No, I’m not talking about a faceted search interface for Wikipedia, though that would be a great idea! Rather, I’m talking about the Faceted Classification Wikipedia entry, which until recently contained a list of faceted search vendors, including Endeca. I removed this list for two reasons.
First, I’ve seen how a list of vendors on a Wikipedia entry can become something of a vendor battle for prominence. From what I understand of Wikipedia guidelines, the best approach is to have a separate entry for a vendor list, as per my recent edit to the Enterprise Search entry.
Second, faceted search is not the same thing as faceted classification, and I don’t think it makes sense to talk about “faceted classification software”. We really need a Faceted Search entry, and then we could point from there to a list of vendors, analogous to that for Enterprise Search.
I’m posting these thoughts on the talk page for Faceted Classfication. I hope that folks here will chime in and perhaps even contribute an entry on Faceted Search. This entry may have been a well-intentioned start, but we need one that meets our and Wikipedia’s standards.
The Noisy Channel 
One reply on “Faceted Classification on Wikipedia”
A vendor representative contacted me and made a case for reversing this edit on the grounds that his site had received a healthy dose of traffic from that section, which he took to suggest that a list of commercial vendors was not irrelevant to the page and its viewers.
I’d really like others to chime in on what is the right thing to do–both here and on the talk page. It would be highly inappropriate to have an edit war between two people associated with different vendors. I’m trying to take a principled approach, but I’m the first to admit a potential conflict of interest.
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