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, which ended when the owner of MyWikiBiz was banned from Wikipedia. The current site at MyWikiBiz.com uses a version of the MediaWiki software. The MyWikiBiz directory currently contains over 37,000 pages of content about corporations and individuals. The business is headquartered in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The site was founded by Gregory Kohs, a market researcher.

According to its main page:

"MyWikiBiz is a new directory where you can author your legacy on the Internet. We think you are notable, even if Wikipedia has rejected an article about you or your enterprise as being “non-notable”. With MyWikiBiz, you create a beautiful, reader-friendly page that will get picked up by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search engines."

Professor Jonathan Zittrain of the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society discussed the case of MyWikiBiz in his book The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It. Gregory Kohs appeared on Attack of the Show! on January 25, 2007, and discussed MyWikiBiz. Heise Online expressed a suspicion that while MyWikiBiz’s “attempted corporate infiltration” of Wikipedia was discovered, MyWikiBiz was not an isolated case.

Paid editing of Wikipedia
Gregory Kohs and his sister started the MyWikiBiz venture in Pennsylvania in July 2006, initially as a paid editing service, writing content for inclusion in Wikipedia and other community-edited sites. The idea came from Wikipedia’s "Reward Board", where interested parties would offer cash rewards or gifts to create or improve Wikipedia articles. . MyWikiBiz’s tiers of service were priced at $49, $79, and $99 per article. Kohs stated MyWikiBiz would only produce legitimate Wikipedia articles that conformed to the necessary policies. No official Wikipedia policy prohibited paid-for contributions at the time. Kohs argued that there were tens of thousands of companies and nonprofit organizations unrepresented on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales called the commercialized editing "antithetical" to Wikipedia’s mission, and "absolutely unacceptable". Wales blocked Kohs from editing Wikipedia. Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press compared Kohs’ situation to that of Rick Jelliffe, a technical writer approached by Microsoft to edit Wikipedia articles for pay.

In August 2006, Wales issued a "mutually beneficial" compromise where he encouraged MyWikiBiz to author and post content on a GFDL-compliant section of MyWikiBiz.com, which could then be scraped by non-paid, independent editors into Wikipedia and other GFDL sites.

In October 2006 Wales again banned Kohs from Wikipedia, and cautioned any business from using its services. According to Kohs, the result of this was for MyWikiBiz to go into "hibernation"; although still operating, the site is currently acting solely as a wiki for people and corporations to author their own wiki articles, with no transferral to Wikipedia. Kohs maintains a belief that everyone, even editors with commercial interests should be able to contribute to Wikipedia.

Centiare alliance and takeover
In late October 2006, Kohs formed a partnership with the owner of Centiare.com which resulted in Kohs promoting and marketing a wiki-based directory at Centiare. When Centiare’s owner opted to pull the plug on the site, Kohs negotiated a transfer of the entire contents of Centiare.com to MyWikiBiz.com. MyWikiBiz has witnessed 2008 growth in monthly visitor traffic of.

Wikipedia admin plagiarizes MyWikiBiz content
The original version of any wiki-formatted article about the Arch Coal company was authored in September 2006 by Gregory Kohs and released under the terms of the GFDL on his website, MyWikiBiz.com. It was then scraped by an independent editor into Wikipedia. In October 2006, erroneously thinking that the article was paid for by Arch Coal, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales acted to delete the article from Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia community determined that Wales' action had been unjustified. The article was revised, largely by "User:JzG" (Guy Chapman). However, in January 2008, Kohs demonstrated to Chapman that the article as modified by User:JzG actually plagiarized many aspects of the original. Faced with that evidence, Chapman elected to cover up his misdeed by deleting the original edits on the Wikipedia site, thus making the provenance of the article appear to have come from Chapman, and not from MyWikiBiz. When Jimmy Wales was notified about this violation of professional ethics and proper GFDL attribution of the edit history, Wales very reluctantly restored the original edit history, with the childish edit summary, "might as well restore all of it I suppose".

Additional comment
When in December 2008, Kohs sought to improve the article about Arch Coal on Wikipedia, his improvements were reverted back by a mindless administrator from Belgium. This underscores the true system of editorial control on Wikipedia -- it matters not the content of one's edits, but rather who authors the content. (Which, of course, directly contradicts Wikipedia's supposed credo that "anyone can edit".)