How to Create a Wikipedia Page for an Author or Writer?

Are you a writer yourself, or do you work for a publishing house or agency that handles author communications?

You’ve probably already wondered whether you could create a Wikipedia page for a writer, to give him or her a little more visibility and authority.

I’ll show you step-by-step how, in 7 easy steps.

Evaluate the writer’s reputation according to Wikipedia criteria

🚨 Having written 1, 2, 5 or even 50 books for a publishing house is not a sufficient criterion for inclusion on Wikipedia.

For your page to be permanently online, you need to meet the general and specific criteria for writers.

Here are the criteria specific to writers and other artists of the written word:

It is therefore generally necessary for other media (academic or national mainstream) to have covered your works in sufficient length and detail: simple interviews with you about your work are not enough.

If you don’t check these criteria, you can see if you meet the general notoriety criteria:

• have at least 2 media appearances talking about you within 2 years of each other;
• in general (non-specialized) and national media: the regional daily press does not count ;
• these publications must be all about you (your career, your work) and must have been investigated by journalists: interviews don’t count, nor do your positions on social issues.

ℹ️ There are also specific criteria for works of fiction: sometimes, one of your books may have its own Wikipedia entry, without you necessarily checking off the eligibility criteria.

Create a Wikipedia account

Does the writer meet the specific or general notoriety criteria? If so, you’re ready to create your page!

If you don’t already have one, create an account on Wikipedia, in the language version in which you want to create the page. Just go to Wikipedia and click on “Create an account” in the top right-hand corner.

Just fill in a few details, enter your e-mail address, choose your username and password, and that’s it – your account is created!

Access your draft

There are several ways to create a new page, but I recommend this one: use your draft.

To access your draft, once logged into your account, type this in your browser :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:votrepseudo/Brouillon

Replace “votrepseudo” with the nickname you’ve chosen on Wikipedia. For example, in my case, it’s NDrbs.

This brings you to your draft. Click on “Modify” in the top right-hand corner to start writing in it.

Draw inspiration from a good Wikipedia article about a writer

For a writer’s Wikipedia entry to be published and remain online, it must also be written in Wikipedia’s encyclopedic style and formatting.

To do this, I advise you to take inspiration from an article that has been rated as good quality by the community. These are called “good articles” or “quality articles”. The full list is here.

You could, for example, take inspiration from the page of writer Sarah Trimmer (here in french). Or identify the page of a writer with a quality label, but closer in time or style to the writer whose page you’re building.

I advise you to structure your page in at least 5 parts.

1. Introduction: the longer the article, the longer the introduction.
2. One or more parts: Biography, Works, etc.
3. Notes and references.
4. External links.
5. Categories and portals.

🚨 Every statement (except in the introduction) must be supported by a source. Authors’ personal websites or those of publishing houses are forbidden as they are considered commercial.

You also need to keep your tone as neutral as possible: avoid superlatives.

Don’t forget to :

• add an infobox with a royalty-free photo of the writer ;
• insert internal links to other pages on Wikipedia ;
• insert an external link to the author’s site, to optimize the site’s SEO.

See also: template for creating a Wikipedia article.

Proofread or publish the article

Once you’ve carefully proofread your article (and ideally had it proofread by someone less emotionally attached to the subject), you can move on to the next step, as you wish:

• submit your page for proof-reading: a volunteer on Wikipedia will proof-read your page more or less quickly and tell you what needs to be improved before you can publish. Please note that this is not a freebie, and that it can sometimes take a long time for someone to take an interest in your page;
• publish the writer’s page directly. However, it may be deleted in the hours, days or weeks that follow, if the notoriety criteria are not met, or if the form leaves too much to be desired.

Declare the context of your contribution

Wikipedia’s community rules require you to declare any connection you have with the writer whose page you are creating:

• is it you?
• Is it your partner, someone in your family?
• Is it your customer (if you’re an agent)?
• Is this your author (if you are a publisher)?
• Is it your boss (if you are employed by a company where the author is the director)?
• Etc.

Whatever the nature of your link, you must indicate it in at least one of these 3 places:

• in modification follow-up when the page is put online;
• to the discussion page once the page is online;
• on your Wikipedia user profile.

If you don’t, a large, unsightly red banner may appear on the “Undeclared paid contribution” page, and your account may eventually be blocked.

See also: how to create a Wikipedia article about yourself.

Enable Wikipedia entry tracking

As soon as a page is put online, robots and Wikipedia volunteers come to check its content. You can be notified by e-mail of any changes made to the page: just click on the star at the top right of the page to do so.

This will let you know when changes have been made and, depending on their nature, decide whether or not to intervene again on the page.

It is also at this point that your page may be automatically deleted, or that a debate on admissibility may be launched if the author does not sufficiently meet the notoriety criteria.

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I wish you all the best for your editorial adventures on Wikipedia!