How are companies to correct wrong information? SImple: they can change it, or they can comment on the discussion page, or they can use the “contact us” links to email the volunteers who handle complaints and issues. Companies do this all the time.

What they can’t do is control the content of “their” article. That’s because it’s not “their” article, it’s Wikipedia’s. You ask what kind of service Wikipeida offers; the answer is, it offers a service to our readers in providing neutral content on significant subjects. It does not offer a directory service, a service to company marketers or SEOs. This is pretty clear in our policies and guidelines.

My best piece of advice to companies is, if you don’t want your article deleted, don’t let your marketing people near it. Hiostorically, marketing people have proven unable to write anything much other than marketing blurb, and that fails policies and gets nuked.

Kent, thanks for exchanging e-mails with me. I’m sorry about the role I played in expediting the removal of your firm’s content from Wikipedia; but believe me, had I sat on my hands, the same fate was facing you within the next 24 hours.

You and your readers should visit WikipediaReview.com, where we’ve been exposing the hypocrisy of Wikipedia rule sets and their de facto policy of “truth and openness gets you banned”. It really does need to stop, but I’m not exactly sure Wikipedia CAN be changed. It is truly a massive, multi-player defamation board, disguised as an encyclopedia.

Last month, I ran for the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees seat that was open. Over 120 Wikipedia editors ranked me #1 out of a roster of 15 candidates. About 450 ranked me as one of their top 3 choices. I still came in last place.

Wikipedia culture has a systemic violation of their own “neutral point of view” policy. That is, the one point of view they will not tolerate is the thoughtful, reasoned, commercial/paid point of view!

Another sub-policy underlying all Wikipedia rules: Jimmy Wales is the only person entitled to make money off of Wikipedia.

The sooner the world realizes this complete hypocrisy within Wikipedia, the sooner we’ll figure out new ways to subvert it.

I wish you and your company the best of luck in rebounding from this very predictable setback.

Note, Guy Chapman re-wrote an article in October 2006 that I had originally written about [[Arch Coal]]. There was a big debate founded on the premise that I couldn’t have possibly written a neutral article about a coal-mining company if I were paid by them. Even in light of that, an independent, unpaid editor of Wikipedia is the one who scraped the article into Wikipedia, not me. I let the debate rage on and on. Then I let everyone know that Arch Coal had no idea who I was, that they had never contracted me to author anything. The article was nothing more than an experiment to test and see how long it would take an article about a Fortune 1000 firm to get into Wikipedia from my GFDL website.

Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. Later, in January 2008 — 15 months after the whole Arch Coal article battle — Guy Chapman went back to Wikipedia and, using his admin tools, deleted from public view the fact that the article had originally been written and attributed to MyWikiBiz.com. This had the effect of trashing the GFDL license obligations, and made Guy Chapman’s version the “original content of record” on Wikipedia.

This would be somewhat defensible if Guy Chapman re-wrote the article completely from scratch, without help from my article. Indeed, on another website, he stated that he had authored the new article “ab initio”. Then, I and others pointed out that he wrote “his” new article in about 26 minutes, complete with infobox mark-up, reference citations, and several substantial paragraphs of text. This would be an amazing feat — especially for someone who was still engaged in the “article for deletion” debate WHILE he was writing “ab initio”.

In the end, it was painfully obvious that Guy Chapman had been caught in a big lie. He even created grammatical mistakes as he rearranged my original subjects and predicates, but failed to mop up the resulting subject-verb disagreement. His formatting of the managerial names in the Infobox was exactly identical to the unusual way that I had arranged them. This caused him to admit that “maybe” he had used the existing Infobox over again, which caused everyone to laugh at him and ask if he really knew what “ab initio” meant.

Now Guy Chapman is here, advising a marketing professional on how to ethically engage Wikipedia. And I am (fortunately) here to point out what a hypocritical and ballsy move that is for a proven liar to execute on another man’s blog.

It would be alarming, if it weren’t so dad-blamed funny!

Greg, I did rewrite it from scratch. If it looked similar then perhaps we both used the same sources. Maybe we neither of us rewrote the text sufficiently and it should have been nuked as a copyright violation or at the very least plagiarism.

But you are using misdirection here; you were banned because you were offering to write articles for profit. That means you get paid, while the rest of the community, who are volunteers, have to go around after you checking for bias in what you write. You thought this was fine, not least because you get the mooney and you don’t see how what you write could be anything but neutral. Unsurprisingly, the unpaid volunteers (i.e. pretty much everyone but you) thought this was not such a good deal since they didn’t get the money and they did dispute that what you write for pay will always be a neutral warts-and-all portrayal of the subject.

Sorry, that’s how it is: Wikipedia is a project run by volunteers and as a whole they don’t like it when people set out to use Wikipedia to make profit. There is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical about that. If people want a free directory where they can control article content, then they can give you a call. Wikipedia is not that place, never was.

The lies continue. Even IF you re-wrote the article from scratch (which you didn’t: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arch_Coal&diff=79696189&oldid=76592206 — why did you write “The company’s operates mines…”?), why did you find the need to erase the original version of the article on January 2, 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Arch_Coal ?

Answer: so that I wouldn’t be able to easily show the world your hypocrisy by comparing the two versions, as I’ve done in the link above.

Guy, I wasn’t banned for offering to write articles for profit, and you know that. All of my articles written for profit, after August 9, 2006 and my phone conversation with Jimmy Wales, and his public notice of our agreement, were published on MY OWN WEBSITE. Other unpaid, volunteer Wikipedia editors were free, under the universal terms of the GFD License, to scrape that content into Wikipedia IF THEY SAW FIT AS far as WP:NPOV and WP:RS were concerned.

The reason I was banned (and this is published truth in the Washington Post and USA Today, if you care to look up “MyWikiBiz”) is because I had the audacity to e-mail Jimmy Wales on October 4, 2006, to ask him if the newly-developed WP:COI (conflict of interest) rules were more lenient than his own accord with me. Simple question. He went crazy, thinking I was trying to “drive a wedge” between him and his beloved Wikipedia community (sycophants like you). Is it any coincidence that less than 12 hours later, Jimmy deleted the [[Arch Coal]] article?

Guy, I’m convinced that you are so delusional in your cover-ups of your disgraceful practices on Wikipedia, you’re not even capable of telling the truth about me or yourself any more. You’re sad.

Greg, you may think what you say is “published fact”, but it’s only your interpretation of the facts. You were banned because you were abusing a volunteer-run charitably funded project for personal gain, an the volunteer community took umbrage. I know that cognitive dissonance forbids you from admitting this to yourself, but it’s what happened.

Who’s sadder? A person who devotes their efforts to helping a project resist abuse, or a person who is still obsessed after all this time with wanting the credit for edit number one in an article? Let’s let others decide that. The point here, however, is that there is nothing evil or inconsistent with removing articles created for pay, any more than there is anything evil about removing or blacklisting links that site owners add. Sure, some people might want Wikipedia to be a place to build their brand and generate leads, but it isn’t. You started a project which is devoted to those things, but as far as I can tell it is less attractive to readers than a project which at least tries to be neutral and not have marketing people write the text about companies. I am quite content to let time be the judge here: in ten years time, maybe your site will be the go-to site for information about companies, who knows? But I’m betting it won’t, and I’m betting that your inability to discuss the issue without name-calling is a symptom of the reason why.

Your definition of “abuse”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arch_Coal&oldid=76592206

Please cite a reliable source that indicates that any of my business transactions resulted in “abuse” of Wikipedia, and I’ll send you $5, Guy.

Your snarky “ten years time” wager is rather quaint. In ten years’ time, I estimate that I will have earned at least $2000 from my site. In ten years’ time, I estimate that you will have earned $0 from Wikipedia. Who is wasting their time?

I note that you, too, are “using misdirection” here. There were dozens of editors in good standing on Wikipedia who wished to calmly discuss the advantages of incorporating paid content into the body of Wikipedia. You and your goons shouted them down and blocked them all. Here are just the most recent 500 accounts you’ve blocked:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&limit=500&type=block&user=JzG

Talk about “abuse”!

Can you two not go bash each other elsewhere? Who is lieing about what has nothing to do with the issue and the simple fact is Wikipedia was created for the sole purpose of being a user created and verfied factual database, not anouther marketing tool. Now weather or not the content created by someone about there own company was well written and unbiased is not the point, the entire issue is can that be proven? The whole purpose of Wiki is to find out information that did not come from a press release card, if I found out as a wiki user that the content I look up about a company were wirten by the company itself or someone hired by them, would I trust it? How far does trust go with humanity these days? From what I have seen, not far.

Kyle Rantala: “The whole purpose of Wiki is to find out information that did not come from a press release card…”

Take a look at User:SlimVirgin, User:Jimbo Wales, User:Elonka, and User:Mantanmoreland. You obviously have no clue as to the REAL purpose of Wikipedia.

[...] over. He is active in so many things and has always been one of the best at being open and honest. So the story he told me this morning made me mad as a hornet to think that yet again the trolls rule Wikipedia and that so many people [...]

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