Amapedia was a

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

run by the retailer

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, that existed from January 2007 to June 2010, where users could edit articles about Amazon's products. Anyone with an account on Amazon.com could edit the contents of Amapedia.

Beginnings

The amapedia.com domain name was registered in 2005. Jonah Cohen, a programmer who worked on the project in the summers of 2005 and 2006, described it as a "Wikipedia-inspired product website" in his resume, said it was developed with

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

and

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

. The wiki was launched in mid-2006 as "ProductWiki", then renamed Amapedia in early 2007. Even after Amapedia's closing, an Amazon.com page still referred to the wiki as "ProductWiki". Amapedia was unrelated to the website productwiki.com.

Editing

Individual product pages on Amazon.com contained the text, "Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com" if no article about the product existed. Editing was done using a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

interface. There was a separate table editor. Amazon retains the copyright to the content of the site and licensed the compilation for personal use only.

History

In February 2007, a senior editor at ''Business 2.0'' said "The Amapedia appears stillborn, as Amazon users stick with what they're used to: individual, rather than collaborative, product reviews."Chris Taylor
"Why commercial Wikis don't work"
Business 2.0, February 21, 2007 Even by Spring 2010, the logo for the site, on every page, still included the word "beta", with the copyright message indicating "2005 - 2007", making the project appear to be on hold. In June 2010, the site became inoperable, with the

home page A home page (or homepage) is the main web page of a website. The term may also refer to the start page shown in a web browser when the application first opens. Usually, the home page is located at the root of the website's domain or subdomain. ...

simply displaying the site logo and the words "Amapedia is not available at this time". By several months later, the site was no longer accessible at all.

References

External links

Amapedia
{{amazon Amazon (company) American review websites Wiki communities