Michael Calore

Amazon Wikis On The Moon

Amazon has become quite the fan of wikis lately, first came the investment in Wikia and now there’s a new service called Amapedia. Amapedia allows users to create and tag their own wiki articles for consumer products. Content is a bit sparse at the moment, the site launched with 800 articles and few thousand more […]

AmapediaAmazon has become quite the fan of wikis lately, first came the investment in Wikia and now there's a new service called Amapedia. Amapedia allows users to create and tag their own wiki articles for consumer products.

Content is a bit sparse at the moment, the site launched with 800 articles and few thousand more ported over from an earlier version of the site, but for the future the content development is in the hands of users. To contribute to Amapedia you must be a registered Amazon.com shopper.

One of the potential problems facing Amapedia is of course spam from product producers touting their wares or unfairly slagging the competition. There's a note in the guidelines that puts is thusly: “Amapedia is not the wild west… only a certain type of content belongs on this site.”

As for what that “type of content” is, the following editing guidelines are listed on Amapedia:

Do:

  • write about your favorite products
  • find out what others??? favorite products are
  • quantify why you like or dislike a product as much as possible (“oh, I didn???t like it” without any context is not very helpful to others)
  • cite your sources
  • disclose if you are affiliated with the product, such as being the author of a book (or the spouse or close friend of the author)
    ???

Do Not:

  • self-promote by referring to yourself, your work, or your Web sites in an article that is unrelated to your self-promotion
  • store personal photos
  • create a personal home page (we may support that in the future)
  • talk in the first person in the main body of product articles (that???s what the “Anecdotes, Experiences, Opinions, Comments” section is for)
  • express personal opinions about things that are not products (i.e., while we are very interested in your opinion about a book about the Iraq war —??? particularly so if you can calmly document specific good and bad points about it —??? we are not at all???interested in your personal opinions about the Iraq war itself on this site)
  • accept payments or gifts from anyone to edit material on Amapedia

I'm curious if that last item was added recently, vis-???-vis Microsoft's paid wiki-editing snafu.

At the moment there's no back-end way to scrape out the data, but given Amazon's typically robust APIs it's probably safe to assume that they're working on something.