Wikipages: a proposed solution to the paid editing crisis

[Anuran]

Here is a proposed solution that could help ameliorate the paid editing crisis and make most parties happier, after I did months of intensive research into the paid editing / COI crisis that is eating Wikipedia from the inside out.

Let's set up a "directory-encyclopedia" that anyone can edit, and call it Wikipages for now, though you can feel free to suggest alternative names below. Wikipages would be a directory-style encyclopedia that anyone can edit, including paid editors and editors with close connections to the subject.

Wikipages would be a 21st-century version of a White Pages + Yellow Pages wiki encyclopedia. Like Wikipedia articles, it should be well-referenced and not look like an advertisement, resume, press release, or personal reflection essay. No original research, but you can include lots of stuff from your official website and cite them.

Coverage:
1. All notable and "semi-notable" individuals (the White Pages encyclopedia part of it). Fork over all living persons articles (~900,000) from the English and non-English Wikipedias. Maybe split this off as a separate project and call this WikiPeople?

2. All notable and "semi-notable" organizations (the Yellow Pages encyclopedia part of it). Fork over all articles on legal entities, business entities, organizations, non-profits, brands, trademarks, etc. Maybe split this off as a separate project and call this WikiOrg?

We can (and probably should) even fork over tons of content from Deletionpedia, AfD archives, drafts, and more.

No comprehensive Wiki for companies and semi-notable individuals:
There is a ton of useful stuff that gets deleted everyday from Wikipedia. Much of it should have gone into another Wiki.
But unfortunately there's no outlet for many companies and individuals to write encyclopedic articles about themselves, which creates this huge market for black hat editors. We say they can't do this or that due to WP:NOT, but the truth is there is no Wikivoyage or Wiktionary or LyricWiki equivalent for corporations.

Living species have Wikispecies.
Lyrics have LyricWiki.
Words (any language) have Wiktionary.
Travel guides and destinations have Wikivoyage.
Nothing for attention-hungry people and companies though? This is why they are turning to Wikipedia and are so desperate to get on it, even though Wikipedia is supposed to be a general encyclopedia and not a directory.

This wealth of new info on Wikipages will be truly useful for people in the business world, economics analysts, and the like. Due to the witch hunt against COI and paid editors that pays hardly attention to actual article quality, Wikipedia is currently horribly representative of individuals and companies. Paid editors have all their articles deleted due to guilt by association, which is what Wikipages should not do.

Basically, the vast majority of deleted articles written by paid editors would be eligible. Let's include the "semi-notables" like local grade schools in India and local rappers with a few news articles written about them, but not teachers at small elementary schools or others who are truly non-notabe.


Wikipages would have:
1. Expanded notability. Most people who have contributed something somewhat noteworthy to society would be notable, and most small companies with some press mentions would be notable. To be more specific: all university professors and top grad students with some publications would be notable, but not the average housewife or toddler. Your local well-known law firm in town with plenty of clients and some news coverage would be notable, but not a small, local mom-and-pop restaurant or laundromat. Local professional athletes with a few mentions are notable. Local well-known real-estate companies and law firms with a 3 or 4 press mentions would be notable on Wikipages, but not Wikipedia.

2. Allow paid editing and closely connected editors. It doesn't matter if someone was paid to write an article, if he wrote about himself or his own company, or if there was a close connection. As long it's neutral, well-referenced, etc. then it's good to go. One of Wikipages' central policies would be to judge a content by what it's like, not who it's written by. This is what many Wikipedians don't get these days.


Policies that would be the same as Wikipedia: no original research, citations needed, too much reliance on a single source, no libel.

But Wikipages accepts that people and companies have a right to write about themselves, or pay someone else to do so, as long as the content is good and verifiable and non-biased.


We don't have anything like this yet.
Kohser's MyWikiBiz is still relatively small and not that often updated. One possibility would be from Kohs to revive his MyWikiBiz site and fork over all the living persons and corporations articles from Wikipedia, and invite all the paid editors. There's also http://isan.wiki/ , which I dug up from WP:PAIDLIST, but it only has several articles that were failed paid articles.


Challenges:
1. We'll need to fork over around 2 million articles from the English Wikipedia. This requires lots of bandwidth, disk space, and maintenance costs. Eventually it's going to have more articles than English Wikipedia. So this is no small feat.

2. Who's going to host this project? Me and you? Pretty positive that such a project is absolutely antithetical to the WMF's and Jimbo's core beliefs on what a Wiki project should be like, so other people with a completely different vision will need to run and manage this project. The managing organization should be non-profit and funded by donations.

Of course, forking has been done by Wikipilipinas (now defunct) and Wikitravel, among others, so this can be done.

This might take a lot of money and expertise. Or maybe not so much at first. Perhaps we can try to:
1. Crowdfund and crowdsource this idea.

2. Get a small team of dedicated guys and not crowdsource this.


Of course, there will be vandals, trolls, edit wars, and the same other stuff that Wikipedia has. But just imagine all the useful information that would suddenly become available to the public if we were to launch Wikipages.

What do you guys think? I'm pretty serious about this. You can PM me too if you're seriously interested. I'd be especially interested in hearing what folks like Gregory Kohs and Mike Wood think about this.

[Beeblebrox]

The reason multiple other sites that have tried to do this went nowhere is that people want their company to be covered on the actual Wikipedia, and until you can present a reasonable explanation of why this idea would somehow change that I can't see it going anywhere.

And frankly, attention seeking people and companies already have a bajillion social media sites to talk about themselves on, sites where they retain complete control over their own messaging.

[Anuran]

The reason multiple other sites that have tried to do this went nowhere is that people want their company to be covered on the actual Wikipedia, and until you can present a reasonable explanation of why this idea would somehow change that I can't see it going anywhere.

And frankly, attention seeking people and companies already have a bajillion social media sites to talk about themselves on, sites where they retain complete control over their own messaging.

Which other sites tried to do this?

The other sites were never comprehensive enough, so there was never much of a reason to be on them. If we can fork over ~1-2 million articles onto Wikipages, add some more content from deleted articles, say that this is the largest online encyclopedia of people and companies ever, more so than Wikipedia, and promote the site via WP:OUT (Wikipedia:Alternative_outlets) and the media, then companies will want to be on Wikipages too. As far as I know, nothing of this scale had ever been done.

This kind of should have been done by the WMF many years ago, but they never appeared to even think of it.

If we create a big site like this, then the top Google search results will follow.

Get in touch with all the black hat paid editors and tell them to dump all their failed articles on Wikipages. Advertise everywhere that Wikipages takes what Wikipedia won't. We've had plenty of success getting content over to Wiktionary and Wikivoyage. I don't see why this can't be done.

[Beeblebrox]

Thi sounds almost exactly like Everipedia. (if you added some BLOCKCHAIN and some CRYPTOCURRENCY in there) They claim to be the biggest encyclopedia, because they copied WP in it's entirety and then started adding all kinds of crappy articles about marginally notable people and organizations. They hyped it just as you propose for this. It doesn't seem to have worked out so well.

[Anuran]

Thi sounds almost exactly like Everipedia. (if you added some BLOCKCHAIN and some CRYPTOCURRENCY in there) They claim to be the biggest encyclopedia, because they copied WP in it's entirety and then started adding all kinds of crappy articles about marginally notable people and organizations. They hyped it just as you propose for this. It doesn't seem to have worked out so well.

That's because Everipedia has a confusing user interface that the old Wikipedians aren't familiar with. They even want you to log in with your social media account.

Wikipages should have the same interface as Wikipedia, like Wikivoyage. We want the same templates and old-school mid-2000s look.

[No Ledge]

Welcome to MyWikiBiz!

We believe you're notable. Tell your story here.
71,858 articles in English

[Poetlister]

MyWikiBiz hasn't taken off like that, and I'm not sure if that was ever the intention. Maybe if it had ported in a million articles, it would be booming, but then it would need an army to monitor it.

[Dysklyver]

Of course you could simply ask Everipedia (T-H-L) for an "old style" interface. It's truly the only Wikipedia competitor at the moment with any funding, and this is exactly their mission and what they are doing.

Of course if you want to get stuck in anyway with their current interface, Everipedia can now be edited for free if you get a Twitter account and use it as a login. No expensive buy in needed!

The uh... previous editing system there was very complicated. But if you do sign up for the crypto options, you can reportedly edit a lot and get enough Ponzicoins™ to buy a peanut.

[Johnny Au]

Microsoft has a solution similar to that of Wikipages (and appears at or near the top of search results). It's called LinkedIn.

Yes, I am already notable enough to be included in Wikipages, as I am featured in a reliable source.

[Anuran]

Microsoft has a solution similar to that of Wikipages (and appears at or near the top of search results). It's called LinkedIn.

Yes, I am already notable enough to be included in Wikipages, as I am featured in a reliable source.

LinkedIn is a social networking site like Facebook and Twitter. It is not an open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The closest thing we have to the world's largest crowdsourced database on company profiles is Owler.
https://www.owler.com/

[Poetlister]

If you're a company, do you want to be on a site where anyone can edit your article to say whatever they like about you?

[Anuran]

There was a former attempt at this called Wikicompany.

https://wikiindex.org/Wikicompany

https://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/Wikicompany

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-JP1

https://web.archive.org/web/20120207194 ... _Wikipedia

https://web.archive.org/web/20060417225 ... press.com/

Wikicompany was a free, community built, open content worldwide business directory. It was based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and was founded 2005 by Jama Poulsen, who edited under the username Walden.

Any idea what happened to it and why it shut down?

[Johnny Au]

Microsoft has a solution similar to that of Wikipages (and appears at or near the top of search results). It's called LinkedIn.

Yes, I am already notable enough to be included in Wikipages, as I am featured in a reliable source.

LinkedIn is a social networking site like Facebook and Twitter. It is not an open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The closest thing we have to the world's largest crowdsourced database on company profiles is Owler.
https://www.owler.com/

Interesting.

I took a look at Owler and I see that there's quite a number of defunct companies there.

[Dysklyver]

There was a former attempt at this called Wikicompany.

Any idea what happened to it and why it shut down?

No money, no editors, no interest.

[Poetlister]

I took a look at Owler and I see that there's quite a number of defunct companies there.

That's bound to happen. There would be no effective mechanism for removing them.

[Earthy Astringent]

The paid editor problem all boils down to one thing. Those that are editing for free are jealous. Speaking of paid editing, check out the history of Michael Avenatti (T-H-L). That the article was created shortly before Avenatti’s foray into US politics is unlikely to be a coincidence. Bytemark (T-C-L), who created the article seems to have gone dark under that account. I wonder how Avenatti or whatever subordinate he directs found Bytemark in the first place?

[thekohser]

It appears that my expert commentary here is unnecessary. Nice job, everyone.