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Posted by: thekohser

Well, what do you know? An article about my ol' company Wikipedia Review has been trotted out for another try at permanence in Wikipedia. I wonder how this one will pan out.

Looks awfully self-referential to me, so far. What's with the "Internal Links" section?

And, what's with the "Open Letter to Jimmy Wales" from Scott Baradell in the "External Links" section? I mean, Scott's a friend of mine, but that blog post doesn't even mention Wikipedia Review.

Greg

Posted by: thekohser

And down she goes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CSD#G4.

All for the best, since the article referred to my business in the past tense (even though I spoke with a venture capital consultant this morning).

Greg

Posted by: Joel Leyden

Greg, many of us are with you.

I would rather NOT have anything on my company or myself on Wikipedia until they hire and use only professional and objective editors.

As it now stands, Wikipedia is the world's largest digital cesspool.
With a stink one can smell around the world.

It's truly a waste of time for which the Wikipedia Contest will prove in the coming days.

Posted by: thekohser

Well, whaddaya know? It's back again, and survived an AfD "vote". I went ahead and obeyed WP:COI and made my suggested corrections and improvements on the article's Talk page.

Wonder how long before some of my old friends have a cow, seeing that Jimbo restored my account, despite the "community ban". I sure hope this doesn't lead to more fireworks.

Greg

Posted by: Somey

Y'know, what you really ought to do is change the entire Wikipedia Review business model. This write-an-article-for-$100 stuff is hardly the way to rake in the big bucks, IMO....

What might start to get really lucrative over the next year or two would be to provide medium-term consulting services, billed hourly, for companies who need help and advice for getting Wikipedians to stop smearing them, and to go mind their own @$#%!! business!

Posted by: LamontStormstar

thekohser

How exactly was your plan to work if somebody wanted inclusion but they couldn't pass notability?

I mean if someone could pass it, but they want someone to just write them a nice article that might be one thing.

And how did you expect billing to work when you'd do something and then someone else reverts it or deletes it? Would you keep the customer's money, refund it, or keep trying futily so it turns out not to be worth your time.

Posted by: Skyrocket

Maybe you could use the Barbershop model: If somebody needs something you do, they pay you to do it. Later on, when they need it again, they can come back and pay you to do it again. Or else they can pay somebody else to do it. Or do it themselves. Their choice.

Posted by: Somey

I shouldn't speak on Greg's behalf of course, but I think the idea was that he'd state up front that all he was going to do was write the article with the proper formatting, citations, yada yada yada, the company would presumably approve it, and he'd then post it - and anything that happened after that was specified as being beyond his control, and therefore not part of the deal.

When you think about it, that's still a fairly substantial amount of work for only $100, which to most companies is "chicken feed." But I agree, if he were to try and help shepherd the article through whatever stuff was going to happen to it after the initial posting, including AfD's and such, that would almost have to require an hourly-billed contractual agreement, no? Obviously the WP people would frown on that sort of thing, since their assumption is that when you log onto Wikipedia, you're a Wikipedian first, and everything else second, including your own self.

Naaaah, it's not a cult at all...

Posted by: gomi

As I've noted elsewhere, the better (and more evil) business model is to offer a service to companies (large ones) who already have a page, saying, in essence:

This could be a great business, because it self-sustains as long as Wikipedia continues to suck!

Posted by: Somey

And since it will always suck, it's a perfectly sound investment for VC's!

Still, you'd be 80-20'd out the ying-yang, I suspect. You'd have to charge on a sliding scale, based on how evil the company is... companies like Halliburton, Wal-Mart, and Microsoft would be practically untouchable. Unless you were really good at avoiding the customer-sandbagging effect, you could get screwed pretty badly!

Posted by: thekohser

While others have already responded, in a way, for me... My intention was to accept business only from those companies who would pass the Wikipedia notability test.

As for placement and persistence, remember Jimbo created a "http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-August/051897.html" (that's what I called it) with Wikipedia Review, such that we would be placing the GFDL content on our own website. Then, independently-acting, non-paid, "trusted" Wikipedians could scrape that content into Wikipedia if they felt it was worthwhile. (No comment on the overall wisdom of such a policy.) While it wasn't in my advertising literature, I had an unwritten policy with clients that they would get a refund if their article were to be deleted or severely molested within the first two weeks of its placement on Wikipedia. I'll just say this: we had no dissatisfied paying clients. We had a couple of instances where either no payment was processed, or a refund was issued, and the clients were satisfied with the attempt.

Just so everybody knows where I'm at, currently, I'll copy Wikipedia Review's description from Centiare:



I absolutely agree that the $49, $79, or $99 business model was, eventually, going to take more time and effort than it was worth financially to myself. However, the long-term goal was to have a team of low-paid Eastern European and/or Indian editors doing the lion's share of the work in exchange for a smaller portion of the client's payment. That would leave me free for higher-level consultative work with corporations and organizations about long-term, wider-reaching strategies for community-edited spaces on the Internet (including Wikipedia).

It's funny, but so many of my Cheetos-fingered, teenage critics laughed at how much Wikipedia Review was trying to charge clients for something that "they could do themselves for free". On the other hand, several of my clients and many reputable business people who examined the business model often commented, "You should be charging $499, not $49." It's certainly a telling example of how little the average Wikipedian knows about the business world and the value of intellectual capital.

Greg

Posted by: LamontStormstar

Wouldn't the underpaid foreigners then go into business for themselves in time?

Posted by: thekohser

Imagine someone in the Communications department of Manor Care (a Fortune 600 company that is not listed in Wikipedia). Now, imagine that they want someone to write them a Wikipedia-suitable article. How easy a time are they going to have talking on the phone about their objectives with Greg in Pennsylvania, who has a slight Michigan accent, versus talking on the phone or corresponding by e-mail with Ivan Dragorbovich in Romania or Rashnan Heptashareepishnah in India?

In time, yes, the foreigners might go into business for themselves. My guess is that they would not perform as ably as the American firm when marketing to or communicating with American organizations.

We'll never know now, though, will we?

I wonder how long http://trevorcook.typepad.com/weblog/2006/08/wikipedia_pr_an.html#comment-62035628 is going to last before he's exposed?

Greg

Posted by: Somey

I've got companies that actually can't buy some of our cheaper utility programs officially, because $100 is simply too low to be placed on a corporate purchase order. Amounts like that have to come out of petty cash, which for an individual user is almost unobtainable compared to setting up a PO, which by contrast is just a matter of e-mailing a request to the right person. So they end up having to put it on personal credit cards and "expense it" - and since nobody wants to do that, I've ended up having to raise prices to increase sales! I've done that twice now.


Most outsourcing firms are actually very strict about that, believe it or not, at least in India. In addition to non-compete agreements, they have reputations to maintain for not doing that very thing, and their in-country competitors are very quick to point fingers when it happens...

That's not to say that people should ever outsource anything, of course. But I suppose it could be said that outsourcing a function that was never done by domestic workers in the first place is a whole lot better than laying people off in your own community just to save money in the short term.

One thing that does occasionally happen, though (and this is rarely written about) is that in the software development industry, outsourcing firms will buy the rights to failed projects as salvage operations. These then wind up on their websites as entries in long lists of products that unsuspecting US CTO's assume to be internally developed, and their existence is supposed to prove that the company is well-versed in whatever genre the product is - accounting, ERP, document imaging, whatever. Anything. In fact, very few of those products are original to that company, and none of the original designers are still involved. There's less of that now than there was 5-6 years ago when outsourcing was starting to really take off, but it still happens occasionally.

That's not particularly relevant to this thread, of course... but http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Online_Personality_Management

Posted by: guy

We manage these things better in Britain. Several companies now have call centres in India, and I know people who find them easier to understand than people from say Glasgow.

Posted by: wikilove

That's because many of them are still in school, and they have no concept that what THEY do or that their time is worth something.

Or they are people to whom "content" is defined by "how I see things" and "if I think those links are relevant" - regardless if they are informed of the subject matter....

And you should have been charging at least 499 per article. Otherwise you wouldn'tve been respected.

And you should have kept it on the down low (read: not advertised on WP). Its like a thumb in the face to all those people, that you should make money on what they are doing for free....

Posted by: wikilove

Starting new businesses isn't as easy in other countries. The ease of doing it here is why we are so powerfully economically.

In most countries, you have to pay people off, or you have to already be a "have". "Have nots" are booted out pretty quick.

There are exceptions, and its getting better, but...

Besides that the culture and mentality doesn't support it. It isn't usual to start new businesses. Again, it is changing, but....

There is more of a passive attitude.

Posted by: thekohser

I'm a generally honest person. Going in "above board" was the way I thought best, right from the get-go, because IT WASN'T AGAINST ANY RULES on Wikipedia to edit for pay.

Besides, had I gone "secretive", how long do you think it would have been for Durova or JzG or Tobias to pool together $49, purchase an article, then see who created the page and ban the holy hell out of them?

Greg

Posted by: Somey

Well, if ya want my opinion, I doubt the idea would have even occurred to them. As long as they can pretend there's nothing bad happening in their Utopian commercial-free cocoon, they'd just buzz merrily along with the rest of the hive...

Posted by: wikilove

Honest? Or overly self-disclosing? How you make your money is none of their business.

The model I was thinking of concerned your having approached businesses directly. You could have something on the web, sure. But it could be part of a general web PR program.

But by mentioning it to Wikipedians, that was most definitely going to tee them off. If for no other reason, because it is their turf, or because they didn't think of it and BLAH BLAH BLAH...

And 49 dollars wasn't worth your time, to be honest. That wouldnt even cover dinner for two.

Posted by: thekohser

Looks like our pal Cyclopia has taken up editing the Wikipedia article about Wikipedia Review as a hobby.

So, is it standard BLP procedure to look up what the "known online nick" is of a person mentioned in an article about a business venture?

Why is this idiot editing an encyclopedia, much less allowed to even go near an article about my enterprise?

Besides, "nick" has three definitions:

So, not only is the content inappropriate for an encyclopedia, it's not even grammatically correct.

Posted by: thekohser

Score +1 for Steve Smith.

Score -1 for Fish and Karate.

Posted by: Milton Roe

It's also short for nickname. It's quite appropriate in the way he used it.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

I'd say it's a level of informality unsuitable for A Website Purporting to be an Encyclopaedia, but that was hardly the most serious problem with the edit.

Posted by: thekohser

{{citation needed}}



Oh, and...

Score +1 for Scott MacDonald.

Posted by: Milton Roe

http://www.answers.com/topic/nick
Look under "hacker slang" section.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nick
See meaning 5.

Geez, Kohs. Don't get snarky with me. I can play those games as well as you or better.

Posted by: Somey

You'd think that someone who claims to be a "reasonable inclusionist" regarding BLP articles on Wikipedia - and who denies that WP exists to be a revenge platform - wouldn't resort to petty revenge-editing like that, wouldn't you? I mean, if only to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Agree. But the fact that this somewhat unedited "Website Purporting to be an Encyclopaedia" (Encyclopaedoia?) actually purports to be an "Encyclopaedia," is the real problem. The wont of a paper boundary to contain overspilling crap, has made WP sloppy and garbage-ridden beyond words. Did you ever come across Robert Frost's description of free verse as "tennis with the net down"? Well, that's Wikipedia, too.

On WP, the gems, junk, and garbage are all mixed up. The garbage is winning. Since the problem is getting worse not better, it's not going to fix itself with time. It is like the old business proverb: "When outgo exceeds income, then upkeep leads to downfall." Something has to change.

The meta-problem that you "admitted without admitting" is interesting. We saw the God-King clean up the pedophile userbox problem in 2006 like Jesus in the temple, desysopping 5 people in one blow. With him now losing interest, one presumes that leaves WP busted with no fix. As the only member of the board easily available, might that be a topic of your next meeting? Or is it too hard to get even these people together for a conference call?

Posted by: dtobias

There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_at_Nite.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

I thought we all agreed that "standard BLP procedure" is an oxymoron.

I'm sure you realize it would be difficult to claim that this information—that the proprietor of Wikipedia Review contribute[sd] to other sites as "thekohser"—is damaging in itself, or that you ever intended it to be private, so you'd need some other argument.

If you are serious about wanting this removed (despite continuing to publish it on your own site) you probably will want to play the "this is unverifiable / I am not a reliable source" card and beat them at their own game, cf. Jimbo's date of birth.

Posted by: Trick cyclist

Finding definitions of nick? This is much more fun than worrying about boring old Wikipedia!

"On a squash court, the nick is where the wall meets the floor." http://www.answerbag.com/video/video_squash-terms:-nick/91adf039-e63c-cb27-1209-6545b2e0d489

"state or condition" as in "in reasonable nick"

"A nick is a discontinuity in a double stranded DNA molecule where there is no phosphodiester bond between adjacent nucleotides of one strand typically through damage or enzyme action" Nick (DNA) (T-H-L-K-D)

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

In my mind "squash" refers to a yellow vegetable and/or an anti-cricket maneuver, so I can only conclude that obscure sports trivia has stir-fried yours.

Care to explain silly mid-wickets again?

Posted by: thekohser

Excellent reliable sources, Milt. I'm kind of disappointed you didn't come back at me with http://books.google.com/books?id=VR1AAAAAYAAJ&dq=nick%20%22to%20nickname%20(1634)%22&pg=PA306#v=onepage&q=nick%20%22to%20nickname%20(1634)%22&f=false.

Watch out for those "half-candied lumps in cane sugar", now, ya hear?

Posted by: Trick cyclist

Is this some sort of troll, Ms Stockings? Squash is a game played in a small enclosed court where you take turns to bounce a ball off the wall. Its a bit like tennis only you return the ball by bouncing it off the wall not lobbing it over a net. And only a Yank would have "an anti-cricket maneuver"!

Posted by: Viridae

Far faster than tennis. Great fun.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Paraphrasing the adversary, it takes one to know one.

Posted by: Trick cyclist

Indeed I dont know a troll when I see one hence the need to ask.

Posted by: thekohser

Why do you think the lead paragraph of Wikipedia Review includes the name "Gregory Kohs" twice? That seems excessive to me.

Posted by: KnightLago

Before I try and fix it, is there a certain way you want to be credited in the edit summary?

I went with this.

Posted by: thekohser

Anybody have any idea what happened a few days ago on Wikipedia that caused this traffic spike?

The traffic logs on the Wikipedia Review.com site itself didn't seem to receive a noticeable uptick in inbound traffic from Wikipedia, which suggests to me that this isn't "normal" human browser activity on Wikipedia.

Posted by: cyofee

Looks like someone with a big proxy list is trolling you.

Posted by: radek

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Help_desk&diff=prev&oldid=442723135.

Posted by: thekohser

Your note was August 2. The spike began August 5. No cigar.

Posted by: radek

Well shucks.

Posted by: thekohser

The surge continues unabated.

It's got to be a bot, right?

Posted by: EricBarbour

It's likely. Someone is messing with you. Has anything happened to MWB's direct hits?

There are now more than 100 bots operating on en-WP. Any of them could be easily modified to
automatically inflate the hit-counts of any article. Because no one ever talks about what they
are doing with their WP bots, we might never know.

Yet another area of Wikipedia that is completely opaque and obscured from its users. After looking
at the edit histories of thousands of articles, I am convinced that WP's mad admins are deliberately
using bots to falsify edit-counts across the board. Since 2009 the preponderance of edits to ALL
articles (except major battlefields) have been bot edits such as reformats, or trivial edits by complete
nobodies which added little or no information.

When people see my edit-date analysis, there will be much sadness.