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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
