Shemspeed CEO in the Daily News for his Wiki work

Making New Yorkers Wiki worthy is netting two Brooklyn guys big bucks.

Record producer Erez Safar, 33, and film maker Aaron Wertheimer, 34, spend their spare time creating citation-heavy Wikipedia entries for clients who pay $300 a pop.

Wikipedia, part of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, prides itself as a no-cost publicly edited site where thousands of users across the world comb the pages flagging bad information.

“A lot of people try to put up a Wikipedia page, but it reads too promotional,” said Safar who recruits customers via his two-month-old site mywikipro.com, Facebook, and word of mouth. He then passes them off to Wertheimer who crafts the articles from his living room in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“A lot of people aren’t Wiki worthy. There are not a lot of articles on them to cite. We turn down a lot of people.,” said Safar who lives in Crown Heights.

So far, the duo has a dozen articles up on Wikipedia, ten more in production and about 100 requests to make more.

Safar thought of the business venture while managing his record label Shemspeed, helping his hip-hop artists keep their Wiki articles up-to-date using links to respectable news sites.

“People would post their pages as promos and not as encylopedia entries,” Safar said. “It will eventually get taken down.”

It takes around two weeks for the pair to post their paid article spending hours researching their subjects after quizzing them on their professional and personal backgrounds.

“If there is no press on them, we say we can’t do it,” Wertheimer said.

Brooklynites who’ve hired the pair say having a problem free Wikipedia article is a new must for growing businesses or budding artists.

Overwhelmed with Wiki rules, Casey Safron, 36, uses the duo to update the article about Animation Block Party, his annual animation film festival run out of Fort Greene. “You have to cite things. Note things. Or these warnings start popping up,” Safron said. “There are all these guidelines and standards that Wikipedia stands by. I have no idea about that.”

A spokesman for Wikimedia didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/wiki-worthy-brooklyn-webpreneurs-cashing-writing-wikipedia-profiles-article-1.1072063#ixzz1tvbvApWu

Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You might also like