Wikipedia spends a lot of time paring down business articles because they read more like advertisements than encyclopedic articles. That’s fair — so why not have a wiki for businesses and consumers to work on together, blending what businesses think of themselves with the opinions of consumers? Such a wiki does exist, though it’s still very small: WikiCommerce.

Some of the articles are fairly good, others, not so much.

The problem is that WikiCommerce isn’t doing a great job actually using open, wiki principles. A friend of the blog, Jim Hedger, tipped us off that WikiCommerce has been spamming him — that’s a pretty big offense. Jim’s colleague then made a new page on the WikiCommerce wiki, appropriately titled “spam.” The current version of the page shows no history of this, but the version history is a little more telling, on the left is the old, on the right is the current:

Protip: when your website/business is built on a platform that is fundamentally built on openness — and not just openness, but openness in users and businesses talking about commerce — you probably shouldn’t use your platform to censor your users for using your site exactly how you asked them to.