[Foundation-l] Proposal:Consumer Wiki?

Thu Mar 30 11:34:55 UTC 2006

Hi All!

This is my first post on the mailing list  and I am not sure if this is the
right mailing for this topic.

Actually I had two ideas

1)I have found that people tend to use the internet a lot to research about
about various products/services that they wish to buy.And as far as I know
most of the sites that offer information on the products or services are
commericial sites either hosted by the creator of the product or service or
by some other commercial site which would probably also be selling the
product, so there is no guarantee how unbiased the information is.So I was
wondering if we can create a web site which will have unbiased information
about all the products/services in the world, where users will create the
pages with product/service information , how good , how bad it is, what are
the alternatives, what price the user paid etc etc.Something similar to the
wikipedia site for knowledge where users can log in and edit.I have not
thought about the design of the web site, its just a rough idea so far, but
what do you people think?wouldnt it be great to have just one web site where
you can look up all the unbiased information of whatever product/service you
want to buy?

2)I was reading that wikimedia projects need lot of donations to support
hardware and software requirements for the staggering growth its
having.Iwas wondering if wikimedia could earn this money by itself for
example by
just showing some small non intrusive adds(like google adds) which are
selected in a fair fashion by a search algorithm(again its a rough idea not
sure how to do it yet), wouldnt that be good?Obviously all this money can be
pushed back into the primary goal of wikimediafoundation 'Imagine a world in
which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge. That's what we're doing." wouldnt that make the
wikimediafoundation much more stronger to achieve its goal?Just a thought
what do you people think?

Thank you!

Regards
GP