Type of business Private Available in Multilingual Slogan(s) Author Your Legacy Founder Gregory Kohs | Type of site Wiki Key people Gregory Kohs (CEO) Website mywikibiz.com | |
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Founded June 2006, West Chester, Pennsylvania, United States Headquarters West Chester, Pennsylvania, United States | ||
Why mywikibiz
MyWikiBiz is a wiki directory that allows people and enterprises to write about themselves. The brand began as a service creating Wikipedia articles for paying corporations; the founder and owner of MyWikiBiz, Gregory Kohs, was soon blocked from Wikipedia.
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History
Kohs and his sister started the MyWikiBiz venture in July 2006, as a paid editing service, writing content for inclusion in Wikipedia and other community-edited sites. Kohs charged between $49 and $99 USD for articles. At the time, though it was widely known that Wikipedia was used by corporations and public relations firms, such contributions were often hidden, only to be discovered later. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales expressed opposition to the idea of a paid editing service.
A few days after MyWikiBiz was launched, the site's user account was blocked by Wales on the grounds of "paid editing on behalf of customers". It was one of the few such blocks personally by Wales in Wikipedia's history. Wales viewed the problem as one of "conflict of interest and the appearance of impropriety arising from editors being paid to write by the subjects of the articles". He and Kohs reached an agreement, under which Kohs could create "Wikipedia-like" articles on his site and that they could then be "scraped" to Wikipedia by Wikipedia editors. The agreement soon unraveled, and Kohs was blocked from editing Wikipedia.
In his book The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain said that Wales believed that MyWikiBiz had been "spamming Wikipedia with corporate advertisements rather than 'neutral point of view' articles", but also that MyWikiBiz persuaded some Wikipedians to lower objections to an article merely because of its source.
The Chronicle of Higher Education said "it's hard to feel too bad for MyWikiBiz," and that "if the encyclopedia is serious about gaining acceptance from academe, surely it has a vested interest in dissuading companies from paying to improve their presence on the site."
In late October 2006, Kohs formed a partnership to promote and market a wiki-based directory at Centiare.com, after which Kohs moved its contents to MyWikiBiz.com.