A comment on my recent post about social commerce pointed to the Wikipedia article on social commerce, which was started in September of 2007, according to the history. Which is funny because I started the first Wikipedia page on social commerce in December of the previous year but, despite the help of multiple friends interested in the space, we couldn’t prevent the Wikipedia police from taking the page down. The reason for the takedown was that they wanted citations and not just of blogs and links to startups that were in the space.
Wikipedia is nearly infinitely more flexible and up-to-date than its precedessors–the multi-volume encyclopedias. Yet, still, here is just one example of how it refused to accept new knowledge because it was stuck on looking for validation from the very same backward world of paper.
Hi Simeon, I’m putting together a time line of evolving definitions of social commerce for Social Commerce Today and I’d really like to include your early definition that the Wiki powers that be deleted from history. Any chance you still have it – and do you have a newer take on the area?
Paul, no, I relied on Wikipedia to maintain the content. I presume there is a way to find all deleted pages…