-revert changes that are likely to be vandalism or spam, like if an anonymous user adds a link to a blog on a free blog hosting site. (Specifically, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XLinkBot .)
If someone replied to a post with, "You're wrong and an idiot," but the original poster replies with a reasoned defense, then I would certainly vote down the first reply and vote up the second.
If someone is trolling with a dumb comment like, "Capitalism never works," but then receives well-thought out replies as to why capitalism does in fact work in this situation, then I would leave the original comment alone and vote up the replies.
Is this really a thing in Germany? That's the weirdest part of this whole story, that kids would care that much about an international corporation like Google. It'd be like getting in a fight with someone because they didn't drink Coke.
I've been trying to work this one through. One possible solution, (using a hefty dose of mathematical illiteracy, that looks like one of those word problems that occasionally appears in Marilyn vos Savant's column):
Same reason that, when you code, you want to include comments, have good variable names, use reasonably-sized functions, etc. It makes maintainability and future extension much easier.
Forget about semantic purity. CSS has survived all these years because it's been very useful in a very practical sense.
Some people (myself included) like use Facebook as a mirror to their own social circles. Defriending someone from Facebook for an inappropriate post would be like defriending them in real life for an inappropriate joke. It's easier to just ask them not to do it again.
When it comes to Israel/Palestine, every mapmaker in the world is taking a stance.