Woman who can't seem to settle down to a real job commits to doing 100 jobs for $100 each. That's $10,000, folks -- still poverty level.

I don't even know what to say...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mi01qvxxWQ

She could be a professional electronic sports player and earn much more, like Fatal1ty. He won a lot of consistent prizes which were well over 10,000 bucks each.

Definitely must-see-TV. No idea what to say either...

That's astonishing! I don't know what to say either-er!


I can't make out what he says right after that, at 3:26 or so, right before the girls gone wild cover - anyone? Help?

I recommend everyone watch this video, with the caveat that after about 30sec of listening to her, I started smelling burnt popcorn. Did Jimbo understand his conversation was going direct to Youtube? Why is he hiring someone to do what he's built his empire on getting for free?

I'm not sure, but I think this might be awesome.

For every successful pro gamer, there's bunch of nerds who try and fail. It's just like how not every kid who plays football gets to be as rich as Beckham.

And Jimbo is in fact a professional gamer in the middle of thousands of nerds. He's the only one playing the free encyclopedia game without much effort, and is getting almost all the money, with 10% going to his primary mates on the board.

Stop using his product and it will die. Now convince all the people out there to do the same, but they don't care!

He started talking because she was an attractive young lady, not the usual Wiki-nerd.

$100, less making the video of the call including editing, less international call charges, less cost of Blackberry and computer equipment. In labour and overheads she has already blown the $100, she is working for free.

Jimbo Wales: "Exactly. Yeah, I hate to disappoint, but I'm not Joe Francis, and he is." <self-laugh> <self-laugh>

And, if anyone is wondering, this silly woman met Jimbo in Montreal, at the same time that Tara Hunt (we discussed her here) was in that city. And, lo and behold, this silly Aimee Davison and Tara Hunt appear to be local karaoke pals.

I can't take it.

She seems nice. I think she's just networking. Probably will get bored with this and go to grad school soon.

Jimbo is the man, walking around with $10K checks he can hand out whenever he feels like it.

Ermm... in this particular case, it's a $100 check he's handing out.

My bad. Poor reading comprehension. I was thinking $100 per article x 100 articles.

Just prior to working for Wikia, Inc., Aimee was driven by bus for about 2 hours to a remote house in Sutton, Quebec, where she could play "construction worker" on a house. Lots of "upshorts" video shots, for all the guys in the audience.

Best quote: "What can you say about this big tool you have in your hand?"

Middle aged encyclopedia salesman takes charming young D-list model, young enough to be daughter, to dinner and pays her $100 for the pleasure.
Middle aged encyclopedia salesman gives young model his personal phone number and hires her for a job in 2012!?!
Middle aged encyclopedia salesman encourages young model to call and calls her often to discuss "the job".

Did this $100 come out of his own pocket or is it accounted for to and by Wikia?

Middle aged encyclopedia salesman uses the unpaid labor of NPO workers to promote his own for profit corporation and having his fancy tickled if he can, a girl in every convention town ...

Does the young woman know what scrutiny is likely to happen to her if she succumbs?

It is probably a 'first' for an encyclopedia salesman/founder even to have groupie action. he has probably only got a couple of more years of it left before he has to pay for it outright (or was that Moscow?) and so good luck to him if he can.

Meanwhile his company, Wikia, is funneling visitors to Wikileaks.org where they can read illegally obtained classified documents, and he's not very interested and taking no responsibility.

I wonder if she knows that by working for Wikia, she is indirectly putting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan at risk.

As we've discussed elsewhere, Wikia owns www.wikileaks.com, www.wikileaks.net, and www.wikileaks.us, all of which show the content of Wikileaks.org.

Ok, I´ll say something!
Am I the only person who think this lady looks as if she is on drugs? Or is it normal for young women in North America to act this...."silly"?

Quite normal - we call it "social assimilation training," though most people just call it "high school."

Meanwhile, I was on Yahoo!Answers the other day and noticed that someone had posted a link to a new "Health Care Wikia." I'd been under the impression that although the Wikia staff don't actually check to see what people are doing with their website, at least the small army of Wikiland Forest Creatures™ checked sites like Y!A on a regular basis, would have seen the link, and would have notified the right person(s) at Wikia that this was going on. Inexplicably, they either haven't done so, or the Wikia people think this material is perfectly appropriate - I would have assumed they'd delete it almost instantaneously.

Instead, this has been up for at least three days, and who knows what else is buried in their bewildering number of (mostly moribund) subdomains. Maybe they should pay this woman $100 to help them figure shit like this out.

No, you're not alone, and I'm from there. The video lasts exactly 4:20, and not a second too soon!

I think it is a young person in front of a camera thing - nothing particularly American or female about it, it is universally depressing to see the "Look at me I'm so gingerblonde, duh!" routine acted out.

I admire her spirit. I maintain my admiration even if this project turns out to have been unproductive: variety is the spice of life.

How does Wikia not spot this, obviously written by teenage boy on summer vacation - bring back National Service I say.

Tackiest Q & A:

Q: Can a female dog ejaculate?
A: Im not sure, but i will try to find its clitoris to see if it can be stimulated.

Isn't that a fine example of all that has gone wrong with the apostrophe in the modern world?

He doesn't care. It's free publicity, and "all publicity is good publicity". ( )

Gee, thanks for lowering my IQ, Greg.
Aimee is quite annoying, so I presume she will go far.
(Although I thought this was far more entertaining
than her "Jimbo conversation". On 2nd thought, put
"entertaining" in quotes. )

In the USA we call it "Boot Camp for Troubled Teens," but the kid's parents probably think their precious youngster is inventing the next generation of windowed operating systems in their basement. That's assuming they didn't actually put him up to it themselves...

IMO we have to assume Wikia is either not checking at all, or they only check once every two weeks or every month or so. If that. More likely they don't lift a finger unless someone complains to them directly. So of course I'm not going to complain to them directly...


We should hire her ourselves, to spend 4 or 5 hours going through the List of Wikias to find the ones that are basically nothing but sexual content about little kids (and/or animals). She might not want to upload a Youtube video of that one, though, so there'd be less promotional value for us, I suppose.

Except that she's 30, and a mom. She's also made some of her videos on YT "private", so presumably is reading along.

In the (hopefully unlikely) case that youtube makes http_referer information available to uploaders, I advise disabling it (set network.http.sendRefererHeader to "0" in about:config).


At least the respondent didn't get Greg's goat by writing "it's".

I admire her spirit. But I will lose my admiration if the Wikia project turns out to become reproductive.

Do we have a mole reporting back to the mothership passing messages onto Jimmy Wales who calls anyone has given his 'Midas' touched?

What would be funny is if Jimbo had no idea it was going live. Shame she did not get more out him ... she could have out Marsdened Marsden.


(Note to any prospective dates or golddiggers: a) make sure you grab anything remotely ebay-able when you leave, b) get it all recorded on some digital media, c) upload a copy of /Users/Jimmy_Wales/Library/Mail to Wiki-leaks ... No, hold on, let's think that last one through again. Contact someone here first).

See Jobberwacky

Jon

All That Jazz

After 21 days, I couldn't take it any more, so I e-mailed Gil Penchina, and within an evening, the site was down. We ran a WebCite over it, though.

Gil offered me an unpaid position at Wikia, to help look for crap like that.

I declined his offer.

Excellent find, Somey.

An unpaid position; are you shitting me?

They have two positions on their jobs page that could encompass the task
Community Manager
Director, Product Management

You do realize that these are the sort of people who do not mind being paid, while asking other people to help them in the same enterprise, for free? They don't feel the least guilty about it.

They really are a spectacular example of why the world in general is so fucked up. A very large fraction of people can actually run enterprises in which the underlings who do an important part of the work, are carrying the load and being worn down and finally wiped out-- and yet the people at the top just don't let this state bother them. Human history is filled with it. The people at the top-- the officer's corps or white shirts or "management," or tenured bunch or permanent staff or whatever-- feel that anybody "under" them, and not genetically related to them, might as well be draft animals. Hell, meat animals.

I'm guessing that the CEO didn't offer Greg a position at Wikia, and Greg's 'unpaid position' was more akin to a wiki permission, enabling Greg to be part of their community.

But I'm surprised that the CEO of Wikia offered Greg an unpaid anything. Has he never heard of Greg? A more sensible approach would have been to offer him a very well paid job that requires relocating to San Francisco, knowing he wouldn't accept it for a multitude of reasons. Or offer nothing at all.

He really did. He called it "Employee #31", since I've often referred to the "30 or so" employees of Wikia. (Gil was joking, JayV.)

Gil and I chat by e-mail periodically. I know where he lives, and how much he paid for his house. He at least still (usually) responds to e-mails. Jimbo can't be bothered to do that any more.

Hey, if they'd let you take down entire subdomains, you should have taken it!

I mean, they've supposedly got as many as 150,000 subdomains, and I only found that one by an accident of timing, because someone had just created it when I was looking at the "List of New Wikias" - for some reason I can't quite recall.

Their "Hiring" page is mostly BS, I should add - none of those jobs have "check for inappropriate sexually-oriented content about underage children" in their descriptions, or even anything close. It sure looks like they mostly just goof off all day, from the pictures... nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

They say they want to "develop new products" - what sort of products would those be, pray tell? Are they going to sell Memory Alpha tee-shirts? Maybe one of them will write a book on how a company can make money despite not having a viable revenue stream. They also say they're the "largest user-generated media company" - do they have any valid basis for this claim?

Last but not least, this page suggests that their wikis "cover" the "world's best chocolate chip recipes," which strongly suggests they can't even proofread themselves properly. (Not that anyone here should be surprised at this.) But assuming they actually mean chocolate chip cookies, the "Recipes Wikia" has very few of these, and the link doesn't go to any of them, it goes to the "Recipes" main page. The few recipes they do have aren't properly categorized, and frankly, everyone with working taste buds will tell you that Hershey's Kiss Cookies aren't really "chocolate chip" cookies at all. The search engine is also a mess; typing in "chocolate chip cookies" takes you straight to the main chocolate chip cookie recipe which is obviously taken from the back of a chips bag. If you want an actual list, you have to type in something like "sugar chocolate chip cookies," since there's no specific recipe by that name but sugar is (presumably) common in all such recipes.

Sorry to go on about that, but misleading cookie-related marketing is a huge sore-point with me... and really, if you want to make decent cookies, the absolute last place you'd want to go is Wikia.com.

It continues to amuse me that Stephanie da Silva's recipe collection (which you used to be able to buy on CD from her, dunno if she still does this) is far far better than anything the Recipes Wikia has to offer. Hell, the Route 66 Cookbook I bought in a restaurant in Dwight is a better source of inspiration, and some of its recipes call for a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup.

I routinely get recipe ideas from the Internet; I have never found anything on the Recipes Wikia worth looking at. It doesn't even rise to the level of visibility. I suspect a large part of the problem is that there is no editorial oversight and no meaningful search. Most recipe sites have editors who reject recipes that are either extremely well-known (e.g. off the back of a chip bag) or clearly bad, apply meaningful, useful categories, and offer search engines that at least can group by category and often have ingredient search.

The Wikibooks Cookbook attempts to remedy those problems.

It will fail, however; the underlying MediaWiki platform lacks the necessary intelligence for the application, and Wikibooks doesn't have enough personnel to make up for this effectively.

Somey, you're always so spot-on. They have no basis for this claim, of course. They mention on that same Hiring page that they are a Quantcast Top 100 site, so let's look at that list, shall we?

• #2 - Facebook, definitely user-generated, but would Wikia say "that's not 'media'"?
• #4 - YouTube, is almost exactly "user-generated media", only in (mostly) video form. Because it's owned by Google, does that disqualify it in Wikia's eyes?
• #9 - Wikipedia, run by the Wikimedia Foundation, could arguably be a "user-generated media company", it's simply non-profit.
• #12 - Blogspot and #13 - Blogger, again, are these sister domains disqualified because they're owned by Google?
• #17 - Answers.
• #18 - MySpace, disqualified because Jimbo says it "hurts my eyes".
• #19 - About, seems to be the archetypal "user-generated media company"... they just pay their contributors, that's all.
• #20 - Twitter, is it "media"? I think so.
• #22 - Wordpress.
• #37 - eHow.
• #47 - AssociatedContent, like About, it's just that they pay their contributors.
• #69 - Tumblr.
• #75 - Yelp,

Wikia is down at #87 on the list.

That makes it the largest, I guess.

Back on topic, the aforesaid Tara Hunt interview is here, I think. The low resolution make Jimmy's eyes look beadier and highlight when he checks out her boobs ... its all about how Jimmy and the Wikipedia are defeating nationalism (which is news for me, I thought they were offering a stage for it), creating world peace amongst muppet collectors and leading a fundamental shift in human consciousness.

Wikipedia is an exciting lifestyle, Jimmy name drops Marc Andreesen and Wiki-mason Garret 'SarekOfVulcan' Fitzgerald must be heartbroken ... Mr Wales is only a carpenter not an architect.

I switched off when it got to Wales' take on why Lost was supposedly so good is that it creates a platform for conversations, so it "is good for marketing".

Isn't that why Web 2.0 sucks? Nothing is really being done for its own worth, everything is done to be a marketing tool. It is of course not just Teh InterWeb, but the noughties are really stuck in the "it should only be done if there is a profit in it" mentality.

I have no idea what Lost is about but ... thanks to the Wikipedia ... I don't have to actually watch it in order to engage in dinner conversation about it. Isn't that why Web 2.0 exists?

Is "friend" an euphemism for 'someone she has had sex with'? Tara does seem a little bit frisky and surely real friends know where each other live?

Answer: Golden Acres trailer park in Dunedin, Florida ... a fact that has made it into the Utne Reader website article about Africa being 'The Invisible Continent' on Wikipedia.


Previous related discussion is, here with Jimmy interviewing Tara this time. Isn't that the same table? It is a horrible PR fluff piece with added nervous laughter.


Oxford University Internet specialist Mark Graham that despite more than 8,000 English-language editors sign up every month, “there are more articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.”

Graham goes on to argue, “it is equally conceivable that as peer-produced projects . . . become our primary sources of knowledge, we could begin to see permanent information inequalities.

That's not exactly fair. The trailer park mention didn't "make it into" the article. It was in a comment left by Jonas Rand.

Don't get me all excited like that, Cock-up!