How to publish an article on Wikipedia?

Facts only. No emotions.

We recommend checking every word in your text; any adjectives, etc., should be used with extreme caution. Ideally, the entire text should simply convey facts: subject + predicate + adverb = who? what did they do? when? All other words can be removed. So if you have an article, don't give it to a writer or content manager to proofread, but to a programmer or someone with a mathematical mind, who will quickly edit your text to Wikipedia standards. Yes, you probably won't like the final text, but then you can either keep your version and publish it on social media or in magazines, or adapt it to Wikipedia's rules.

Each statement is a confirmed fact with a reference to an independent source. References to social media are not suitable, as it is difficult to verify the independence of judgment in them, so we agreed that references to facts should be to “independent” media, scientific journals, competition and championship websites, and official sources. Honestly, if you plan to publish an article on Wikipedia, it is advisable to start compiling evidence now and strive to gather all the evidence for the future. The process is very similar to that of O1 visas in the US for outstanding individuals. There, you also need to create a portfolio of your achievements, prove with facts and references that you are an outstanding person, and then you may be able to obtain this visa. Similarly, in Wikipedia, you need to prove that the text is about an outstanding person or brand, confirm every word, and then the editors may agree with you that the text is new, worthwhile, and should not be deleted because it is valuable.

Photos/videos must be unique and belong to you. Again, to prove that they belong to you, it must be content that has not been published anywhere else on the internet or whose original source belongs to you. For example, if you have a logo, you must upload it and indicate that it appears on your website and prove that the website was not created yesterday and really belongs to you.

Essentially, these are the three main rules. Depending on the category of the article and the language in which you publish it, additional rules may apply. As a marketing agency, we tend to focus on the subject matter of brand and company pages, so here's what you can do right now to assess your chances of getting published. Find a competitor's brand page in your country or in your language, familiarize yourself with the content of their page, then go from the article to the section where the article is published, to the section of similar companies, see what other brands have published articles in your niche in your language, study their texts, links, and quotes that they use to confirm facts. After reading 5-6 articles, you will have a rough idea of who writes about what and what references are used in your niche to get published, and you will be able to outline a plan of action for gathering facts about your brand and preparing a worthwhile text for publication on your behalf.

In our case, we took the text that the client had, removed everything unnecessary, tried to add a link to confirm each fact in every sentence, and deleted anything we were unsure about. As a result, the text became 10 times smaller in size and 100 times less eloquent than the original.

Uploading and moderation

Next comes the technical formatting of the article. The Wikipedia editor is not the most user-friendly, but it works nonetheless. It has a web interface version, or you can edit the code itself if you know how to do so. It uses basic HTML—links, text formats, and so on.

After a day or two, once you have rewritten everything in the required technical format, created sections, written sentences and paragraphs, confirmed them, added links to primary sources that confirm each sentence or paragraph, and checked that all your links have already been used and all texts refer to sources, you can publish the article.

The article will then be published, but after a short period of time it will appear in a selection for review by section editors, who will review it, check what you have written and what you are referring to.

In our case, the article was rejected several times, and the moderators wrote the reason for the rejection. As a rule, the main reason, and we understand that the easiest reason for the moderator, is to write that the text is of no value. Then you need to communicate with the moderator, prove that you are right, that the article has a place and is valuable.

As a rule, value can be confirmed by the fact that a brand or company has achieved certain successes, i.e., won a competition, received an award, something that has been recognized by other people and can be confirmed.

If there is no such confirmation, it will most likely be difficult to publish an article. If you simply have a brand, you simply sell goods or services, but you are not recognized by anyone and there is no source that can confirm your recognition in your niche, then no matter how hard you try, the moderator will simply say that the article has no value and it will be difficult to argue with him.

Therefore, the key to success is to gather all the necessary information that confirms your recognition in your niche by independent third parties.

If there is at least one reference to confirmation, such as an award, competition, etc., then there is a 90% chance that the article can be published, even if it requires lengthy communication with the moderators.

In our case, communication with the moderators took about one to two months. This does not mean that we communicated with them every day. You write, wait for a response to your messages, write again, wait for another response, and the moderators, most of whom are real people, may have other jobs, and being a moderator is their hobby. Wikipedia also has professional moderators who do only this, but this is not always the case. As a rule, they are experts in the field for which they are responsible on Wiki, but they have a lot of other things to do besides Wikipedia.

Conclusion and advice

After several months of communication, the article was left in place and has now been published for over five years. No one has deleted it, so our main recommendation is to find confirmation of your uniqueness and recognition of your achievements by other people, and then you can write an article about yourself and be published on Wikipedia.