Having a Wiki page can get your business the attention it deserves!
The one thing that builds trust between your company and its potential customers is having its own Wikipedia page. It is the first thing that shows up when someone looks up your company (besides your website of course!) and gives potential customers all the information they might need about your business. Another major plus point of having a Wikipedia page is that it positively influences the search engine optimization (SEO) ranking of your website. Since the Wiki page has backlinks to the company’s website, it makes your company’s website show up higher in Google search results. If these benefits have convinced you to create your own Wiki page, look no further! Here is a step-by-step guide to creating a Wiki page for your business.
Step 1: Creating an account
The first step to creating a Wiki page is creating an account on Wikipedia. After your account is ready, you need to become an autoconfirmed user. These are users that have had their accounts for at least four days and have made a minimum of ten edits (including the ones that might have been deleted by other users). Those who spend time making edits tend to have a higher chance of getting their Wiki page published.
Step 2: Check your eligibility
Before you even get started on writing your Wiki page, it is important to check whether your company is eligible to have one. Your company needs to have a certain level of notability, meaning that it has been referenced in articles or blogs on websites that are significantly well-known, such as major news outlets. These articles should be about you and not just mention your company name in passing. This includes interviews and biographies and even listicles.
Another way to check your eligibility is to use the red link technique. Red links refer to topics for which articles have been requested but not yet written on Wikipedia. So, if your company has been red-linked across various Wikipedia pages, it will have a higher chance of approval. You can check for red links by Googling “site:wikipedia.org” with your brand name in quotation marks.
Step 3: Write your Wiki page
You can begin the writing process by going to Wikipedia’s “writing a page” article and clicking on the Article Wizard. Through the Article Wizard, you will be guided into your personal writing space called the “Sandbox”. Here, you can structure information about your company the way you would typically see on other Wikipedia pages. This can include company history and an overview of the products or services you offer.
When writing your business’s Wiki page, one of the most important things to remember is to be neutral and present yourself as an objective source of information. Wikipedia has strict guidelines on how content should be created, which include disclosing whether you have been paid to write the Wiki page. If your page reads like an advertisement for the company, chances are that it would be flagged as spam, and you might be blocked or banned from creating any more articles.
Step 4: Add citations
Once you have added all the required information to your page, you need to add references to support your claims. There are two types of sources that can be used in a typical Wiki article—primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources are ones that are directly related to an event, such as a research paper for a scientific discovery.
On the other hand, secondary sources are created by trustworthy publications or sources that have a significant following. This can include references to your company in business directories, stock exchange listings, press releases, news articles and even other Wikipedia pages.
Step 5: Submit the page for review
Finally, once you are done with all the steps listed above, it is time to send your page for review. This requires a lot of patience as it can take anywhere from a couple of days to several weeks for the Wikipedia editors to come back to you with edits and suggestions. You may have to make changes based on the editors’ suggestions, such as removing sources that may not be relevant or don’t sound neutral. Once you make the changes, your page will be published for all to see. After that, it is advised that you have more than one person edit and contribute to your page on a regular basis since pages without editing history tend to be deleted.
As of September 8, 2022, there are over 56 million pages on the English language Wikipedia. The website is the biggest encyclopedia in the world, and being featured on it can help you increase brand awareness. However, it is also crucial to remember that since Wikipedia articles are edited by people across the world, having a Wiki page will highlight your company’s shortcomings just as much as it would showcase your achievements. But if you want a piece of the over five billion unique global visitors that the website receives on a monthly basis, getting both your negative and positive sides equally exposed is a risk you will have to take.
Also read:
- What Are the Common SEO Mistakes Startups Should Avoid?
- How to Use Blogs To Generate Leads?
- How to Get Your Business Listed on Google?
- Wikipedia: Finding Neutrality in the Echo Chamber
Header image courtesy of Unsplash
