[Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

[Delirium]

Sage Ross wrote:
> Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's
> reviews.   Amazon's reviews, especially for manufactured goods, are an
> extremely valuable public service (even if you don't shop at Amazon),
> and the fact they are controlled and maintained by a for-profit
> company means that the potential exists for Amazon to lock down access
> or suppress negative reviews (in fact, this happens already) for the
> good of their profits but to the detriment of the public good.
>   

I buy this, but my main question would be: why Wikimedia? It doesn't 
seem to have a lot to do with collaborative editing, wikis, knowledge 
production, or any of our other core areas. My guess for what the 
software would look like makes it not seem to overlap very much with any 
of our existing software, either.

I'd certainly contribute reviews to a review site with a pledge of 
openness: some sort of non-content-specific filtering policy (allow spam 
to be filtered, but not negative reviews), availability of the metadata, 
etc. But people other than Wikimedia are allowed to set up worthwhile 
open-content projects. ;-) One corner of the open-review landscape even 
exists already: MusicBrainz (www.musicbrainz.org) recently added 
user-contributed reviews for music albums.

-Mark