3 ms·

I got this email a couple of months ago. The sales pitch, despite being poorly written, is interesting. I have no idea how they got my email address, but my gue

• bredren 13y ago
  I got the same email in May from a different sales consultant. I asked for additional information, which named Voxer and two other companies as clients and provided the following pricing: Pricing Wikipedia Page Creation - $1500 Includes research, writing, client review, editing, and uploading to Wikipedia. Wikipedia Page Management - $49/month (optional) Includes ongoing updates to your Wikipedia page, removal of any flags added to your page, and a money-back guarantee that your page will not be deleted by the Wikipedia community. I ignored that email, but the sales consultant checked in with me later. This was my response: "Thank you for checking in. I understand the value of your service. However, if we were to go after a wikipedia page these days, we would probably make the attempt on our own. I realize that your expertise could more efficiently get a page up and ensure it has the necessary elements to stay up. However, we aren't spending money on marketing right now. We're spending it on product development. Our hope is that by continuing to prove the value of our service, and by surfacing greater publicity and user traction, creating a wikipedia page and having the necessary attention to have it be upheld will become less of a challenge for us. Again, I appreciate the check in, I hope you understand our circumstances." The sales consultant responded with an offer to discount page creation by $500 if we did it by the end of the month. I politely declined. We still have not taken the step of building a wikipedia page for our startup, and instead have continued to focus on making it notable. EDIT: I think it is worth mentioning that at the time I did think our company was notable enough to get a wikipedia page. I also thought that done ethically, it was potentially reasonable to pay for someone who is an expert at this to do so. But I did not realize doing so would be against TOS. I myself created and edited pages on Wikipedia for fun (mostly new albums for bands and music labels) I know there is some art to making something that passes editor muster.
  • leokun 13y ago
    > We still have not taken the step of building a wikipedia page for our startup, and instead have continued to focus on making it notable. Do you not know about Wikpedia's policies? You should probably not create a wikipedia page for your own product. If you become notable someone else will do it for you. You have a major conflict of interest, and thus you should just not do it, and you should probably not edit it either if one is ever created. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASpam#Advertisements_masquerading_as_articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASpam#Advertisement... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organizations_and_companies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organiza...
    • pessimizer 13y ago
      > We still have not
  • swalling 13y ago
    > We still have not taken the step of building a wikipedia page for our startup, and instead have continued to focus on making it notable. Wikipedia admin here. This is the right way to go about it, though I would add "making it notable" doesn't just include product work, but includes generating press about your startup. Especially if you can get something more mainstream than tech press like TechCrunch, The Verge, etc.
    • chris_wot 13y ago
      Old, former Wikipedia admin here. Unless things have changed, I would strongly advise against paid editing, nor would I allow an employee to directly edit any articles directly related to your company.
      • davidgerard 13y ago
        If someone does make an article, noting stuff on the talk page (with full transparency) is fine.