Wikiproducts

Wikiproduct

Mailing list link : []
Naming suggestions : ?? User:YvesChaix:Wikingineering, Wiking
Domain name: ?
Scope : A wiki for information about specific products : software packages, phones, pens, lamps, windows, computers, flooring -- by model and distributor, covering official instructions, reviews, tips, updates, common problems, links to help forums.
Details: Wikiproduct
Proposer: +sj +
People interested joining: User:Fasten,User:YvesChaix
started Wikis: ~~[Wikiproduct.de (german) http://www.wikiproduct.de/wiki/Hauptseite]~~
- User:Harshmellow - should be specially fine if properly connected to wikibooks (how to create) and wikidata (project - on what was already made)
Comments:
- This proposition should be merged with wikidata and just make some templates/page layouts to use for products of specific area. For example computer hardware catalog would be nice. --194.100.190.241 12:11, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- A product review wiki could have specific reviews for education software (example: [1] [2]). --Fasten 13:10, 25 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- For product reviews a review of vendor policies may be interesting. (see http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Esp for some ideas) --Fasten 13:10, 25 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- A Wikiproduct with detailed information about computer parts could provide references for How To Assemble A Desktop PC and computer reuse.
- Wikiproduct could require a minimum team of ten product group experts and require the team to produce a minimum of ten articles in article-of-the-day quality to open a new product group. Anonymous posters could be kept out. (Rationale: A user has to have a product to be able to comment so users qualified to revert falsehoods could be in short supply) Product groups could be suspended (with all pages locked) when the expert group shrank below the minimum required size. (Rationale: This would require a minimum of people dedicated to a product group as a whole and not only their personal subset of products owned).
  - It should be fine to start with a much broader policy for accepting input... perhaps even starting with an existing body of reviews from a freely-licensed site to seed the work. 18.85.46.172 21:04, 17 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- This exists already at http://wiki-products.org (in german) and a smaller english page at http://en.wiki-products.org (and a very small bulgarian page at http://bg.wiki-products.org)
- User:YvesChaix: The global idea is OK, but present implementation maybe slightly flawed and may never get off the ground because it competes with vendors sites online sales and B2B. I personally would go for a vision where vendor products would be derived as instances from a generic products master file, created from a Universal Product Catalogue and User Defined Engineering or Technical Attributes - as the german Wiki seems to do it (but only looking at the database or XML content could one really tell). Also, vendor products are not necesssarily limited to final consumer use. What about raw materials, consumables, machinery, tools, instruments, spare parts, accesories, components, machinery, etc.? But the whole purpose is not to publish this information for manually browsing the Wiki site only, but rather to make it available as a (World Wide) Web Service, to interoperate with ERPs, for example, via WS-*. Of course, vendors should be able to add, under their authorship and responsability, complementary attributes to differentiate their own products from the competition. The Wiki project I would like to propose, would include a body for reviewing new categories, new user defined attributes and the sets of corresponding validation values, and then the creation of generic products. We are talking about the same scope as Wikipedia, but for millions of products, with structured information in a formal database to allow for complex queries (for example, "Show me all the ball bearings with internal diameter of 25mm and working temperature up to 500°C). Experts from the manufacturing world, retired engineers would love to contribute to the creation of this knowledge base, and the vendors could use the universal product catalogue and the generic product masterfile, to describe their own products. Note that each category from the catalogue could have an hyperlink to the corresponding textual description in Wikipedia. Wikingineering would the structured information complementary of Wikipedia free text content (well, somewhat structured as free text content goes :)). Note that this already exists on many sites, but mainly directed to the final consumer, and with limited, non standard product categories. I do not know the Wiki software, but does it support publishing Web Services? If it does not (I understand PHP does generate nor consume Web Services, but I may be wrong), then this project (my proposal, I mean) has no future. Maybe, actually, this is the wrong page where to publish this comment, although it IS called a discussion page about Wikiproduct. ¿Any suggestion?