Wikimedia Foundation sends cease and desist letter to WikiPR - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/19/wikimedia-foundation-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-to-wikipr/ <comment><USER2> 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 firstname.lastname@example.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.

<comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER4> > 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%3ASpam#Advertisements_masquerading_as_articles) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organiza...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_\(organizations_and_companies\))

<comment><USER5> > We still have not

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> By sending a cease and desist letter, wikimedia puts the situation squarely in that discussed by the US district court in the Craigslist v. 3Taps case.[1] In rejecting a motion to dismiss, the court in that case found that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which provides criminal and civil penalties for "intentionally access[ing] a computer without authorization or exceed[ing] authorized access" covers accessing a website after being sent a C&D letter by changing IP addresses to evade an IP ban.

While the aforementioned decision was only on a motion to dismiss and in any event was at the trial rather than appellate level, nonetheless if I were wiki-pr's lawyers I'd caution them strongly not to violate the the C&D.

[1] [http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order- Denyi...](http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denying- Renewed-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> That is a well written demand letter. It is reasonably cordial in tone but it is firm and leaves no doubt what the "public relations" company is expected to do and why. My only thought, as a Wikipedian, is WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG? This kind of abuse of Wikipedia's reputation by violating Wikipedia's terms of service has been going on for years, and even if this group of paid meatpuppets is driven from the site, there are still thousands of articles on Wikipedia that are edited for personal advantage by people who desire to publicize their products or services. I basically can't count on any article about a psychological or genetic test on Wikipedia to be neutral, for example, because people are in the business of publishing or distributing those tests, and other people are in the business of administering them. To date, there are still far too few Wikipedia articles that are based on neutral sources such as graduate-level textbooks (preferably used in combination, to detect any bias that might be in one or another of those) and long-form journalism.

The only Wikipedia article I can recommend (barely) so far is one I have done a lot to edit.[1] It still needs a lot of work, as does just about every other one of the 4,381,166 articles on English Wikipedia. Editing every Wikipedia article to that standard takes a lot of work, and most people don't like to do that much work as volunteers without getting paid, but would rather edit to promote their hobby or their pet cause, or edit to promote their business.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification)

<comment><USER8> The WMF legal department, prefer "get it precisely right" to "get it done quickly".

In the more general case, WMF finds it difficult to act on on-wiki editorial problems for Section 230 immunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This statement says that wiki-pr was in performing "paid advocacy." I looked at the Terms of Use for Wikipedia and this company seems to be in violation of some or all of this portion:

Engaging in False Statements, Impersonation, or Fraud

\- Intentionally or knowingly posting content that constitutes libel or defamation;

\- With the intent to deceive, posting content that is false or inaccurate;

\- Attempting to impersonate another user or individual, misrepresenting your affiliation with any individual or entity, or using the username of another user with the intent to deceive; and

\- Engaging in fraud.

Looking at the cease and desist letter, it appears the real issue here is not that they were being paid to create or maintain wikipedia articles, but that the content was not neutral and that editors did not self-declare their status as paid but rather unaffiliated internet users.

<comment><USER9> You're absolutely allowed to be paid to edit articles. Many large organizations employ people for specifically that purpose. However, those who do so legitimately will make it clear both through their username and their userpage that that's what they're doing. The community then takes that into account when determining whether their edits are appropriate.

<comment><USER10> You are absolutely _not_ allowed to be paid to edit articles!

<comment><USER9> Sorry, you're right. I misremembered. You can't directly edit articles in which you have a conflict of interest, however you can (and are encouraged to) request edits on the talk page, provide sources, write drafts, etc. Often these paid editors will have experienced volunteers they collaborate with who work with them to ensure the proposed edits meet Wikipedia's guidelines. It's a sort of hands-off editing by proxy, but there very much are paid editors working on articles about their employers -- they just don't edit the articles directly.

<comment><USER10> Agree completely with this. That is the most transparent way of going about things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11>
        As we have discussed with you previously, we have come to
        the opinion that , based on the evidence we have to date,
        that agent(s) of your company have engaged in sockpuppetry
        or meatpuppetry to, among other things, make it appear as
        if certain articles are written by unbiased sources when
        in fact those articles are authored by Wiki-PR for money.

I was not expecting to see "sockpuppetry" or "meatpuppetry" in a cease and desist! In general I wouldn't expect lawyers to use company-specific jargon in external communications. What are they trying to do?

<comment><USER10> They defined the term before using it. It's quite clear what they meant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This company shows the worse in human beings.

"Let's take one of the best thing human has created to share knowledge and fuck it up and make money while doing it."

<comment><USER13> To be fair, you could say that about most things. That's part of what keeps us creating though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So are there legitimate paid articles on wikipedia? Meaning, someone getting paid to write about some (non-spam, non-marketing) topic like how some open source developers get paid.

<comment><USER15> There are countless employees/owners of various firms editing their own wikipedia articles on company time. As long as they're providing verifiable, true information and actually making the page better no one really cares.

The issue isn't that this company offered to outsource that so much as that they were consistently promising to create fabrications and biased content.

<comment><USER16> If you're paid to improve articles for a company, you "are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question." ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest)) They weren't following that guideline.

Making an article better isn't as big of a deal if have some conflict of interest but aren't directly paid to edit, such as voluntarily editing an article about a product you helped build - you may "make certain kinds of non- controversial edits", like reverting vandalism, correcting typos, and adding references: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Advice_for_editors_who_may_have_a_conflict_of_interest)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't circumvention of terms-of-service a felony these days?

<comment><USER18> No. Lori Drew was acquitted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those who want to get it right: the "bright line" guideline is, never touch an article where you have a conflict of interest. (And if you need "conflict of interest" defined for you, just assume you have one, okay.)

This is not a Wikipedia _rule_ , but it is true that if you are caught violating it the media and public will _crucify_ you. And that's probably bad.

<comment><USER19> Well, it sure is an official guideline [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COI)

<comment><USER10> You confuse guideline with policies. Guidelines have a fair bit if leeway, policies have very little wriggle room. If a policy has wriggle room, it's not been drafted very well :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any current standard for when a company is worthy of having a Wikipedia page?

<comment><USER8> Basically, if a third party hasn't created an article about you then you're probably not famous enough yet ;-)

The typical self-written company page gets people like me putting an {{advert}} tag on it.

<comment><USER7> _The typical self-written company page gets people like me putting an {{advert}} tag on it._

You may want to take a look at the actions of an editor who, undeniably, writes mostly about people and places in the part of the world where he lives. Some of the articles, and especially some of the wikilinks to those articles from other articles, for example the link from "Pork pie" to "Michael Kirk (butcher)"[1] look _a lot_ more promotional than anything I would write about people and places in my part of the world, where there are also a lot of active Wikipedians who write mostly about local topics. Maybe it's just volunteer expression of personal opinion, which perhaps is backed up by opinion in reliable sources, but it's an odd-looking editing pattern.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Kirk_(butcher)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Kirk_\(butcher\))</comment></comment></comment>


Graphql-Up: CLI to create a ready-to-use GraphQL API - <AUTHOR> https://www.graph.cool/graphql-up/ <comment><USER2> This sounds interesting but as someone outside this community, I would appreciate a little more background information. I have no idea what exactly the GraphQL API lets you do, what Apollo or Relay are, or even what language this is all in (guessing Javascript from the npm mention). Just linking some of these project names would be helpful, and some high-level motivation would be nice, like "GraphQL lets you make awesome interactive charts like this" or something.

<comment><USER3> GraphQL is a client->server data query definition language developed by Facebook. There's a lot of tools that can read and write that query language. Apollo and Relay are two different full-featured JS client libraries for making GraphQL queries.

A good place to start reading is [http://graphql.org/](http://graphql.org/) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome way to leverage the schema definition files to set up a super fast server. I see this being really useful for quick prototyping or for hackathons.

<comment><USER5> We did this for the whole schema (in an Erlang port of the GraphQL server). It turns out to work extremely well for our use case, and it seems to fit better to the Erlang model of working with the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> While this is good, I'm astonished that this took so long, especially compared to Ruby On Rails. GraphQL was introduced 2 years ago, in the spring of 2015. And it's taken this long to get a CLI tool that can auto-generate some of the schema/setup?

These last 2 years, a lot of my clients have been asking me, "Should we switch to React/GraphQL?" And I've done one big project with GraphQL, in the spring of 2016. And I was amazed at how much I had to hand code, especially compared to Ruby On Rails.

In 2004, Ruby On Rails was born with these kinds of CLI tools. Indeed, Ruby On Rails pretty much established our modern ideas of how much a framework should do for us.

A CLI for GraphQL certainly makes the React eco-system more competitive with Ruby On Rails, but I am astonished that it took this long.

(PS: I am aware that React and Ruby On Rails are not strictly competitors, since you can use them together to create software/website. Nevertheless, "Should we use Ruby On Rails or React?" is a real question that I've been asked several times over the last few years.)

<comment><USER7> Hi lkrubner

I think it is fair to say that React and RoR are serving the same needs. Obviously the two approaches are very different, mainly because they are from different eras.

In many ways RoR is still ahead compared to React, and ease of getting started + tooling like you mention is one of them.

Expo and create-react-app is making good progress towards making this more seamless and we hope graphql-up with time will be able to solve the last missing piece, namely schema generation and migrations.

If you'd like to chat about RoR vs React/GraphQL and especially wider adoption by agencies and companies my email is firstname.lastname@example.com. Also - let me know if you are going to GraphQL Europe[1] - I'd love to meet.

1) [https://graphql-europe.org/](https://graphql-europe.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I looked at GraphQL..... can someone please explain how extensive join queries are done?

Literally almost every app I ever write, even the simple ones, offload tons of work to the database for joins between a half dozen tables.

I have yet to see a sane answer on how this is possible with GraphQL? How am I supposed to think about performance ... and not just having something overly simple/basic like HERES MAH BLOG... HERES DA COMMENTS!!!!!!

<comment><USER9> GraphQL is not a query language for your database, it's more like a query language for your REST API.

So asking how to do a join in GraphQL is like asking how to do a join in REST. It's not a well-formed question.

The good news is that the sever can expose absolutely anything as a GraphQL query. They're just arbitrary entry-points into the schema. Think of it as like calling a stored procedure. The procedure is an opaque thing as far as the caller is concerned.

<comment><USER10> You are dismissing a valid question and incidentally this is the question that exposes a problem of the graphql-js implementation (specifically the execution module) when the data source is a database (which 90% of the time it is), though it's not a problem of the GraphQL . Of course he can not "well-forme" it since he is just looking into GraphQL. What he is looking for actually is this [https://github.com/stems/join-monster](https://github.com/stems/join- monster) but it's not without it's problems.

PS: My comment does not mean the reference implementation is bad, it's just that it's a reference and good in a lot of cases but not in all. It does not mean you have to use every part of it, you can write your own execution module.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Feels so good to see a demo using fish as the shell.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think this will be a really awesome way for people to get a taste of GraphQL, without needing to write any code up front!

There are already some other tools that will give you a GraphQL API in very little code, but the fact that this one is hosted means you can host a frontend on GitHub pages or something, send it to your friends, and have a basic app going.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's also super easy to embed graphql-up into your own docs & tutorials. Simply add the graphql-up badge as a link and you're tutorial basically comes with a free hosted server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm new to GraphQL and I have been trying to get my friends as excited about it as I'm, the problem has always been the amount of code that they have to up-front before seeing any results, this might change that.

Definitively bookmarked!

<comment><USER7> This is exactly the kind of use case we had in mind. Glad you like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The pricing LOL.. one of these is wrong, if not both.

its $45 for 2GB + 10m requests, and $449 for 10GB + 50m requests. (more expensive per GB or requests..)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for bringing this up. We'll shortly adjust the pricing plan to be more transparent and fair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Damn, between this and sketch + create react native app, it's the week of 1-step-apps.

Is there an easy way to eject into a full blown graph.cool app? It seems you can't take any of your schema and use it as a starting point in graph.cool. From a business perspective, wouldn't that be the point? Perhaps I'm missing something though.

<comment><USER7> Just made a comment on the Expo Sketch thread to that effect. Imo Expo + GraphQL is a killer combo.

To your question (Graphcool co-founder) - Our vision for graphql-up is twofold:

1) Enable you to easily spin up a fresh GraphQL endpoint in your automated tooling. Think ci test servers.

2) Lower the barrier for people new to GraphQL.

I'm especially excited about the second point and looking forward to see how the community will leverage graphql-up to make tutorials and documentation more accessible

<comment><USER15> I get that. So are there no "graduation" strategies to ur main product that you see as useful?

Basically I'm trying to understand how far this takes you and what "up" is missing in comparison to the information you provide to your core product, "cool," to produce schemas. It would be very enticing if you said there is a 1-step solution to graduate your graphql-up server to a full blown graph.cool app. Are there really no useful synergies there? Is it a secret lol?

<comment><USER7> If you need a full blown API you should just sign up to Graphcool from the start :-) We have a generous free plan, so there is really no downside.

I think you are right that it could be useful to be able to import a graphql- up api to graphcool, so that is definitely something we will consider. What we will do for sure is allow you to create a Graphcool project based on a Schema Definition, just like with graphql-up - look for that in the near future.

<comment><USER15> I'm excited!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So the only way to mock the data is to have mutations in your schema and to post the data with these mutations?

Btw cool idea! :)

<comment><USER7> Thanks :-)

Graphcool automatically generates a crud style api based on your schema, so you don't have to specify mutations in the schema.

We'll add the ability to auto-generate mock data, but for now you will have to use mutations to insert some data

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there a way to convert SQL schema to the GraphQL IDL notation?

</comment><comment><USER18> I've always wanted IDL -> stub implementation for graphql... just like FB did with thrift</comment>