fragmented interests
I think I was already aware of Amazon’s recent introduction of product Wikis, either from talking about them in Don’s Semantic Web class or just browsing the site. But I didn’t really think about what they would do until now. At first blush, a Wiki for each product would seem helpful. With a Wiki, you can read positive and negative perspectives on a product in a single blurb, instead of scrolling through user review after user review. Of course, this could also give undue emphasis on minority opinions, but I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing.
The feature doesn’t seem to be catching on quickly. A glance at the “Most Edited Wikis” page reveals that the wiki with the most edits is the controversial novel A Million Little Pieces with 76 edits. The number of edits per item falls of sharply. An article with a moderate amount of traffic on Wikipedia could easily get 76 edits in a month, so these wikis aren’t particularly active. In addition, the 1839 Wikis available is only a slim slice of Amazon’s catalog, and most of these are Wikis with a single edit.
Finally, it seems like hosting Wikis could present a lot of administrative hassles for Amazon. Do they have an employee managing the inevitable conflicts that will emerge from edit wars and thin skins? And while Wikipedia is not immune from the threat of legal action, because Amazon is clearly a for-profit entity, it could be much more vulnerable to litigation from unhappy authors. Or authors could become “page divas,” constantly monitoring a page and reverting unfavorable edits.
It will be interesting to see how this experiment hashes out. This seems like a better application of Wikis than the LA Times “Wikitorials” debacle, since there’s plenty of information that is uncontroversial about products that could be shared in a Wiki.
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