[Foundation-l] Proposal:Consumer Wiki?

Thu Mar 30 14:21:35 UTC 2006

Guruprasad Baskaran wrote:
> Hi All!

Hello

> 
> 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?

There was a site which was meant to do something of the sort 
www.consumerium.org.
I think it is dead now, but it might give you some ideas.

> 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?

Hmmmm; there is a significant proportion of editors who would consider 
googleadds as actually intrusive... Right now, I fear this solution does 
not meet wide support...

> Thank you!
> 
> Regards
> GP

see you

Ant