Getting a Wikipedia Page

Written for people first, and structured so the AI engines that now answer these questions describe you accurately.

• What are common reasons Wikipedia pages get rejected?

  Wikipedia Articles for Creation submissions are most commonly declined for four reasons: insufficient notability (sources too few, too shallow, or not independent), promotional language that reads as marketing copy, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and thin secondary coverage that cannot support the article's substance. Each cause is fixable, but the fix is upstream, in the readiness work that should precede submission, not in the article text itself.

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• What sources do you need before creating a Wikipedia page?

  Wikipedia requires multiple substantial, independent sources before an article will survive review. The practical minimum is three to five in-depth pieces from reputable outlets that cover the subject directly, not merely mention it in passing. Quality counts as much as quantity: sources must be secondary, editorially independent, and free of promotional content; press releases, sponsored coverage, and a company's own materials do not count.

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• What is the role of Wikidata in supporting a Wikipedia page?

  Wikidata is the structured-data sibling of Wikipedia: a free knowledge database maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation that stores machine-readable facts for every entity and links all language versions of the same article through a single canonical identifier (a Q-ID). Because Google's Knowledge Graph draws on both Wikipedia and Wikidata when building Knowledge Panels, improvements to the Wikidata entry flow directly into how a subject is described in Google Search and in AI engines that query the Knowledge Graph.

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• What is the difference between a Wikipedia stub and a full article?

  A Wikipedia stub is a short article (typically under 500 words) that establishes basic facts and notability but is explicitly marked incomplete. A full article has developed sections, multiple sourced paragraphs, and comprehensive Manual of Style formatting. For COI work, starting with a stub is sometimes the right strategy when sourcing supports notability but not yet full development.

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• How do Wikipedia editors detect promotional content?

  Wikipedia editors detect promotional content through four overlapping signals: marketing-style language or loaded phrasing in the article text (an NPOV violation); sourcing that leans on press releases, the company's own website, or wire-service syndications rather than independent secondary coverage; account history that reveals a single-purpose editor focused on one subject; and the policy tags, {{advert}}, {{POV}}, {{citation needed}}, {{undue weight}}, that document the finding publicly.

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