We Reviewed the Consumer Rights Wiki. It Should Not Need to Exist. 8/10.

The Consumer Rights Wiki is an encyclopaedia of the ways a thing can be sold to you and then taken back: features switched off after purchase, subscriptions bolted onto objects you already own, repair locks, adverts on the fridge. It has 1,435 articles (opens in a new tab), it is properly sourced where it counts, and more people edit it in a month than work here. It gets an 8. The two points it drops are set out below, and the fact that it exists at all is the harsher review, and not of the wiki.

Its mission statement (opens in a new tab) says it documents “a new generation of consumer exploitation that bears no resemblance to issues of the 1950s-1990s.” The old consumer protection was about products that hurt you. The new kind is about products that work perfectly until the vendor decides otherwise, and a volunteer reference work now exists to record the date.

What it is

Louis Rossmann, a repair-shop owner with a YouTube channel of about 2.6 million subscribers, launched it on 14 January 2025 (opens in a new tab) with a video whose title is entirely in capital letters, which is the last shouting anywhere near the project. The wiki is hosted by the Fulu Foundation, a nonprofit of which he is president, and staffed by sixteen people.

The one who runs it day to day is listed as Keith, wiki manager, no surname. The launch video has been watched about 126,000 times; the one Keith appears in (opens in a new tab), about 9,800, which we suspect is the exact amount of attention Keith was hoping for.

Anyone can edit, with or without an account. On the day we read it there were 11,697 registered users, 160 of them active in the past month, 21 administrators, and about 66,000 edits across roughly one and a half million words. That is a wiki. We checked, because the alternative is a blog with a skin on, and the internet has enough of those, this one included.

The criteria

A review needs criteria, and ours are four: is it what it says it is; do the footnotes go where its own rules say they should; is the founder’s thumb on the scale; would we use it. Each is worth two and a half points, because we wanted ten and could only think of four things.

The first is answered by the user count. The other three took a day, which is a day longer than we have ever spent on a terms-of-service page, including the ones we agreed to.

Where the footnotes go

The wiki’s sourcing rules (opens in a new tab) put court decisions, regulator findings and the company’s own documents at the top, established press below that, and forums and social media in a tier to be used cautiously, mostly as evidence of how customers felt about it. Other wikis are banned as sources outright, on the grounds that “even Wikipedia doesn’t source itself.” We read seven entries against that ladder.

Good news first: the entries you would actually arrive at. The page on Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac (opens in a new tab), which collected 1,015 points on Hacker News in May, has eleven references and six of them are Microsoft. The claim is that a licensing certificate expires and the copy of Word you bought outright stops letting you type into it.

Microsoft’s own page (opens in a new tab) confirms the certificate “expires on July 13, 2026”, that older versions “enter reduced functionality mode, where users can open and view files but can’t edit, save”, and that for Office 2019 “this issue cannot be resolved by updating or reinstalling”. The suggested remedy is a subscription. The wiki and the vendor agree on every fact; the difference is which of them put it in the title.

John Deere’s page cites the FTC’s complaint and the FTC’s press release, and the FTC did sue Deere (opens in a new tab) in January 2025, with Illinois and Minnesota alongside, over repair restrictions. The Samsung fridge-advert page runs to seventeen references and none of them is Reddit. Before you write in to say a page sourced to Android Authority is a page sourced to Android Authority: it is also sourced to Samsung’s own product pages and newsroom, which is the part Samsung would rather it were not.

Now the tail. The Litter-Robot entry (opens in a new tab) has sixty-six references and about two-thirds of them are threads on r/litterrobot, including an accusation of astroturfing that rests on Reddit and nothing else. The Wemo page carries ten Reddit threads of its own. The policy is right and the enforcement thins out towards the cat-litter end of the catalogue, which is a point off, and the wiki already has a template for it, which reads, in full, citation needed.

You will do the thing everyone does with a site like this, which is type in something you own. You will find it. It will have a subsection, a date, and a link to the announcement you did not read when it arrived on the device, and you will remember, with some precision, tapping Agree.

The founder’s money

The obvious objection is that this is one man’s grievance list with a search box, and the money supports the objection. The Fulu Foundation’s 2025 tax return (opens in a new tab) reports $3.7 million in revenue and pays Rossmann $124,506 as president, and the wiki is its project. The wiki also keeps a directory of his videos with a note inviting editors to turn them into articles, and a few dozen have been.

Its conflict-of-interest policy (opens in a new tab) tells anyone connected to a company not to write its article or remove the bad parts, and to disclose the connection in three separate places before touching it. The category for individuals (opens in a new tab), reserved for people with major decision-making capability, contains three entries: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and a page called “Sample individual”. Nobody has got round to the founder. That is either an oversight or the most restrained thing on the internet, and we are scoring it as restraint.

The rules it sets itself

The inclusion guideline (opens in a new tab) rules a practice out “if it belongs in a Yelp review”. Hyper-local, run-of-the-mill grievances are out too; an incident has to be large-scale, and somebody has to have reported it first. Company and incident articles must be “factual, non-accusatory, and legally safe”, and a Granny rule bans inflammatory language. And there is a policy page (opens in a new tab) which says, of a site with 83 documented incidents and 55 company entries, “The Consumer Rights Wiki is not a review site.”

We are a review site, and this is what the work looks like when somebody does it without the jokes: a catalogue of what was promised and what was withdrawn, with the date, and the vendor’s own words beside it. It is boring in the way a land registry is boring.

Everything we would want to write about is in there somewhere, filed under the right company, with better footnotes than we would have managed by Friday.

Its general disclaimer (opens in a new tab) says it “cannot guarantee the validity” of anything on it, that it is “not subject to uniform peer review”, and that anyone needing legal or financial advice should consult a professional. That is a franker warranty than any product in it shipped with.

The verdict

Is it what it says it is: two and a half; do the footnotes go where the rules say: one and a half, for the cat litter. Is the founder’s thumb on the scale: two — the money is his and the pages are not, and the half point is for the video directory, which is still there. Would we use it: two, because we already had; half off for not being a review site when we needed one. Eight.

When we left, the newest article had been created at 23:57, by a volunteer, about a company that makes machine-vision systems. Someone stayed up to file it. Eight out of ten, and it did not ask.