Meta:About

What is amapedia?

Amapedia is a community-powered website for sharing information and learning more about the products you like the most.

Amapedia introduces a new way of organizing product information that we call “collaborative structured tagging”. Articles about products are tagged with terms that describe what the product is (“This Is A”) as well as their most important features (“Facts”).  We believe that this way of organizing information will make it easy for you to write about the products that you like most. This structured information will also allow other community members to easily discover, filter, and compare related products and product features. Check out Real-time Strategy Games to get a sense of what collaborative structured tagging is about.

We know that we are a long way from fulfilling our mission to offer the aforementioned experience for all products that people like.  To get there, we need your help.

Tell us how we’re doing

We summarize all the input we receive through the Give Feedback form at Meta:Feedback.

Amapedia Do’s and Don’ts

Amapedia is not the wild, wild west. Our mission revolves around sharing product information. Only a certain type of content belongs on this site, as follows.

Do:

1. write about your favorite products
2. quantify why you like or dislike a product as much as possible (“oh, I didn’t like it” without any context is not very helpful to others)
3. provide useful facts that you think would be helpful to others
4. cite your sources
5. disclose if you are affiliated with the product, such as being the author of a book (or the spouse or close friend of the author); this disclosure must precede any of your content
6. write in English, or otherwise include English translations of phrases in other languages
7. add a Submission Comment explaining why you are deleting or modifying someone else’s comment (which you should only do if a comment violates policy)
8. use language and images appropriate for children (as we have no mechanism in place for an adults-only section); in particular, do not provide profanity, sexually explicit language, or sexually explicit images
9. categorize new articles via the "This is a:" field in such a way that they directly (or, more typically) indirectly "are-a" Product, Company, Person, or Concept (use on the first Edit screen to get to the "This is a:" field)
10. choose a single place for your contribution - don’t paste the same material into both the article and the discussion (or, for that matter, into multiple discussions or into multiple articles)

Don’t:

1. refer to yourself, your work, or your Web sites in unrelated articles
2. paste the same text into multiple amapedia articles (instead, use facts and internal links to relate the articles)
3. store personal photos
4. create a personal home page; we may introduce personal profiles in the near future
5. talk in the first person in the main body of articles - instead, put your comment at the end of the article and prefix it with your name
6. express personal opinions about things that are not products (e.g., your opinion of a book about the Iraq war is welcome, particularly if you can document specific good and bad points about it; however, amapedia is not the appropriate forum for sharing your personal opinions about the Iraq war itself)
7. accept payments or gifts from anyone to edit material on amapedia, or write a favorable article about someone else’s product in return for them writing a favorable article about your product
8. create an amapedia article that simply contains duplicated text from another page on the Web (rather, provide external links from your amapedia article to relevant external Web pages)
9. provide any text that talks about yourself in the third person, as that might be misleading.  Please identify yourself instead (see Do number 5)
   
10. provide opinions in an article that are not your own
11. correspond with others in the "article" tab; use the "discussions" tab instead
    

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I ever see requests for donations here to keep the site running?

Unlikely. However, there will soon be contextual ads on the view, search, and compare pages, and maybe others.

Will there ever be giant blinking ads that pop in your way on amapedia?

Equally unlikely.

Amazon has one of the world’s largest product catalogs; what do you need me for?

Because amapedia is about

1. your favorite products; only you can tell us which ones they are
2. product information that comes from customers, so that it might be more impartial and authoritative
3. product facts that actually matter to you (like shutter lag for cameras and fan noise for notebooks), not those supplied by manufacturers or sellers.