An ingenious application of crowdsourcing: Fix reviews grammar, improve sales

Panos Ipeirotis New York, NY, United States. Associate Professor at the IOMS Department at Stern School of Business of New York University.

The original Article is here and worth a full read and the comments http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/04/want-to-improve-sales-fix-grammar-and.html

During research they have noticed is that the quality of the reviews can have an impact on product sales, independently of the polarity of the review.
A review that is well-written tends to inspire confidence about the product, even if the review is negative. They noticed that demand for a hotel increases if the online reviews on TripAdvisor and Travelocity are well-written, without spelling errors; this holds no matter if the review is positive or negative.
An online retailer noticed that indeed products with high-quality reviews are selling well. So, they decided to take action. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk to improve the quality of its reviews. Using the Find-Fix-Verify pattern, they used Mechanical Turk to examine a few millions of product reviews. While I do not know the exact revenue improvement, I was told that it was substantial.

Ethical? I would say yes. Notice that they are not fixing the polarity or the content of the reviews. They just change the language to be correct and error-free. I can see the counter-argument that the writing style allows us to judge if the review is serious or not. So, artificially improving the writing style may be considered as interference with the perceived objectivity of the user-generated reviews.