Sage Ross wrote:
Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative
to Amazon's
reviews. Amazon's reviews, especially for manufactured goods, are an
extremely valuable public service (even if you don't shop at Amazon),
and the fact they are controlled and maintained by a for-profit
company means that the potential exists for Amazon to lock down access
or suppress negative reviews (in fact, this happens already) for the
good of their profits but to the detriment of the public good.
I buy this, but my main question would be: why Wikimedia? It doesn't
seem to have a lot to do with collaborative editing, wikis, knowledge
production, or any of our other core areas. My guess for what the
software would look like makes it not seem to overlap very much with any
of our existing software, either.
I'd certainly contribute reviews to a review site with a pledge of
openness: some sort of non-content-specific filtering policy (allow spam
to be filtered, but not negative reviews), availability of the metadata,
etc. But people other than Wikimedia are allowed to set up worthwhile
open-content projects. ;-) One corner of the open-review landscape even
exists already: MusicBrainz (
www.musicbrainz.org) recently added
user-contributed reviews for music albums.
-Mark