Wiki sites aim to be more inclusive than Wikipedia

March 11, 2008 - PRLog -- Is there an article about you in Wikipedia? Is there one about the company you work for, or your church, or your civic organization or club? Chances are, there is not, because Wikipedia rightfully limits its topic base to subjects that meet its guidelines for "notability" and "reliable sources". For most of us, this means your biography cannot be written on Wikipedia. Seeing an opportunity, other websites are taking shape to catalog the millions of "non-notable" entities found on our planet. Though, if some of these sites aren't careful about their community-generated content, they could be facing accusations of fostering libel or defamation.

One site called NexWiki.org claims to be the "largest username and name archiving website" on the Internet. The Australian site, however, is hosting volatile "anonymous powered" content; that is, the wiki doesn't even bother with registering users. It therefore could become a magnet for vandalism. For example, one can find a page about a username "Psychonaut" which describes a real-life person as "a blight upon the earth". Not particularly useful as a trusted reference.

New York-based WikiYou.com aspires to log an unauthorized biography of every person on earth. The site's management feels that a biography should exist for everyone, "regardless if there have been 'reliable' or 'verifiable' sources for that person." Yet, founders Jay Gould and Aaron Cohen have not authored biographies for themselves on the site, so one may wonder about the trustworthiness of the model. Until a profile has been "claimed" by someone, all of their information is malleable by anyone. Even after a profile has been claimed, the "biography" and "stories" sections are still open to other editors. There is no mention of what one without e-mail or Internet access is supposed to do about claiming their biography.

Biographicon.com, "the place for everyone's biography," seems to take a more humanistic approach, advising editors that a biography "must not hurt the basic human dignity of its subject." The site also associates search results with nifty photo headshots of related persons. However, there is no editorial control over anonymous editing on any of the biographies, and most of the articles are merely duplicate copies of an old version from Wikipedia.

There is one wiki directory that is making every attempt to be inclusive of as many entities and biographies as possible, without opening up the site to anonymous libel or vandalism. That site is MyWikiBiz.com ( http://www.mywikibiz.com ), which has set a goal of featuring 265 million pages of content about "non-notable" subjects; however, only registered users may edit the pages, and only the legal representative of an entity or person may have final, "lock down" control of an article about the legal entity. This way, personally disparaging remarks never pollute an article; yet cooperative, community-based editing may still take place on subjects which aren't about legal entities (such as "carbon dioxide", "Christmas lights", or "heating oil").

Nathan Richards, who works for and promotes an Internet service firm in Ottawa, Canada, notes the dichotomy, "I appreciate the collaborative environment of MyWikiBiz, because I can choose to work with others on some subjects, or publish protected content about myself or my place of business."

MyWikiBiz is attracting more and more attention since its re-launch in January 2008. Recently, the site welcomed 1,000 unique visitors in one week, and MyWikiBiz.com has surpassed nearly 400,000 other domains in only 10 weeks of operation as a wiki, according to Alexa.com traffic rankings.

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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, because it's built on an enhanced version of the same MediaWiki software architecture used by Wikipedia.

Website: www.mywikibiz.com