How Not To Blog

Consumerpedia is a Wikipedia clone.

It seems to be built to display Google adwords. (Making money for whom?)

Do they really expect companies, entrepreneurs, spammers to behave with a website that anyone can edit?

[Update 3/29: Here's what they had to say in response to the above:]

But, you never really know if you are any good or not until someone starts badmouthing your efforts, so thank you to How Not To Blog blog for giving us our first extra boost with your post of "Consumerpedia is a Wikipedia clone. It seems to be built to display Google adwords. (Making money for whom?). Do they really expect companies, entrepreneurs, spammers to behave with a website that anyone can edit?" (How Not To Blog - Bring in the clones.. the slimy Wikipedia clones)

Thanks also for giving us the opportunity to make some additional points:

As discussed above, Consumerpedia is not and is not meant to be a Wikipedia clone.

Consumerpedia is not a wiki, but rather a different type of tool designed to handle a different type of content.

As to the name, the roots of the word "encyclopedia" are "medieval Latin: encyclopaedia, general education course, from alteration of Greek enkuklios paideia, general education" - thus "Consumerpedia" = "Consumer Education" (Dictionary.com/encyclopedia)

As to "Do they really expect companies, entrepreneurs, spammers to behave with a website that anyone can edit?" - while everyone and anyone can indeed add a comment or navigation suggestion (and rate those of others), note that no one can "edit" someone else's comment - you can only rate how helpful or not it is. This is one of the reasons why Consumerpedia is not based on a wiki platform.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of a wiki" - meaning that with a system like Wikipedia, since anyone can edit anything at any time, you need people who are willing and able to watch and correct "bad" edits at any time. The stabilizing factor with Wikipedia is the ever vigilant users.

"Cumulative vigilance is the benefit of Consumerpedia" - meaning that with a system like Consumerpedia, as users rate the helpfulness of comments and suggestions (and thus indirectly also rate the users who made those comments and suggestions - and also indirectly rate themselves as to how well their ratings correlate with those provided by others), the collective wisdom of what and who is good and bad (helpful and not helpful) grows over time. The stabilizing factor of Consumerpedia is the nature of the Consumerpedia system itself.

Short version: while spammers may indeed be in issue an the short run, the Consumerpedia system is designed to increasingly damp out their effect over time. The stored collected and correlated contributions of the non-spammers should (hopefully!) swamp any spam attempts over time (and no, this is not a challenge - please give us a chance to at least start building the pool before pissing in it!)

As to why we are using Adsense, it was in large measure due to watching Wikipedia's experience with supporting their site through contributions alone. We tried to think of an easier, more natural and more direct way. Indeed, Wikipedia itself hit upon the exact same method by using Adsense in their latest venture, Wikicities.

My response:

Forgive me for jumping the gun.. I don't spend too much time checking out websites with next to no content. I think the idea is interesting, though I think you could innovate more. First thing I'd do is get rid of the Adwords.. you're not going to make shit off of it anyway, and I think you'd be perceived by others the same way I did.

It is easy to innovate in this field, because most of you guys do it all the same. You could expand on your "consumer education" idea up the wazoo. Read Cluetrain for some ideas. Allowing your visitors to communicate directly to companies would be one idea. If you're site becomes popular enough, then you could set up a help desk system in each sub-category. You would lease access to these subs to other companies. In turn, they would answer any questions a consumer has about a kind of technology, product, or kind of product. There are many more ideas to explore in this field. But, unfortunately, you're not contributing to the HNTB kitty so that's for you to figure out if you want to go there.

I appreciate your response, though. It's nice to see that you're not quite the assholes I thought you were.