[Developers] Invite from Ryan Miller (ninjascience at gmail.com)

[William Pietri]

Robert Cook wrote:
> Now adding the "evil scam" boolean to the "Website" type...

Evil scam? Heck, that's a relationship to a whole set of types. Let me 
know when you get there and I'll pull out my shelf of related books. 
That'd be fun.

Interestingly, the question of what's a scam and what's not is a source 
for a variety of small battles on Wikipedia. A lot of scams work through 
some sort of information asymmetry, and Wikipedia is a big informational 
leveler. For example, take Almeda University:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almeda_University

They sell "life experience" degrees, which in my view is partly a scam 
(for the people who buy them naively) and partly a scam enabler (for 
people who buy them knowingly and use them to get jobs, promotions, and 
the like. So there's a big divergence between what Almeda University 
says about itself and what reputable third parties say about them.

Unfortunately for Almeda's operators, the Wikipedia article about them 
is the second Google hit, and that must be putting a crimp in their 
business. They've spent a fair bit of effort trying to pretty up the 
article, and even issued their very first press release. When they got 
chased off, they advertised on a freelancer site for somebody willing to 
go to the Wikipedia article daily and revert them.

Eventually, they apparently gave up, but I'm sure there's quiet editing 
going on somewhere else to preserve somebody's favorite way of fleecing 
the rubes.

William


-- 
William Pietri - william at scissor.com - +1-415-643-1024
Agile consulting, coaching, and development: http://www.scissor.com/
Use your geek-fu to fight poverty: http://www.mifos.org/