ProductWiki x2

Two new wiki stories over the Thanksgiving weekend: First, a new service called ProductWiki has launched. It's a GPL'd product information and review wiki. I haven't been able to dig up much background information, but the two of the three founders are graduates of the University of Waterloo. (The third may be as well; his bio doesn't state.)

Unfortunately for them, in the very same weekend, Amazon has started to beta test a new feature called "ProductWiki." I still haven't been able to see it — I assume they're just randomly selecting some small percentage of visitors to test this with. But there is more information and a screenshot at the Church of the Customer.

A few notes of interest about Amazon's feature:

• Amazon is using some rudimentary wysiwyg editor rather than wiki markup.
• Amazon doesn't allow outside linking. I realize that this is easier for them, but I think it's a big loss for the user.
• Amazon wants to keep the subjective review content separate from the ProductWiki. But I wonder how they're going to manage to do that.