Amapedia

» see amapedia.amazon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Amazon barely existed in Turkey in 2007. There was no amazon.com.tr until September 2020, shipping on most items either was not offered or cost more than the item did, and the American e-commerce experience arrived here as something you read about on forums. So Amapedia was never going to become a Turkish habit. The catalog it documented was not one anybody around me could order from.

The site started in mid 2006 as ProductWiki and took the Amapedia name in early 2007. The idea was straightforward and, at that moment, everywhere: let the customers write the reference material. Any Amazon account holder could create or edit an article about a product in the catalog, attach structured tags to it, and argue with strangers about what a given camera actually did. Amazon kept copyright on the compilation and licensed it for personal use only, which is the detail that separated it from Wikipedia and the one that ended up mattering.

It never found the contributor base it needed. Product wikis carry a structural problem that encyclopedia wikis do not, which is that a catalog turns over faster than volunteers can document it, and a thorough page about a 2007 camcorder is worth nothing by 2009 in a way that a page about a battle in 1815 never is. Amapedia stopped working in June 2010 and became fully unreachable over the following months. Amazon never wrote a farewell post.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Context explains why this looked obviously correct in 2006. Wikipedia had won its argument, every company sitting on a database was asking whether users would maintain it for free, and the word "wiki" was doing heavy commercial lifting in pitch decks. Google launched Knol two years later on a near-identical theory. Amazon had better reason than most to believe it, because customer reviews had been running since 1995 and were already the most valuable thing on any product page.

~ the slide ~

Reviews worked because writing one takes four minutes and the payoff is immediate and attributed to you. A wiki article takes an hour and the payoff is your sentences buried in a revision history under somebody else's edits. Amazon already owned the format that fit its users, and tags plus reviews covered the same ground with a fraction of the friction. The wiki spent four years losing to a better-designed part of the same website.

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