I love finding good examples of wikis, so my ears perked up when I saw the new eBay Wiki pop on my radar screen via the Read/Write Web blog. It’s part of their Community content authoring efforts and it’ll be exciting to watch it grow and mature.
The eBay Wiki is a collection of fact-based articles written and maintained by eBay Community members. You can use eBay’s Wiki to read up on topics important to you or contribute by adding topics or making existing articles better.
The information designers have done a good job of creating a navigation system with categories that are task-oriented, such as Buying, Finding, and Selling. Plus you can go into specific areas of auction interest such as antiques or baby items and so forth. To me, it’s a great example of a well-tended, easily-navigable wiki.
I’m not “into” eBay, having never bought or sold there, but I am definitely interested in their user-generated content, especially on such a large scale. Forbes.com had a catchier title for their article, and offers a more business-oriented analysis in “EBay Gets Wiki With It.” Especially interesting to me is how eBay hopes to save money with their wiki by cutting down on customer support calls. That inverse correlation is an often-used metric for proving that documentation is helping users, so I hope that they are able to track and link support cost reduction specifically to the wiki content.