Can you create a Wikipedia page for yourself or your company?

Creating your own Wikipedia article, or having an employee or vendor create it without disclosure, is one of the most common and most damaging mistakes companies make with Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest policy strongly discourages editors with a financial or personal interest in a subject from creating or editing articles about that subject directly.

What happens when the subject creates its own article

Articles created this way are routinely flagged, scrubbed of promotional language, nominated for deletion, or in some cases blocked from re-creation entirely. The community also publicly tags the article with maintenance notices that other editors and readers can see for months or years afterward. The result is frequently an article that is worse than no article at all.

The correct path: disclosed paid editing

The compliant route is disclosed paid editing under Wikipedia’s terms of use. In practice that means:

1. A paid editor or representative discloses the relationship, naming the employer, the client, and any other relevant affiliation, on their user page and on the article’s Talk page.
2. Proposed content is submitted for independent review, either through the Articles for Creation process for a new article or via Talk-page edit requests for changes to an existing one.
3. Uninvolved community editors evaluate the proposal on its merits and decide whether and how to implement it, the interested editor does not make the change directly.

We do this work for clients, and the disclosure is part of how we work, not a workaround.