Wikicompany

Wikicompany is a community built, free-content, worldwide, business directory web site. Its vision of is to serve up-to-date (and reasonably neutral) information about the current business environment.

Wikicompany has been operating since March 2005. We are a community built, free-content, worldwide, business directory web site, licensed under the GNU FDL v1.2 license.

The vision of Wikicompany is to serve up-to-date (and reasonably neutral) information about:
-Company profiles
-Job positions
-Product presentations
-Service-points/stores of a company in a region
-Business events
-Business news
Wikicompany currently contains about 500 company profiles, in 244 sectors, and these numbers are rising each day.
See also the Wikicompany Ideas page for the future plans.

Some commercial ideas are being considered for Wikicompany:
-Creating a partnership with vacancy brokers to use the automated vacancy posting by email functionality.
-Company sponsorships or advertisements
-Web services (so third-party websites/applications can access Wikicompany data)
-Company or product profile coverage on the front page
-Cooperation with sector institutions, schools and governments
-Donations and/or subsidies for feature development and operational maintenance.

The main idea of Wikicompany is to have a free, and much more dynamic alternative to the many other business directory services which can be found on the web (see: Wikicompany:Business_directories).

Making money would be a very nice side-effect, as long as the website quality will be improved by it. Many people have some distrust towards web sites which put advertisers first and readers second (not just in presentation, but also in content).

The challenge for Wikicompany is to find all kinds of interesting ways to empower the online community to help build a better global yellowpage service. Wikicompany is a long-term community project, which will slowly pick-up more readers and (even more important) contributors, just like Wikipedia did.

The main value to Wikicompany readers will be a wealth of business information, free as in beer and speech, which is considered useful for whatever purpose the reader might have. The free content license will also keep the control structure more evenly balanced, as people are free to fork (as has happened with Wikipedia, although mainly in a read-only fashion).

If we go by the popularity of Wikipedia and its sister projects, the outlook is very good for this to be an effecitve model.

Wikicompany’s success will all depend on the continuous improvements to the Wiki content and software, but most important the site’s integrity as it is perceived by readers.

The main pitfalls of this model are lack of interest by editors to add company profiles and other information to the Wiki, help with Wiki vandalism, and other site maintenance tasks.

Our recommendations to others who are looking to use a simialr model are:
-Keep working hard on improving the service everyday, but love what you do.
-Keep the focus on the customer/visitor (ask yourself what could make the service even better?)
-Use a long-term strategy which suits all sides (don’t commercialize too much or too soon)
-Start small (in terms of people and money) and build the business slowly
-Use the web as your main marketing tool, since its much cheaper than traditional media.

wikicompany.org
Jama Poulsen (founder of Wikicompany and DebianLinux.Net): info@wikicompany.org
Wikicompany community: mailinglist@wikicompany.org