James Governor's Monkchips

Why is Wikipedia anti small business? “Get Better PR”

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Jimmy Wales and James Governor

I like Wikipedia a lot. But it infuriates me than while major incumbents in any sector are “notable” enough to be worthy of an entry, small firms, or new ideas, are not. Its bizarre that while RedMonk is cited repeatedly in the knowledge base, when people have tried to create an entry for us it got blocked by an editor.

I would think I were being paranoid where it not for the fact when I met Jimmy Wales a while back his answer when I asked him about the issue was:

“you need to get better PR”.

That is – use a public relations firm to get citations from print publications.

From print publications? From print publications? What the hell are we doing here? Newspapers are going out of business left right and center. Print publications. Bah.

I still love to use Wikipedia, but I do think the obsession with Hits is kind of weird for a Net property. It hurts innovators.

14 comments

  1. [email protected] Wikipedia rules need to change as Newspaper relevance wanes http://tinyurl.com/yj2jcjg
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  2. Wikipedia needs to branch.

  3. Ironically, you also see newspapers and other traditional print media using Wikipedia as a source.

    I’d also note that the truly small can create Wikipedia articles with impunity. Once, for my own amusement, I read 250 random Wikipedia articles. Amazing how many were one-town garage bands of little note, Pokemon characters and small villages in India.

    So I think the very small and the very large survive quite well in Wikipedia. It is the guys in the middle who have precarious positions.

  4. Is it PR or is it just the fact that there no realistic way to validate the extremely large pool of small businesses.

    As an example , I run a small company, If Wikipedia quotes me – how does it know that that I am not a fly-by-night operator or even that I am not promoting an agenda.

    Large Enterprises have already been vetted out of this basic validation

  5. Further to my note above, The issue is not Wikipedia specific. Any small firm has to go over the hump of establishing credibility – you can do this in several ways , one among them is getting a PR firm. You could also win a nobel prize and avoid PR 🙂

  6. […] power of the mainstream media was cited by Red Monk analyst James Governor this week who had been having problems with […]

  7. Why is Wikipedia anti small business? “Get Better PR”:
    I like Wikipedia a lot. But it infuriates me than while.. http://bit.ly/38uubh
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  8. And now you know why, while an administrator at wikipedia since 2002, I rarely if ever go there anymore. I discovered that wikipedia is an extension of print. If it is in print, then it must be true, and if it is not, then it must not be. [Do you have a citation for that?]

    I extend print to mean media, which means that if there is a movie about it produced by Sony or Universal Studio, then it must also be true. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers_%28film%29]], as well as music.

    In the end, I realized that wikipedia is reflective of the interest of the masses, and since the masses are distrustful of small businesses or find them irrelevant (who cares about a PR firm in London when there is Lost on TV?), then they remove such listings, marking them as blatant advertising.

    Now, why are the masses distrustful of blatant advertising? Mmm? Maybe they are right after all: a small business wants to just set up shop, make a wikipedia entry, and funnel large amounts of eyeballs to its website to pitch goods and services of dubious real value?

    Maybe this is good for wikipedia to not allow the small businesses there.

  9. RedMonk should be on wikipedia, end of story. If Wales doesn’t see that, he needs to spend more time on @gapingvoid’s site studying the impact of microbrands, of which RedMonk is a very good example – not to mention the rise of independent analysts in the IT space, or the impact/innovation of freemium business models. RedMonk fits the bill for all three. Put RedMonk in wikipedia now or look small after the fact.

  10. get citations from print publications???? RT @monkchips: Why is Wikipedia anti small business? “Get Better PR” http://bit.ly/4sjvyt
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  11. unbelievable…if 25 of us bloggers with some following sendthim an email supporting you would he consider that good PR?

  12. @leisa new world? what balls http://bit.ly/4sjvyt
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  13. Dan – While reading your post, I thought your conclusion would be that wikipedia reflects the interests of mass media and the money they can afford to spend on PR and advertising – not that the masses were suspicious of advertising. If wikipedia reflects the interests of the masses, and we find only major TV/movie/mainstream information on it, doesn’t this suggest that, in fact, people mistrust companies that do NOT use blatant advertising?

    That would be the conclusion I would draw from Jimmy Wales’ remarks and your first two paragraphs.

    The conclusion in the third paragraphs seems like a leap to me.

  14. It seems not much has changed in just over 2 years since this post was written…

    http://www.businesszone.co.uk/topic/marketing-pr/wikipedia-anti-small-business/39714

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