Raison d'être

When shopping for products or services, you can find a ton of websites that review or compare the features of products from different brands. Let's say you look for a printer, you'll find many pages comparing printers from HP, Brother, Canon, Epson etc. regarding how many pages they can print per minute, whether they have an ADF (automated document feed) or not. If you look for a smartphone, you'll find comparisons about the CPU speed, amount of memory and storage, display size etc.

Often this data is just copied from the manufacturer's spec sheets. Good reviews/comparisons put some more work into their content and do some proper benchmarks etc.

But what most of these reviews or comparisons (even the good ones) omit, are the red flags regarding some brands.

Staying with the above examples, did you know that HP issued a firmware update which blocks customers from using cheaper, non-HP ink cartridges in its printers? Or that Apple deliberately throttled older iPhone models without informing their users?

The Red flags wiki is a place where these red flags are collected.

Striving for facts and fairness

The data should be based on factual evidence, with links to multiple sources, and with a chance for brands to explain their point of view. All driven by a community of consumers who want to buy products/services from brands that don't screw you over and are ethical.

Disclaimer

This wiki is not meant to encourage boycotts, but only to improve visibility on some warning signs, to help consumers be as informed as possible when making a choice for or against a purchase.

Wiki

The Red flags wiki is a bit different from other wikis in that it doesn't use a dedicated wiki software like Wikipedia, Fandom and others do. But it follows the main definition:

A wiki is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser.

As well as relevant characteristics:

• A wiki invites all users - not just experts - to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki web site, using only a standard 'plain-vanilla' Web browser without any extra add-ons.
• A wiki is not a carefully crafted site created by experts and professional writers and designed for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the typical visitor/user in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape.

The difference is that pages are edited on GitHub. For red flag data this is a simple YAML file. For the website layout/design/structure this is HTML directly.

Another relevant characteristic of wikis is their linking between pages. We have this between brands and categories and want to add more in the future.