Introducing The Soldster.com Art, Antiques and Collectibles Price Guide Wiki

Help us build the Internet's best Open Source and Free Pricing Guide for Antiques, Art and Collectibles

By Jon R. Warren

For collectors, dealers, archivists, researchers, and the merely curious, one of the first questions to be answered when viewing some artifact from the past is, "What's it worth"? Unfortunately, this information is closely guarded and often hidden behind firewalls and subscription services. For the liquidity and prosperity of the marketplace, this information wants to be free, just as it is for the prices of stocks or commodities. We have long seen a need for a free open source pricing guide for art, antiques, and collectibles. The job of maintaining such a database is Herculean to say the least. But, with the Internet and the combined efforts of each collecting community, we propose it is now possible for a Wikipedia approach to maintaining pricing data. Thus, with little fanfare and much hope, we are proud to introduce the Soldster Price Guide Wiki. We hope, over time, as word spreads, each community of interested collectors and dealers, whether they be fans of Hummel figurines or comic books or movie posters or stamps or coins, will centrally locate their combined efforts into the Soldster community wiki for antiques and collectibles, for the good of all.

To this end, we have built a web-based framework for a price guide wiki system. It begins at www.Soldster.com/price-guide/. Anyone can add and edit pages, upload images, add price history, and so on. A team of paid editors and reviewers (see job openings at www.2ndmarkets.com/jobs for open positions) will review all new entries made by the community and either approve or reject them, as the case may be.

You can get an idea of what we are trying to do by...
1. going to http://www.soldster.com/price-guide/List.aspx
2. type in search WEST SIDE STORY ONE SHEET (does not matter if upper or lowercase)
3. See how we have images for each type of one sheet? Our goal is to have images for every movie poster and other collectible in our database. This will be a multi-year project probably, unless we can get large numbers of people involved.

next...
1. search BEATLES BUTCH COVER
2. click GET DETAILS
3. Notice the details page. The crucial elements of an A+ price guide page are here:
    a. nice images (3 total showing various views)
    b. great headline encapsulates all important facts regarding the item (publisher, catalog number, variation, exact album title, etc)
    c. comprehensive textual description
    d. PRICE COMPS !!! we envision a database of Price History comparables attached to the page will be invaluable to collectors in the future.

next...
1. go to http://www.soldster.com/price-guide/Details.aspx?ItemID=207437&search=aquaman
2. notice how the page sucks. No image, poor description, no price comps, estimated value sucks, details text totally lacking... boo
3. we have a lot of work to do on comics, obviously

Our goal is to build great price guide pages (like the Beatles butcher cover page) by having teams of computer-savvy experts working from home to add these elements to every price guide page.  There are several hundred thousand price guide pages already and adding more daily.  We also plan to upload an entire database of Golden Age and Silver Age comics in the near future, as well as a complete database of major sports cards from 1900-1970.

Would you be interested in being a part of this? Go to www.Soldster.com/contact/ and send us en email.

This article has been read 800 times. Last read on 5/17/2012 4:36:25 AM