Creating a Wikipedia page can be incredibly challenging, but if done correctly it’s a great way to boost the visibility of a person, a company, or an event.
But it’s not easy to do and takes some practice, even if something or someone is Wikipedia-worthy.
Writing for Wikipedia is akin to writing a college paper. You can’t get by creating marketing or sales copy. It needs to be factual based with source material and citations.
But if you do it correctly, the effort is worth it.
Reasons To Create A Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia is a living online encyclopedia where editors can add their own articles, and add knowledge to existing articles.
Topics cover just about everything from famous people, to history, to inventions; most things you can think about that fall under the common knowledge category can be found on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has 300 different language versions, more than 32.5 million active editors, and an average 600 new articles a day just on the English Wikipedia site alone.
It’s consistently ranked as one of the top 10 websites and one of the most influential websites of all time following Google and Amazon.
It is also one of the most visited websites in the world. For many years it was in the top 10 but with the emergence of China as an internet superpower, it’s dropped in ranking but is still incredibly important, especially in the western world.
- YouTube
- Tmall
- Baidu
- Tencent
- Sohu
- Tmall
- Taobao
- Haosou
- Yahoo
- Jingdong Mall
- Wikipedia
So why is any of that important?
For starters, it’s great for search engine optimization and backlinks.
Search engines like Google look at where backlinks come from and they rank them according to what they call authority, and as you can imagine, Wikipedia has a higher domain authority than most other websites.
If your information is on Wikipedia, Google will recognize the association between your website and Wikipedia and will rank your website higher accordingly.
Should You Create A Wikipedia Page?
Here are a few indicators that this type of content may meet your needs:
- A person or company is “notable.” Wikipedia editors apply what is called a “notability” test to determine if your subject warrants a Wikipedia page.
- If your company has invented something or if your founder has done something important (e.g., an inventor or the first person to fly across the world in a balloon), then your company or founder might be a good candidate.
- You can’t find any information about that person, company or topic on Wikipedia.
- The person or company has invented or developed something revolutionary.
To learn more about what topics Wikipedia considers notable and worthy of inclusion, read Wikipedia’s article on Notability first.
Steps to creating a Wikipedia page
The steps outlined below provide a brief overview of the Wikipedia page creation process.
You’ll find detailed information on Wikipedia’s Help pages as well in the articles and guides
1. Learn About Wikipedia: Before creating any content on Wikipedia, learn about the Wikipedia community and how it works.
The Wikipedia community are a passionate bunch of people and you have to play by their rules.
Learning the ins and outs of being a good Wikipedia citizen will help ensure your page won’t be deleted or challenged after you’ve submitted it for review.
2. Create an account: You must be a registered user to make changes to existing Wikipedia pages and articles, as well as to create your own. Creating an account is easy. You should use your real name and email address.
No matter what, you should answer all questions truthfully. For example, if you have an affiliation with the person or company you are writing about then you should declare it.
3. Start with small edits: As mentioned before, creating an article on Wikipedia is daunting and challenging.
It’s best if you start by editing an already existing page to learn and test your skills before trying to create new content.
By making small changes, you are able to get more familiar with the site’s content management system and build your Wikipedia user profile.
Building your credibility is important.
Once you create an account, every change you make on Wikipedia is recorded on your user page, which anyone can access. The more correct changes you make, the more credibility you have within the community.
With enough editing under your belt, you can become an “auto-confirmed user.” This gives you permission to perform certain restricted functions, such as uploading images and moving pages to the public space.
While if you make successful edits, your credibility increases, making changes that get reverted back also damages your credibility so be careful and don’t just start changing things without thinking.
You can get banned and blocked from Wikipedia all together if you don’t adhere to the rules.
4. Gather all your sources: While you’re feeling your way around Wikipedia, begin gathering source materials for the page or article you want to create. This will save you a huge amount of time once you’re ready to create your page.
Needless to say, sources are tremendously important in Wikipedia.
Remember that Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia and not designed to promote yourself or your product. This means everything on your page needs to be backed up with citations.
Even if you’re a notable inventor, a celebrity or a famous athlete, you can’t simply sit down and write a Wikipedia page based on your experience.
You’ll need verified third-party sources. Printed material such as books, journals, news articles and magazines; online material such as websites and videos to support the information you provide.
Your content must be factual and unbiased. I can’t stress this enough. One of Wikipedia’s essential pillars is that everything is written from a neutral perspective, just like you would find in a history textbook.
This means you are not writing ad copy promoting something or someone. This means you might have to include some facts or sources that you may not want to or don’t put your subject in the best of light.
Emphasizing the views of natural sources is necessary to achieve an unbiased point of view in an article.
One of Wikipedia’s goals is to catalogue information within society, rather than offering a sales directory.
5. Write the copy: After all those other steps, you are finally ready to get down to the writing and posting of your Wikipedia content. You can add your page to the Sandbox, (which is a test area) where you can format it or you can add it to your My Talk page (part of your user account).
Formatting the page using Wikicode or Wiki markup takes a little while to get used to.
It’s a tedious process even if you’re HTML savvy, which I am, so be sure to allow time for this or hire someone to do it for you. You can learn more about Wikicode by reading Wikipedia’s Help Pages.
Wikipedia also has a cheat sheet that you can use and I would suggest you take a look at before trying to format.
Wikipedia also has a number of templates that can make it easier to format. You should check those out before you start.
6. Adding images: You’re only allowed to use images you own or images not subject to copyright. This can be difficult because it means that you can’t just copy and paste images from a website.
7. Submit the page for review: Once your page is complete and error-free, you will need to submit it to Wikipedia for review. This process can take as little as a few days or as long as a few weeks or more to get a response.
It can take some time to get approval. The automated message usually says anywhere from 3 to 6 months, but it usually happens a lot faster. When I submitted my review I got a response within a week.
What Can I Use As a Source?
In determining the type of source –whether print or online – there are three separate, basic characteristics to identify:
- Is this source self-published or not? (eg a company or personal website)
- Is the source a trusted, independent third-party?
- Is this source primary or not? (Remember back in high school when you learned about primary sources?)
Every possible combination of these three traits has been seen in sources on Wikipedia. Any combination of these three traits can produce a source that is usable for some purpose in a Wikipedia article. Identifying these characteristics will help you determine how you can use these sources.
Last Thoughts
Wikipedia is an amazing project and one of humanity’s greatest endeavours.
Think about it.
If humanity is wiped out tomorrow, it is the most comprehensive record ever put together that can show anyone reading who and what we are.
Wikipedia is a great tool for those who know how to use it.
However, posting on Wikipedia is not an easy process and nor should it be, otherwise everybody would be posting all types of random, useless information.
If what you want to post is novel and interesting to the general public and not just about for marketing purposes, then I would highly suggest you take the time to go through the process.
Once you are approved, then the information becomes part of the wider collective of human knowledge and that’s pretty damn cool.
Joel Mark Harris graduated from the Langara School of Journalism in 2007. Joel is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter and producer.
He has ghostwritten numerous books in all types of genres including true life crime, business, memoir, and self help. With over 1,000 blog posts to his name, he has helped hundreds of business owners scale their business and increase their visibility. You can email him at info@ghostwritersandco.com
