EBay Wiki

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30-Jul-2006

This is the official wiki for eBay users. eBay had the good folks at JotSpot aid in the design and customization of their standard wiki engine and as you can see, the result is a slick and well functioning wiki which combines eBay's look and feel with Jot's collaborative technology. The site is in beta, but it is already a vibrant wiki. This is because eBay users are already such a large group, and wiki's thrive where there is already a community.

In looking more closely you will notice that there isn't a traditional "recent changes" page. I had the pleasure of speaking with Ken Norton at Jot and he explained that the home page area showing "most recent articles" replaces that function. It doesn't detail every single change, but it does algorythmically calculate which new articles are most likely to be interesting to readers and bubbles them up. This is better for users who wish to quickly see what's happening. I wonder, however, why there isn't a traditional recent changes also?

In addition, the wiki sports both comments and ratings. Two features that seem to go naturally with both wiki and eBay's overall bend towards helping users create reputation online. The system shows how many users have rated a particular article and whether or not they found it useful -- great feature.

Overall, this is a well thought out application of wiki technology which is suited to eBay's needs and I'm sure it will be very successful.

via our weblog