On 9/29/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
What Gerard suggests is NOT a solution. There are reasons people are spamming Wikipedia and not adding content to Yellowiki. We are the fourteenth largest website in the world, while Yellowiki does not count in the top one hundred thousand. We have a consistently high google rating and our links ensure that they will have a high google rating, Yellowiki does not. We can offer some modicum of respectability, while they cannot Compare these two statements: "Look at me! I'm in the encyclopedia!" v. "Look at me! I'm in the phonebook! "
Doesn't this statement about google rating misrepresent how google ratings work? http://en.wikipedia.org/ has a pagerank of 9. http://www.myspace.com/ has a pagerank of 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_Network has a pagerank of 0. http://www.theweddingnetwork.co.uk/ has a pagerank of 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeBOX has a pagerank of 0. http://www.edgebox.net/ has a pagerank of 2. The fact that the main page of the English Wikipedia has a high pagerank seems to me to have absolutely no relevance to the fact that people want their companies in it.
I think you come the closest to an explanation of why people want their companies in Wikipedia when you talk about offering "some modicum of respectability". People want their companies in Wikipedia because it's relatively hard to get a company in Wikipedia.
Anthony