Amapedia
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Amapedia is a wiki dedicated to collaborative composition of a knowledge base of product reviews. It was launched on January 25, 2007, by the retailer Amazon.com. In contrast to Wikipedia, Citizendium and other projects, Amazon.com uses copyright law to restrict the distribution and modification of Amapedia. Although contributors may or may not retain copyright in their contributions (the Terms of Service are noncomittal on this point), Amazon retains the copyright and licenses the compilation for personal use only. Amapedia's license ensures, for example, that Amazon can use the legal system to ensure that nobody will fork Amapedia.[1]
The project, open to edits from anyone with an Amazon.com account, appears to have been started in 2005, when the Amapedia.com domain name was registered.[2]
Individual product pages on Amazon.com encourage Amapedia content to be created with the text, "Be the first person to add an article about this item."
The wiki has been slow to develop, prompting Business 2.0 senior editor Chris Taylor to declare it a failure in a February 2007 article for CNN Money:
- "The Amapedia appears stillborn, as Amazon users stick with what they're used to: individual, rather than collaborative, product reviews."[3]
Jonah Cohen, a programmer who worked on the project in the summer of 2005, called it a "Wikipedia-inspired product website" in his online resume[4] and said it was developed with PHP and PostgreSQL.
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[edit] External links
Amazon.com | |
|---|---|
| People | Jeff Bezos • Tom Szkutak • Brian Valentine • Werner Vogels |
| Websites | A9.com • Alexa Internet • Amapedia • Askville • CDNOW • Digital Photography Review • Internet Movie Database • Joyo.com • Mobipocket |
| Web Services | Alexa Web Services • E-Commerce Service • EC2 • FPS • Marketplace • Mechanical Turk • S3 • Simple Queue Service |
| Other | 1-Click • Amazon Fishbowl • Amazon Kindle • Amazon Standard Identification Number • Statistically Improbable Phrases • Unbox |
| Annual Revenue: Image:Green Arrow Up Darker.svg$10.71 billion USD (2006) • Employees: 13,900 (2006) • Stock Symbol: NASDAQ AMZN | |
