Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2013 April 27

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April 27

Where does money come from for this English tutor website?

The English tutor website in question is called Colingo. Native English speakers can apply for being English teachers on the website and Colingo will pay the teacher $14 for each hour-long class as described here.

It seems anyone on internet is free of charge to join the classes on Colingo as long as you can use Google Hangouts and I didn't see any advertisement on the site, so it's not likely Colingo has income from ads to pay teachers. Excepting Colingo is a charity, where does money come from to pay the teacher? Or there are some catches/tricks on payment behind the scenes? If so, what are the possible catches/tricks?

--Justin545 (talk) 15:48, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Have you tried contacting them? They maybe very open about their funding. If I had to guess, I'd say that they probably get grants from various places. Dismas|^(talk) 18:09, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

• They started up with venture capital money, and they are currently doing some crowdfunding. Their business plan doesn't seem to be publicly available, but in several places they mention a goal of teaching English to technical people from Brazil and other places in South America, so I expect that once they have their system going at full steam they will start charging money for classes. Looie496 (talk) 18:29, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

(ec) As it says on their site, this is only a "beta" service...they are testing it prior to a proper launch of a widespread service. So it's free *NOW* - but whether it'll still be free when they've worked all the kinks out of it is anyone's guess. Also, they might be planning on eventually using advertising to get income, or selling some kind of data about it's subscribers and getting revenue like that...they probably won't actually start getting money from those kinds of streams until the service is ready for a mainstream launch. SteveBaker (talk) 18:31, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I was bothered by the question somewhat and I am very satisfied with your answers now, just a few hours after the question was posted. I have got many helps from this Reference desk for years. Thank you for all your efforts to solve my question (and for all people who had tried to help me on this desk) I am very appreciated it! --Justin545 (talk) 21:19, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Maidenform

First, let me say that I am 80 years old and don't really know what I am doing.

I added some information to the Maidenform article as follows:

“I dreamed that I went ……….. in my Maidenform Bra”

This very successful advertising campaign was originated by Harry Trenner and his wife Florence Shapiro Trenner. Harry Trenner was, at that time, working for the William Weintrob Advertising Agency in New York City and Maidenform was one of his accounts. They both would tell the story that they were sitting around the kitchen table after dinner in their home in the Wykagyl Park section of New Rochelle, New York. They hit on the idea for the ad and Harry took it to the agency which expanded it and showed Maidenform.

I then got a "Cite" Error. I have no idea what to do. Neither am I sure that I can even get back to this site. I would appreciate your making any corrections to the Maidenform site. I am probably the only person alive who knows the story and most certainly the only one interested in adding this to Wikipedia's knowledge base.

Thank you for your assistance.

Jerome Greenberg — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jerrymyra (talk • contribs) 18:54, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your contribution. I hope you don't mind that I've added a title above and clarified that the edit you made was to the Maidenform article. Wikipedia policy requires that information be verifiable, so it would help if you could find some published article on the advert. I'll remove the "cite error". Dbfirs 19:13, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I hope you're not telling us that it's solely because you're 80 that you don't know what you're doing. I'm almost 2 decades short of that and I already have the "no idea what I'm doing" syndrome much of the time. Fun, isn't it. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 02:58, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Think of the bright side: We're no longer too young to die.

I do recall those Maidenform ads. I think they were strictly in printed media, as they were considered too "intimate" for TV. (Times have changed since then.) They also tended to get parodied. There are a gazillion examples of those print ads in google images. This is probably typical:[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:11, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

I sympathize with your situation - Wikipedia's rules are that no matter how expert you are on a subject, your story is not directly usable because of our rules about verification and referencing. I have a similar problem with the CD-ROM article. I was on the team that invented the CD-ROM and pressed the first ever disks. However, no matter that I know a ton of interesting information on that creation story, none of it was ever written down or published at the time - so I can't contribute much to that article because nothing I say can be verified. That means that this information will probably die when the last of our team members kicks the bucket...which seems rather sad.

This rule may seem stupid on the face of it - but the problem here is that we don't know for sure that anyone here is who they say they are, or that they are telling us the truth and that their memories are not faulty. With so many vandals and other miscreants here, it's simply impossible to know who knows what about what. So we fall back on the rule that everything we say of a factual nature that is not blindingly obvious (like "The Sky is Blue") has to be backed up with verifiable reference sources.

So, yeah, no matter whether you were the guy who did all of this stuff or not - your story is highly likely to be deleted if you add it into the article under the WP:V rule. The best I can suggest (and what I did in the CD-ROM case) is to relate your story in the associated "Talk:" page for that article. This may be able to help other editors to track down print references for what you say - and may also help them to see what kind of information they should be looking for.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:31, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Ridiculous. There's absolutely no reason for the interesting information on the creation of CD-ROMs to die off; it just can't be put directly into WP as it would be unverifiable. Have someone from Popular Mechanics interview you, I'll quote you, and there we go. Or even just put it on your website. It might not pass muster as a WP:RS, but the information would still exist. Not being on WP =/= gone forever. Matt Deres (talk) 03:08, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

Steve, I beg you to write down what you know, and get it onto a web page somewhere. Let's not lose that information, Wikipedia is not the only place to write cool stuff. --Lgriot (talk) 13:24, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

Talk:CD-ROM#First_computer_CD-ROM...pretty much says it all. SteveBaker (talk) 15:05, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

Copy of the image I'm looking for

I am looking for an image on Wikipedia. I drew my own version of the image, and I am thinking about uploading it on here. I am not sure if I am gonna go through with it, but I just need to know if I am allowed. If I'm not, it's okay. If you can find the original image, just show it to me.--68.186.238.19 (talk) 19:46, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

How are we supposed to know what image you're talking about? You haven't told us! You haven't even hinted at what article it might relate to. Dismas|^(talk) 20:20, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia (or, more strictly, WikiCommons) is happy to have you upload your own drawings for use in Wikipedia articles - providing you give them an appropriate "free" license and providing they meet a few other basic criteria. Whether your drawing is actually appropriate for an article is another matter. SteveBaker (talk) 20:43, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, if the image is a drawn-by-hand copy of a copyrighted image, it would probably be a copyright violation. I'm not sure that is the implication here, but the wording suggests it. Looie496 (talk) 00:02, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

1) If you uploaded an image here, you did so under another IP address or username. If you cannot advise us what IP address or user name to search under we cannot find that upload. 2) If you did not actually finish uploading an image here or at wikimedia we cannot find anything you were working on that was not saved. You'll have to start over. μηδείς (talk) 00:06, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

If you know what date-range you uploaded it on, you could check the upload log special page to see if it is there. CS Miller (talk) 21:42, 30 April 2013 (UTC)