by Glenn Chapman
San Francisco - Using a technology once the domain of nerds, US auction website www.ebaywiki.com
is collecting the wisdom of millions of users in a how-to guide for buying and selling online.
Any of eBay's estimated 185 million users can contribute insights to an eBay "wiki," a website that allows visitors to add, delete or otherwise edit contents.
Executives from eBay unveiled www.ebaywiki.com
on Tuesday at an annual eBay Live conference in Las Vegas.
"It is a milestone in the coming of age of wiki in terms of coming out of the land of the nerds to a more mainstream audience," said Joe Kraus, founder of JotSpot, the company that built eBay's wiki.
Members of virtual communities wind up informally collaborating on definitive articles on whatever subjects or questions are posted on wikis, Kraus explained.
"The Web was read-only for the first ten years of its life," Kraus said. "The goal is to make it a two-way conversation as opposed to a monologue."
Best known would be www.ebaywiki.com
, an encyclopedic online trove of information compiled and refined by its users.
The eBay wiki was to address online auction matters such as how best to deal with buyers in other countries, consummate deals in foreign currencies, or resolve sales disputes.
"The idea here is that this is the Wikipedia of eBay by eBay users," Kraus said. "EBay can leverage the expertise of the entire community to get the right answers in much the same way Wikipedia leverages the expertise of people around the world all the time."
Wikis have grown increasingly common, as people use them for everything from class reunions and family trees to company efficiency, according to Kraus, whose company is based in Palo Alto, California.
"I'm only cautiously optimistic about the wiki model," said Ken Walton, whose auction of a forged Richard Diebenkorn painting on eBay in 2000 sparked a scandal that ended with him pleading guilty to wire and mail fraud.
Walton told his tale of transformation from a budding California lawyer into a hustler of paintings on eBay in the recently released book "Fake: Forgery, Lies and eBay."
"It is possible the wiki may raise awareness about fraud and bring things to light," Walton told AFP.
While sharing wisdom in a wiki might help keep online sales honest, "a lot of the frauds tend to fly under the radar," Walton said.
"I can't say that such a thing would have stopped (Ken) Fetterman and me from doing what we did, but it might have warned away a few victims," Walton said, referring to his accused accomplice in shady online art sales.
"It's amazing how many people don't know the basic rules of what to watch out for, and get swept up in the idea of finding an unbelievable bargain."
Online shoppers would benefit if eBay's wiki included advice on how to avoid being swindled and references to websites such as artfakes.com, an art-fraud watchdog, Walton said.
"Open forums with no editorial control attract complainers and the negative types," said Walton, who went on to start and then sell HammerTap, a company that made software tools for San Jose, California-based eBay.
"I would also worry about eBay's credibility and potential liability for things said on the wiki."
Inaccurate or offensive entries to wikis are usually yanked by more enlightened visitors in a process "referred to in the wiki world as gardening," Kraus said.
"Because it is a wiki, it means people can write bad things," Kraus said. "But, the power to deface is the same as to correct. It turns out there are more people who want the data to be good than want it to be bad."