How I Get A Wikipedia Editor To Create Me An Approved Page
Having a Wikipedia page about yourself or your company is a milestone that improves your brand equity. And you don’t even need to visit Wikipedia to see that.
Google any notable brand, and you’ll most likely see something like this:
Most of the displayed information comes from Wikipedia and Wikidata.
However, getting a Wikipedia page is tricky. And I’m putting it mildly.
I spent hours researching the official guidelines, tried to reverse-engineer the process from the reviewers’ point of view, and got our brand page approved without doing anything shady:
And despite trying to make the page better gradually, it got flagged and deleted two weeks later.
The problem? Allegedly bad sources and a bias against the SEO industry.
Despite failing to get the page to stick and withstand the review processes, I learned a lot about Wikipedia and creating a brand page.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to create a Wikipedia page from start-to-finish, and how to stand the best chance of getting it approved long-term:
- Check your notability
- Find sources to establish notability
- Create a user page
- Build your reputation
- Create an outline
- Draft your page
- Format, cite and categorize
- Prepare to submit for review
- Adjust and cooperate
- Monitor your entries
Let’s kick this off with the dealbreaker.
1. Check your notability
The most common reason why Wikipedia pages fail the review process is the lack of notability.
And here’s the harsh reality: Your brand is less notable than you think.
I had no doubt about the notability of Ahrefs. We have arguably the most popular SEO toolset and pretty much everyone in the industry has mentioned us at one point or another:
On top of this, our two biggest ‘competitors’ already have Wikipedia pages. So it should be pretty easy to get it for us as well, right?
Well, here’s the outcome of my first article submission:
So, even for us, it took a lot of effort to put together enough good sources to stand a chance at withstanding the notability criteria.
And you already know our results. Some editors thought that it was good enough, and some disregarded most of the sources as not reliable due to the affiliation with the marketing and SEO industry.
So, how do you know what to use as sources?
What notability means for Wikipedia
The notability criteria that apply to companies state that:
An organization is generally considered notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. All content must be verifiable. If no independent, third-party, reliable sources can be found on a topic, then Wikipedia should not have an article on it.
There are quite a few terms that need to be explained further. That’s because even some well-established sources don’t always meet the criteria.
For example, I’m sure you’ve seen many brands with sections like this on their homepage, displaying the logos of well-known websites like Forbes and Entrepreneur:
Final thoughts
I had three goals with this guide:
- Help you understand whether your brand is notable enough for a Wikipedia page.
- Get you through the Wikipedia submission process in the most efficient way.
- Convince you to contribute to Wikipedia regularly.
Of course, the best-case scenario would be to have such a popular and interesting brand that independent contributors would create the page for you. This will likely happen once you hit a certain level of notability.
You might also be wondering about paid services that claim to get you your Wikipedia page. To me, the mere existence of these feels shady, so I haven’t even reviewed them. I had one person reach out to me on social media, claiming to be an editor that would accept my submission. I ignored that, and you should ignore them too.
As you already know, an approved submission can be easily deleted anyway and a sketchy approval would just give reviewers more ammunition. Everything you need to know about assessing your notability is above.
Did I forget to mention anything? Do you have any questions or your own experience regarding branded Wikipedia pages? Ping me on Now Here
