How To Get Your Wikipedia Article Approved

Having a high-quality Wikipedia page for you or your brand is so important for your online reputation. Wikipedia, a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, is considered a high-authority website. In the world of the internet, a Wikipedia page will give you online credibility and visibility, and help you rank highly in search engine results. A Wiki page can mean the difference between success and failure for your brand.

How Long Does It Take To Get Approved?

If you want to create a Wikipedia page, there is an approval process that you have to go through. It could take anywhere from 3-6 months for the Wikipedia editors to evaluate your article. Due to the lengthy time investment, you want to make sure you go through each step carefully to improve your chances of approval.

What to Know About Wikipedia’s Guidelines

Here’s why most articles do not get published:

• Too promotional. Wikipedia aims to be as unbiased as possible, so your article needs to be written in a neutral, almost dry tone free of any opinion. Just state the facts. 
• Conflict of interest.  Creating a Wikipedia page about yourself, your own business, or other close relations is strongly discouraged. Even if you write in an unbiased way, Wikipedia will assume a tendency towards bias.
• Lack of citations. Citing sources is key to Wikipedia page creation. Without proper citation of outside sources, the article would have no credibility.
• No reliable sources. Everything you state in the article has to come from an outside reliable source, such as news articles, books, press releases, and web pages that are about you but not published by you.
• Self-published sources. Not only do you have to cite your information, but you can not cite yourself. If you are writing a Wikipedia article about yourself and you claim a fact, the source can not come from a blog post you have written. The source has to come from someone else in order to be credible.
• Content already exists. Always do a quick Google search to double-check that the article you want to create does not already exist. If the page exists, you can edit what is there. If it does not exist, the term will come up as a red link in Wikipedia.
• Lack of notability. Wikipedia decides which subjects are noteworthy based on a few different factors. Subjects must have significant coverage and information from reliable, secondary sources. The subject should also have a long-lasting impact that surpasses a current event or news story.

Step-By-Step Guide on Getting Yor Wikipedia Article Approved

Step 1. Make sure your subject is notable, eligible, and doesn’t already have a Wikipedia page written about it.

Step 2. Create a Wikipedia account.

Step 3. Edit pre-existing articles. This will help you build credibility with Wikipedia before you make your own page.

Step 4. Collect all of your sources and create an outline for the information you are presenting. All information must be backed by reliable, third-party sources, so make sure to cite everything.

Step 5. Start writing a draft of your article. Remember to write in an impartial and unbiased manner. Just state the facts.

Step 6. Once you are done writing, use the Wikipedia Article Wizard to upload your draft. It is a good idea to proofread a couple of times before you submit your work. You can get someone else to check it over as well.

Step 7. Proofread your document, then submit the article to Wikipedia. You will have to wait a few months before you hear back from the editors.

Step 8. Make edits if your article gets rejected. Resubmit once you have made improvements. This may happen a couple of times before your article gets approved, so remember to be patient with the process.

Step 9. Once your article has been published, you still have work to do. Continually monitor your Wikipedia article to make sure all of the information is accurate.

Helpful Tips:

• Don’t rush through the process of writing the article. You want to approach this as if you were writing an academic paper. Take the time to lay out all of the information and cite everything carefully. The higher quality your article is before you submit it for review, the fewer edits you will have to go through, and the quicker it will get published.
• If you are stuck in the information outline or writing process, take a look at other similar Wikipedia articles to get an idea of how to write it. If you are a business owner, look up businesses on Wikipedia that are similar to yours.
• Some Wikipedia users engage in what is known as ‘Wikipedia vandalism‘. This means that they will edit articles in a malicious manner. That is why you should check your article every so often to make sure this hasn’t happened to you.

In Closing:

Creating a Wikipedia page is a lengthy process, and can be especially challenging if you have never made one before. It can be hard to know whether you qualify for an article, how to write in an unbiased way, and how to properly cite all of your sources.If you have no experience with Wikipedia, it could be worth it to invest in a Wikipedia specialist who can help you through the process. They can help you create and delete Wikipedia pages, support you against libel and privacy invasions, and work with you to create a Wikipedia page today.