Amapedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Amapedia is a collaborative wiki launched on January 25, 2007, by the retailer Amazon.com to serve as a "community for sharing information about the products you like the most," according to its About page.

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. Users who contribute content are called Amapedians.

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."

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 and said it was developed with PHP and MySQL.