Biograph Company, Open slander and harrassment Options

[biographco]

First, I want to thank the editors of the blog and say that there is such a need for this forum about Wikipedia, since this so called "Encyclopedia" is crawled by many other information websites and so many editors on Wikipedia truly have an agenda that is unfair and biased.

My company is a small independent film company and had been on Wikipedia for quite awhile with an article. Our company is a very old company, and has an exemplary reputation. We did not even post the first article but one of the Wiki-members did. The first article was fine and fairly accurate. However, in 2004 after our monument in Hollywood event, one editor appeared and became malicious with intent to harm the reputation of the company. This "Editor" also had a certain group of "Editors" that knew this person or he/she recruited them in an effort to discredit our company, and supply false information. We feel this was a personal attack and intent on harming the company's reputation for certain reasons.

At the time, I was not that familiar with Wikipedia guidelines or standards, and one of our VP's was extremely upset and dared to defy this "Editor". This VP who had a previous Wikipedia account was promptly blocked. I admit our VP did go against some Wiki-policies. Our attorney then attempted to call and contact Wikipedia to resolve the issue, but without results. The article was further re-written, including ambiguous information and intentional inclusions to make the company look "Ridiculous" which is actually posted IN WRITING by one of the administrators, yes, that this was their intent and goal. Since this, we have not attempted to change anything, in-process of legal proceedings according to state and federal law.

We also noticed that some other members of Wikipedia who were trying to correct the article contacted us on our information. These other editors also discovered that their was malicious intent against us, and were blocked as well by this other coalition of editors determined to discredit the company. This information we know of because of the blocked editors contacting our office.

We also was recently hacked and even embezzlement of funds occurred by hacking that coincide with recent Wikipedia activity against the company. This has been already reported to the proper authorities, and we believe it may have been a Wikipedia person involved in this slanderous effort.

Unfortunately, anyone attempting to correct the article about us is "Blocked" or "Banned". A monopoly of only a few associated editors now is able to include any false or harmful information without recourse. With this in mind, we have several options that we are in the process of initiating against Wikipedia and the foundation, some of it possibly criminal.

It is sad that Wikipedia is a great idea but is monopolized and used for personal and sometimes hateful agendas against others without provocation. We want to make everyone aware of this and maybe this can be stopped before Wikipedia finally pushed too far, and will eventually be shut down for inappropriate activity.

Please feel free to check out the Wikipedia article under "American_Mutoscope_and_Biograph_Company" and also read the "Talk" sections as well as the archive sections. We also encourage any kind of input on this subject.

[Somey]

Bingo! Couldn't have said it better muh'self...

Think what you will about the folks who run the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company - even if it does seem apparent that they're not quite living in the Real World™ due to their plans to start filming on the Moon in the not-too-distant future, so what? Lots of companies are run by people with all sorts of crazy and/or weird ideas. And frankly, one of these days, some private company probably is going to make movies on the Moon. (Just not next year...) One man's nutcase is another man's "forward thinker," after all!

The point is that Wikipedia doesn't deal with these entities realistically, fairly, or even honestly. If someone puts up an article about a company on Wikipedia, people start combing the internet for dirt on it, and if they find any at all, it gets put in immediately - almost without fail. And so the company is forced to either "defend" the article or ignore it, and in many cases, that decision is almost a no-brainer - if you depend on the internet for revenue, you have to defend it, because Wikipedia is practically ubiquitous these days, what with Google, the scrapers, and certain less-than-professional journalists who use it as a source.

Admittedly, this is to some extent a positive thing, in that it's yet another reason for companies to avoid doing things that are bad. But if the negative information is inaccurate, or even weighted unfairly, peoples' jobs and livelihoods can be jeopardized.

The other thing we have to remember here is that AMBC hasn't really done anything wrong, though of course one can certainly argue that using their website to espouse a particularly strong position on a controversial issue (euthanasia) is not a proper thing for a company to do. (Any progress on moving that stuff off, btw?)

Ultimately it's just another example of why companies should be very, very careful of how they interact with Wikipedia, if they even attempt to do it at all. WP just doesn't play by Real-World rules, as we've seen time and time again.