Account used to create paid corporate entries shut down
The Wikipedia account of a business selling its services in creating Wikipedia articles was blocked by Jimbo Wales, after a truce over the ethical concerns involved broke down. User:MyWikiBiz has been blocked indefinitely, and Wales deleted two of the articles created as a result.
The company MyWikiBiz.com, the brainchild of Pennsylvania marketer Gregory Kohs, announced in August that it was offering to create Wikipedia articles for companies, at prices ranging from $49 to $99 (see archived story). This caught Wales's attention, leading him to block MyWikiBiz temporarily. He unblocked the account after a phone conversation in which they discussed the possibility of Kohs "creating" articles by posting them on his own website, licensed under the GFDL. Uninvolved Wikipedia editors could then decide independently whether to transfer the articles over.
The following week, MyWikiBiz was blocked for a week after leaving comments advertising his services on Articles for deletion discussions (the comments were followed by emoticons, and Kohs says they were tongue-in-cheek). A request for arbitration was also made by Cyde, who observed that MyWikiBiz was also actively nominating articles about businesses for deletion, raising the possibility of a different kind of conflict of interest. The Arbitration Committee rejected the case, however, and Wales suggested that it was premature, noting that the conflict of interest policy was still evolving.
In September, an article was created about MyWikiBiz.com (not by Kohs, however), leading inevitably to a debate over whether to delete that. MyWikiBiz did not create any more articles directly, although at least one was created after being posted on his website.