Wikicompany:Wikicompany v Wikipedia

From Wikicompany

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Introduction

This article describes the reasons why the ideas of Wikicompany were not implemented using Wikipedia.

The founder of Wikicompany (Jama Poulsen - User:Walden) believes that the vision of a global business directory by Wiki means can only be achieved by focussing on the business information side, not the world of knowledge as a whole.

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General facts and assumptions

  • There are many more companies in the world than Wikipedia is willing to include.
Most companies are not encyclopedia worthy, since they are too small and insignificant to add real value to Wikipedia.
  • Wikicompany is not about building an encyclopedia, but a service to locate and understand companies and their products and services better.
Links to encyclopedic articles are less important than product/service descriptions, the relation of a company to other companies, sectors, service regions, etc.
  • A more consistent and advanced article layout (and editing process) is essential when presenting one form of knowledge (in this case company profile information).
  • In the end both projects will benefit from each other via:
    • The availability of even more company profile information under a free content license.
    • Making more people interested in contributing to and reading Wiki websites.
    • More MediaWiki software related development, see: http://debianlinux.net/wikicompany/
    • Introduce new ways of using the MediaWiki software to present other fields of information.
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Specific differences

Here is a list of more specific differences between Wikicompany and Wikipedia:

  • The advanced and consistent use of the right-hand info-box:
    • Contact details (web, email, clickable phone numbers, fax numbers)
    • Geo coding of the location of a company
    • Links to company presence information (local shops, local offices, etc.)
    • As a side-effect, the right-hand info-box makes the article text less wide (or more vertical), which makes for easier reading (since the eye-scan line is shorter).
  • More structured article layout:
    • Many of the Wikipedia company profile texts are changed in several ways to make them more readable and consistent with the rest of the company profile articles.
    • Sometimes Wikipedia content is removed (mostly when the artcile goes into too much detail about non-businesses related issues).
  • A lot of attention on geographical representation of business information:
  • Wikicompany only hosts the profiles of active companies. Companies which are no longer active, should be:
    • Redirected to the Defunct article, or
    • If a whole merger took place be, be redirected to the profile of the merger company. Perhaps with some history information of the old article ported over.
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Information duplication

There are several reasons for building a new Wiki website and doing some "data forking" by using the company articles in Wikipedia.

However, to reduce the amount of information duplication, Wikicompany will try to only present the most relevant (from a business perspective) parts of a company profile, and refer to the Wikipedia article for any further information.

The important parts to be included on Wikicompany are:

  • The introduction text
  • The product and service descriptions (or a summary thereof)
  • Subsidiaries, partners, customers, etc.
  • The ownership structure
  • Founding year
  • Meta-information (in the form of tags)

Some examples:


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See also

Retrieved from "http://wikicompany.org/wiki/Wikicompany:Wikicompany_v_Wikipedia"
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