PubWages

Today, October 29, 2011, PubWages has undergone a major house cleaning. We have eliminated hundreds of contributors and thousands of articles. The reason: those contributors were not people, and/or their articles were not original.

To avoid having this happen to you, ask yourself two questions:

1. Am I a person?
2. Is my writing original?

If the answer is “yes” to both questions, then do not fear. Your PubWages account is safe.

However, you might be wondering how it could possibly be that some of our contributors were not people. What would it mean not to be a person? And is there some way you could not be a person and not know about it?

1. What is a person?

The obvious answer to this question, in  internet terms, is that a bot is not a person. But what exactly is a bot? What distinguishes a bot from a non-bot? Is it that a bot is  mechanical? Or is it that it’s not a human?

Many think that the difference between a person and a non-person is all about being human. If you’re human, you’re automatically a person, some think.

This is not true at PubWages. Here at PubWages we recognize the distinction between a human and a person. Some people are not human. And some humans are not people.

For instance, Bow is a person, but not a human. He can think and express himself, and it doesn’t matter to us about his biological makeup. It’s the mind and not the body that it inhabits that makes all the difference. Many animals are people. Not just humans.

From this you might jump to the conclusion that we like biological beings and are opposed to non-biological entities. This isn’t really true. If someone like Data from the Star Trek Next Generation universe wanted to write at PubWages, we would have no problem with that. Even a disembodied intelligence would be accepted here, if it had consciousness.

But here’s the question: how can you tell whether someone has an independent consciousness? The short answer: you can’t, but it’s good enough for us here at PubWages if you can pass the Turing Test.

Suffice it to say that many of our past contributors were unable to pass the Turing test to our satisfaction. This is why they are with us no more.

2. What is Original Content?

Here at PubWages our standards are simple. You don’t have to write Pulitzer Prize winning material. You don’t have to write about rocket science. You can write about whatever you like as long as the material is your own and you have something new to say about it. You can write about something as practical as how to clean your kitchen sink, and if you write reasonably effectively, explaining something that might be of use to someone somewhere, and you didn’t copy it off an existing site, and you have the rights to it, then it’s good enough.

If you quote someone else, give them credit. If you rely on sources, state what they are and offer a link. If you are the author, but you’ve already published it elsewhere, then unpublish it and wait for it to de-index before you publish it here. You have to have the rights to what you write, it should not libel anyone, and it must not be duplicate content.

Stick to these simple rules, and you will be fine.

3. How to get and keep a PubWages Account

From here on in it’s going to be a little harder to get a PubWages account. Before, all you had to do was register. Now we will ask that before you register, you  send us an email telling us about yourself and be able to respond to a return email from us asking a few follow up questions. This will be our way to determine if you are a real person.

We will be using various methods of discovering duplicate content, and one method will be this: we will ask all genuine pubbers to keep an eye out for duplicate content published on PubWages. Since we all have an interest in keeping this a quality site, we will all help to uncover unoriginal writing.

In order for you  to be  accepted as a pubber, we don’t need to know you. You can write under a pseudonym. We don’t need to know whether you are a man or a woman, a chimpanzee or an android, a cat or a dog. What we do need to know is that you can think for yourself and come up with original content. And if you can do that, then you are most certainly welcome here at PubWages!