Help:Press Releases/January 2008 (draft)

MyWikiBiz sets audacious goal: 265 million pages

Intro

Having acquired the business database once hosted at Centiare.com, MyWikiBiz announces a monumental goal -- that the fledgling site will eventually become a 265-million-page user-generated directory. Established in Pennsylvania in 2006, MyWikiBiz launched a controversial service that authored articles suitable for Wikipedia in exchange for modest payment. The founder of MyWikiBiz rocketed to national exposure with favorable press coverage in the Washington Post, USA Today, Forbes, and a cable television appearance. Wikipedia, though, rejected MyWikiBiz.

So, MyWikiBiz dusted off and created a new Internet home at MyWikiBiz.com for all those people, companies, and organizations that Wikipedia rejects as "non-notable".

Why 265 million?

The United States Census counts nearly 239,000,000 Americans over the age of 15. The Office of Advocacy at the Small Business Administration says there are 24,700,000 businesses (including sole proprietorships) in this country. Finally, LearningToGive.org says there are 1,200,000 non-profit, public-serving organizations (churches, community service providers, etc.) and 400,000 non-profit, member-serving orgs (fraternal and professional associations, trade unions, political committees, etc.) in America.

Add them all up, and you get 265 million.

Wikipedia has decided that only about 1 million of these entities might ever be notable enough for their encyclopedia's pages. All others are regularly (and sometimes rudely) shown the door. MyWikiBiz will welcome these 265 million entities to its pages. As MyWikiBiz founder Gregory Kohs describes, "That's the 'forest'. If Wikipedia's having a problem with a particular 'tree' named ScoreHero.com or the Pittsburgh Bulldogs blocking their view, that's their loss and MyWikiBiz's gain."

New life on MyWikiBiz

Articles in Wikipedia about ScoreHero and the Bulldogs semi-pro baseball team were recently deleted by the Wikipedia community, but their stories take on new life on MyWikiBiz. The site is not intended, nor was it ever intended, to be a neutral encyclopedia. It is currently a 30,000-page directory, similar to the Yellow Pages, Who's Who, or the Wilshire 5000 index, except with the proviso that the subjects of the articles about legal entities are "protected" from abuse and are expected to be authored by their subjects. Says Kohs, "I would be quite surprised to see MyWikiBiz become a comprehensive reference about entities like planets, organic molecules, or Spanish Cardinals of the Catholic Church. However, I would not be surprised to see it become a well-liked directory about entities such as independent record producers, regional pizza franchises, church parishes, logo design firms, webcomics, semi-pro baseball teams, and tax consultants."

Clearly, the opportunity for MyWikiBiz to expand this way far exceeds that of Wikipedia, considering the latter's stringent "notability" standards. But, can MyWikiBiz ever catch the English Wikipedia's two-million-plus page count? "We've already hit 30,000 of them in our year-old effort. Wikipedia only had 19,600 articles in its first year," says Kohs.

About MyWikiBiz

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.