http://consumerreportingusa.org/wikipedia.htm Who knew that "Wikipedia was hiring website processing specialists"? Not me, that's for sure! Easy money, here we come!
Any chance someone can check this out? Seems like a complicated spam farm of sorts.
Phoebe
2008/9/29 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
http://consumerreportingusa.org/wikipedia.htm Who knew that "Wikipedia was hiring website processing specialists"? Not me, that's for sure! Easy money, here we come!
It's nonsense.
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 12:07 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/9/29 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
http://consumerreportingusa.org/wikipedia.htm Who knew that "Wikipedia was hiring website processing specialists"? Not me, that's for sure! Easy money, here we come!
It's nonsense.
I know that :) The implication I read into it was that they were hiring people to write or post Wikipedia articles, and *that* would be interesting, if true. I may be overreaching, though, and it's just a form letter like Pharos says.
-- phoebe
phoebe ayers wrote:
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 12:07 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/9/29 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
http://consumerreportingusa.org/wikipedia.htm Who knew that "Wikipedia was hiring website processing specialists"? Not me, that's for sure! Easy money, here we come!
It's nonsense.
I know that :) The implication I read into it was that they were hiring people to write or post Wikipedia articles, and *that* would be interesting, if true. I may be overreaching, though, and it's just a form letter like Pharos says.
-- phoebe
Shame. Having had to give up work through ill-health, the idea of being paid for what I already do seems attractive, but my experience is that there are "work from home" scams out there where one pays up front for "training" on the promise of work, which either never arrives or when you return it is found to be "not up to standard" and you don't get paid for it.
Since this type of work is not considered "employment" within UK laws, it is largely unregulated and has a poor reputation, and your legal remedies are effectively extinguished by the contract you sign, not that most people would be able to afford to litigate in any event.
On Mon, September 29, 2008 22:12, phoebe ayers wrote:
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 12:07 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/9/29 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
http://consumerreportingusa.org/wikipedia.htm Who knew that "Wikipedia was hiring website processing specialists"? Not me, that's for sure! Easy money, here we come!
It's nonsense.
I know that :) The implication I read into it was that they were hiring people to write or post Wikipedia articles, and *that* would be interesting, if true. I may be overreaching, though, and it's just a form letter like Pharos says.
A quick check (try http://consumerreportingusa.org/ by itself) shows that the site is using the pagename requested *eg. 'wikipedia.htm') to generate which company it wants punters to think is recruiting.
In terms of trademark abuse it would be interesting (but ultimately pointless) to find out. There is 'automated processing' going on as they convert the URL into part of the text, but given that the user is - effectively - entering that name (or whatever other) then they could try to argue that it wasn't them that chose to use 'wikipedia' but the user, with them just re-formatting whatever the user had written.
Alison
On 9/30/08, Alison Wheeler wikimedia@alisonwheeler.com wrote:
A quick check (try http://consumerreportingusa.org/ by itself) shows that the site is using the pagename requested *eg. 'wikipedia.htm') to generate which company it wants punters to think is recruiting.
In terms of trademark abuse it would be interesting (but ultimately pointless) to find out. There is 'automated processing' going on as they convert the URL into part of the text, but given that the user is - effectively - entering that name (or whatever other) then they could try to argue that it wasn't them that chose to use 'wikipedia' but the user, with them just re-formatting whatever the user had written.
Not true.
If I change "wikipedia.htm" to "google.htm" or "myspace.htm" or "youtube.htm" (or any other obscenely popular site I can think of) I get a 404.
This might not prove that there was a conscious decision to exploit the name "wikipedia" but as a logical conclusion it becomes exceedingly likely.
A more convoluted and less plausible explanation would be that an automated process generated a short list based on criteria (unknown to us) which "wikipedia" happens to fulfill.
Possibly litigation-proof but not razor-proof.
—C.W.
2008/9/30 Alison Wheeler wikimedia@alisonwheeler.com:
In terms of trademark abuse it would be interesting (but ultimately pointless) to find out. There is 'automated processing' going on as they convert the URL into part of the text, but given that the user is - effectively - entering that name (or whatever other) then they could try to argue that it wasn't them that chose to use 'wikipedia' but the user, with them just re-formatting whatever the user had written.
Semi-automatic, possibly like the one spoken of in this blog post:
http://www.promotionalcodes.org.uk/750/wtf-coupon-code-for-wikipedia-i-dont-...
- d.
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 10:14 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/9/30 Alison Wheeler wikimedia@alisonwheeler.com:
In terms of trademark abuse it would be interesting (but ultimately pointless) to find out. There is 'automated processing' going on as they convert the URL into part of the text, but given that the user is - effectively - entering that name (or whatever other) then they could try to argue that it wasn't them that chose to use 'wikipedia' but the user, with them just re-formatting whatever the user had written.
Semi-automatic, possibly like the one spoken of in this blog post:
http://www.promotionalcodes.org.uk/750/wtf-coupon-code-for-wikipedia-i-dont-...
- d.
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Thank you David, I'm still laughing at that.
-Chad
PS, I blogged it too: http://anyonecanedit.org/blog/2008/10/wikipedia-just-got-cheaper-to-use/
2008/10/2 Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 10:14 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Semi-automatic, possibly like the one spoken of in this blog post: http://www.promotionalcodes.org.uk/750/wtf-coupon-code-for-wikipedia-i-dont-...
Thank you David, I'm still laughing at that. -Chad PS, I blogged it too: http://anyonecanedit.org/blog/2008/10/wikipedia-just-got-cheaper-to-use/
As predicted!
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/UnNews:Wikimedia_Foundation_to_introduce_paid_e...
- d.
2008/9/29 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
http://consumerreportingusa.org/wikipedia.htm Who knew that "Wikipedia was hiring website processing specialists"? Not me, that's for sure! Easy money, here we come!
Any chance someone can check this out? Seems like a complicated spam farm of sorts.
Phoebe
--
- I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Not spam per se. More a fairly standard if reasonably well done working from home training scam. Not a vast amount we can do about it. They are probably breaking some kind of trading standard laws but well if those kind of laws were enforced online there would be far fewer pyramid schemes.
The name is either because they think wikipedia makes it look kinda respectable or because it is a useful keyword (try typeing wikipedia into ebay sometime).
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 3:26 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/9/29 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
http://consumerreportingusa.org/wikipedia.htm Who knew that "Wikipedia was hiring website processing specialists"? Not me, that's for sure! Easy money, here we come!
Any chance someone can check this out? Seems like a complicated spam farm of sorts.
Phoebe
--
- I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Not spam per se. More a fairly standard if reasonably well done working from home training scam. Not a vast amount we can do about it. They are probably breaking some kind of trading standard laws but well if those kind of laws were enforced online there would be far fewer pyramid schemes.
The name is either because they think wikipedia makes it look kinda respectable or because it is a useful keyword (try typeing wikipedia into ebay sometime).
It looks to me like this is a form letter where they just plug in the names of popular websites. They probably have identical scam letters about Goggle, Youtube, etc. Nowhere does the content of the text refer to anything specific to Wikipedia at all.
Thanks, Pharos
-- geni
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Not spam per se. More a fairly standard if reasonably well done working from home training scam. Not a vast amount we can do about it. They are probably breaking some kind of trading standard laws but well if those kind of laws were enforced online there would be far fewer pyramid schemes.
The WMF has "Wikipedia" trademarked, doesn't it? It looks like a cut and dried case of trademark infringement to me. Whether it's worth doing anything about isn't up to me, but I reckon something could be done if it was wanted. (If memory serves, you have to actively defend trademarks or risk losing them, although I'm not sure if that applies to this kind of infringement - they aren't calling an encyclopaedia "Wikipedia" so it's not making the name generic.)
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