Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia has gone promotional.

Not the site itself, but those using the site to create a profit for themselves.

Founder Jim Wales (known to his “loyal” fans as Jimbo), has always taken a stance that no one can make money from Wikipedia and has vowed to ban anyone who does.

However, Jimbo has created a monster that can no longer be controlled.

The persistence of article spammers fighting with those editors who hate paid editing have caused the accumulation of so many policies and guidelines, that it is almost impossible for someone to create an article unless they have years of experience with editing the site. 

Unfortunately for Jimbo, he no longer sets the policies that are followed on Wikipedia. By design, Wikipedia is set up to run on a consensus basis. This means that policies, rules, and guidelines are implemented or revoked based on what the community of Wikipedia editors feel should be done.

By creating the site this way, Jimbo has painted himself into a corner where he is only a single vote in the Wikipedia community.

Of course he has his loyal followers who cling to his talk page like lap dogs, but the majority of editors do not see him as a credible influence on policy. Citing an admin that I had the pleasure of speaking with about numerous articles that I had written, “Jimbo is not where Wikipedia is evolving.” 

Wikipedia has long been used as a promotional tool. People and companies see it as a social media website where they want to have their profile posted. They know that Wikipedia ranks high in search engines and believe that if they could only get on Wikipedia then they could become more notable.

However, Wikipedia is designed to work in the opposite fashion. People and companies must first become notable by way of being talked about in multiple sources that are credible and independent of the person or company. Once they become notable by Wikipedia standards, they would then qualify to have an “unbiased” and “non-promotional” article written about them.

It is those people who try to spam themselves onto Wikipedia that has caused alarm in the Wikipedia community. The pendulum has swung in the last couple of years from allowing just about anything mentioned in a source to have a Wikipedia article to almost having to send the