Consumerpedia is the consumer information resource everyone can help build.
Each topic has its own page where anyone and everyone can create a new topic or add comments and navigational suggestions to existing topics.
Other users then rate how helpful those comments and suggestions are and the most helpful ones rise to the top.
To start, simply enter your topic of interest in the search box at the top of the page.
Consumerpedia has no built in category hierarchy, but rather uses a unique user-driven hierarchical tagging system. This lets users create and define the relationships between different topics, helping others easily discover and browse related information (this is similar to that mythical college campus that was initially built without sidewalks so that they could later be properly placed over the dirt paths created by actual foot traffic patterns).
Short version: the Consumerpedia system is designed so that it evolves based upon how actual users wish to use it, with the sole organizing principle being how helpful it is to others.
How it started
Consumerpedia came out of a desire to have a user-driven consumer resource that evolved based on how people actually used it - where they were not forced into certain narrow categories and topics as an appendage of someone's ecommerce effort, but rather a completely independent information resource that was an end in itself - one that had no conflict of interest and with the sole goal of simply making it easier to find and share helpful information - so we built it. Please note that Consumerpedia is still very much in early beta testing, so any and all feedback and suggestions to help further build, refine, and improve Consumerpedia are sincerely encouraged and greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Also, special thanks to the following sites for inspiration and example:
Wikipedia is obviously a major inspiration for the Consumerpedia project. The main difference is that Consumerpedia is a specialized tool for consumer information sharing, is built from the ground up to try to minimize spamming problems, and has simplified content creation tools that anyone and everyone can easily and quickly use.
Wikipedia's experience with financing the costs of their service also indirectly
inspired the use of Google Adsense advertisements as a way for this site to
hopefully pay for its own cost of running without having to resort to more
complicated methods (indeed, this is exactly how Wikipedia's latest venture, WikiCities, handles it!)
Del.icio.us is another great inspiration as to what can be done by tagging. Because the Consumerpedia type of content is naturally hierarchical, we developed a hierarchical tagging system to help users better navigate through the system.
Cloudmark and Slashdot both helped show the way on effective use of "karma systems" to reward and encourage positive contributions from users. The Consumerpedia karma system is not yet fully implemented, but when it is, each user will have a karma ranking based on how helpful their actions have been as judged by other users. Good karma will then become an additional weighting factor as to how much your
ratings of others affect them, how much their ratings affect you, and with what
rating your suggestions and comments initially start. Short version: the more helpful others in the system judge you to be based on your actions, the more influence you have in the system (and visa versa).
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