Although anyone can write on Bizwiki, all entries are held for approval by editors and many have to be edited by the editorial team before being published. Submissions are usually reviewed on a “first come, first served” basis but that doesn’t mean they are published that way.

If you want to ensure your Bizwiki submission, be it a new listing or a revision to an existing listing, is approved quickly it helps to present the editor with little or nothing to correct.

Bizwiki is a user generated business directory. This means that YOU can write on this site. As a business owner or manager the ability to submit your company, free of charge, and add to and update your Bizwiki business record gives you the opportunity to go far beyond the standard directory style listing or phone book entry.

We want Bizwiki users to be able to find out all about your company and so we are offering companies the opportunity to add a wide range of information about their company’s products, brands, specialities, areas of expertise, geographic locations they serve, awards they’ve won, associations they belong to, special mentions and so on.

The online news has been buzzing with the story of a US college student’s “Wikipedia Scanner” as reported in Wired, BBC and numerous other places.

No wonder it’s getting attention. The tool lets you see who is really editing Wikipedia pages, and shows clearly what many in the web community have known or suspected for some time - in addition to the outright and very obvious problems of spam and articles being defaced, Wikipedia’s open editing policies have also allowed company owners and corporate as well as government spin-doctors to quietly remove any references they don’t want published and ever so softly insert their own versions.

Why include reviews?

Bizwiki is dedicated to collecting and publishing business information rather than opinion, and the question of whether to include review functionality at all was debated early on in the project.

Our conclusion was that in some cases our visitors will want to know other peoples’ experiences with a business more than anything else, so we decided to add reviews as an alternative place for users to share opinions that would otherwise inevitably filter through into the business information.

After all, you can’t give users the right to edit the pages of a site and not expect them to want to express their views and opinions!

In answer to one of the frequent questions we have received during the process of building and planning the site, Bizwiki is planned to grow into an international directory of business.

We are starting with businesses in the United Kingdom, where most of our staff are based, but obviously the UK is not the only country that could benefit from an open directory for businesses. Versions of Bizwiki are planned for the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand over the next year.

Bizwiki is now live to the public as a beta! A lot of work remains to be done, and the team is feverishly slaving away on the full version of the site, but in the meantime we’ve opened it up for people to have a look around. Please feel free to sign up, look around, try it out and comment on absolutely anything! If you come across a serious error or problem on the site, feel free to report it.

I think the best description of the technical team behind Bizwiki is ‘Nervously Proud’. Imagine a new father outside a maternity ward, waiting to hear whether all the fingers and toes arrived with the main package, and you probably have it in a nutshell.

But most importantly, welcome to the Bizwiki Beta, a taste of what’s to come in the world of online business!

This is the first post, so perhaps the best start would be to offer an introduction. This is the official blog for Bizwiki, a user edited site for businesses, companies and organisations that we hope will grow into one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive business directories on the web.

That is quite a challenge, and in order to accomplish it we are inviting users, business owners, company managers, consumers, clients and customers to get involved and increase the information available for everyone to use.