How to Create a Wikipedia Page for Your Company: Complete Guide

How can you get a Wikipedia page for your company? When is the right time to create a Wikipedia page for your business? How can you create one without risking deletion?

In this article, I will answer these questions, whether you want to do it yourself or outsource the service.

I draw on my experience from helping many company leaders or communication managers create or update their company’s Wikipedia page: Naos (cosmetic laboratory), Satelia (e-health startup), Colis Privé (transportation), CMA-CGM (logistics), dstny (telecommunications), ilek (electricity), etc.

Prerequisites: Evaluate your Company’s Notability According to Wikipedia’s Criteria

It’s very common for us at Wikiconsult to receive messages like this:

In this message, the leader might imply that because their company is 7 years old, it should have a Wikipedia page.

However, the fact that a company is 7 years old (or even 50 or 100 years old) is not a valid criterion for creating a Wikipedia page.

There are both general criteria for justifying a page about a subject, and specific criteria for businesses.

🚨 Before you start creating your page, you need to make sure you meet these criteria! Otherwise, your page might be deleted (or never published), and it will be even harder to get it back online once you do meet the criteria.

Specific Criteria for Companies

Here are the 2 criteria defined by Wikipedia to justify the creation of a page for a business:

You will need to conduct some research to see if the business in question meets these criteria.

Here are some examples of rankings that can count:

• Forbes Global 2000
• Fortune 500
• FT 1000

General Criteria

The company doesn’t tick the specific criteria? Take a look at the general criteria.

There must be at least 2 publications:

• in national AND generalist media: The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, BBC News, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Sky News, The Independent, Financial Times, ITV News, etc. ;
• focused solely on one company (not multiple companies);
• long enough ;
• that are born of investigation and are not simply interviews with executives, or statements about the industry in which the company operates;
• at least 2 years apart.

To identify these, you can use Google News, Google Scholar, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (for the United States) or the INA directory (for France), or contact the PR agency that handles the company’s press relations (or the internal point of contact).

Source: Wikipedia – Notability

💡 If you’d prefer to delegate this work, I can also conduct a notoriety audit for you. This will help you determine if you are eligible for a Wikipedia page and provide an assessment of the quality of your press relations and online reputation. Contact me.

Check if Your Wikipedia Page Has Ever Been Created

If someone has created a page for this company in the past, and it was deleted, it will be logged on Wikipedia.

You need to check if this has happened, because in that case, you will have to follow a different process to recreate the page: a page restoration request.

To do this, go to Wikipedia’s main public logs, and type the name of the company in question in “Target”, then click on “Show” (warning: The image below displays the interface of the main logs in the French version of Wikipedia).

Write a Draft That Complies with Content and Format Guidelines

If the page has never been created, you can start creating the future page.

Access your draft on Wikipedia, and take inspiration from a page considered high-quality by Wikipedia editors. For example, the page for BAE Systems, a British aerospace company.

Here are the 5 most important things to keep in mind at this stage (and the most often overlooked)):

1. every piece of information added must be sourced from outside the company;
2. the tone must be as neutral as possible, without superlatives (have someone proofread it);
3. avoid lists and copywriting, adopt an encyclopaedic tone;
4. at the end of the article, add relevant portals and categories;
5. nsert an external link to the company’s website in the infobox and in the external links section at the end of the article, to optimize your SEO, even though Wikipedia links are no-follow.

Add Your Company’s Logo

All images on Wikipedia must first be uploaded to a third-party site: Wikimedia Commons. You must also follow strict copyright rules: you can only upload photos you took yourself and own the rights to. You must also publish them under a free license.

For logos, there’s another way to add them (for the French version of Wikipedia):

• go to this page;
• choose your file ;
• give it a name;
• click “Upload”.

You need to do this on the same day you publish the page, once it’s finalized, otherwise it will be deleted.

You can then insert the logo in the page’s infobox by typing its name in the dedicated box.

Submit Your Draft for Review or Publish It

Once your page is finalized, you have two options:

• publish it directly by clicking “Publish my draft”;
• have it reviewed by Wikipedia volunteers, who will decide whether to approve it and offer recommendations for improvement.

🚨 Even if you publish it directly, it could be quickly deleted if it doesn’t meet Wikipedia’s expectations. This is especially likely if you submit it with a new Wikipedia account or one with few contributions.

That’s why it’s recommended to submit it for review, especially if you’ve recently created your Wikipedia account or never created a page from scratch before.

At Wikiconsult, we have created dozens of Wikipedia pages, so we publish pages directly.

Declare the Context of Your Contribution on Wikipedia

Did you write the page for your own company as an executive, employee, intern, or apprentice? Or for someone close to you or a client?

In that case, you must be transparent and disclose your connection with the company for which you created the article.

You can do this on the talk page of the newly created page, in the edit summary (right before publishing the page, there’s a section for this), or on your profile.

At Wikiconsult, we do this in all three places for maximum transparency—this will not harm your page’s future if the notability is well-established and you’ve followed Wikipedia’s content and format expectations.

Set Up Tracking for Your New Page

It’s very common for edits to occur within hours, days, or weeks after a new page is created.

Rather than regularly visiting the page, you can set up an alert to be notified by email whenever an edit is made. To do this, click the star at the top right of the page, and choose a monitoring duration: 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or indefinitely.

You will then receive an email or notification for every new edit on the page, no matter how small.

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I hope you find this information useful, and I wish you successful contributions to the encyclopedia!