Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

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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 guess is from AngelList.

"Hi,

Shouldn't Grasswire have a full-length, professional page on Wikipedia? Wiki-PR.com can craft you a professional Wikipedia page for the top 2-3 spots in Google Search.

Would you like more information? Please reply. It will be worthwhile. A full-length, professionally written Wikipedia page will drive sales and inform your clients about what you do best.

Your competitors are getting on Wikipedia. Shouldn’t you be on Wikipedia, too?

Best,

Vanessa Embers Sales Consultant

Wiki-PR We Write It. We Manage It. You Never Worry About Wikipedia Again.

Tel: 888-819-0733 vanessa@wiki-pr.com Twitter: @wiki_PR San Francisco, CA

Disclaimer: This is an individual, personalized email sent by a human. But to unsubscribe, simply reply with "unsubscribe" in the email body."

The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that a lot of your ability to post edits without being caught is based on how often you're making edits approved by the Wikipedia community. If it's blatantly spammy or incorrect it will be corrected, but I'm sure there's plenty that slips under the radar, especially for editors with more experience and a lot of edits under their belts.

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.

> 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#Advertisement... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organiza...

> We still have not

> 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.

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.

If someone does make an article, noting stuff on the talk page (with full transparency) is fine.

Hey David, I wouldn't count that as direct editing :-) TBSDY

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