Wikipedia:Advice on writing about your employer

If you came up with this idea on your own, just drop it. Trust me, you're likely to do more harm than good.

If someone else put you up to it, please read WP:BOSS and show it to them, also. They probably don't realise what an impossible task they gave you when they told you to "get us on Wikipedia".

If your organisation genuinely is 'worthy' of a Wikipedia article, someone may one day write one, but that someone should ideally be in no way connected to your organisation. (Yes, that may sound crazy. Most of our articles are written by editors with no particular promotional motive.)

Read also my essay WP:WIKIMARKETING, which explains that, while Wikipedia might seem like a great way to tell the world about your business – and free of charge, to boot! – it really isn't. One of the reasons for that is explained in An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing, so read that, too.

Unlike eg. on LinkedIn, where anyone can set up a 'profile' for their business, here on Wikipedia things work differently. We have a concept we call notability, which doesn't mean being 'big' or 'well known' or 'long-established' or 'leading player' or anything like that. It means that in order to justify an article, a subject must have been 'noted' in multiple secondary sources already. This excludes most of the sort of coverage a typical business would get, such as routine business reporting (product launches, appointments, new locations, new markets, financial results, investment rounds, business awards, M&A, etc.), interviews, and things where someone from the business is commenting on things. You might be surprised how difficult it is to find sources that do count towards notability according to the relevant WP:NCORP guideline.

There are millions upon millions of businesses, charities, associations, government departments, educational institutions, and other organisations in the world. The vast majority of them – and by that I mean literally 99.9% – are not notable by our standards. It's of course possible that your organisation is one of the rare exceptions, but the likelihood of that is vanishingly small. And without evidence of notability, it simply isn't possible to get included in Wikipedia, no matter how much you or your boss may want it.

(And before you say "but I've seen articles with no sources, about much less important companies than ours" etc. – the so-called WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument – please be aware that in the early days of Wikipedia our standards were much more lax, and there are indeed 'legacy articles' with all sorts of issues; however, that does not mean we should be creating more such problems, all new articles must comply with current standards.)

If you're going to plough ahead regardless, then proceed exactly as follows.

Let's say you work for the legendary Acme Corporation. Do not, repeat not, register a user account with the name 'Acme', or 'Acme Corp', or even 'Acme marketing' or 'Acme comms' or 'Acme official' or anything like that. Your username must refer to you as an individual (although it needn't reveal your real name), not to a collective entity like a business, or to a team or department within one, or to a role or function like marcomms. Acceptable names would be 'Jane at Acme' or 'JD372-Acme' or 'Jane Doe 22' or 'GoldiLoxxx' or something else which gives the impression there is a specific, single individual behind it. (And while on that subject, note also that your user account must not be shared with anyone, as Wikipedia accounts are strictly for use by single individual only.)

If you've already registered 'Acme', abandon that account (as in, stop using it) right now, and register a new one. (You can also go to WP:CHU to request a name change, but if you haven't made many edits yet, there's little point; it's easier to just abandon that account.)

If you do go ahead with 'Acme', you will be blocked, and once you're blocked, you will struggle to get unblocked. And even if you manage to do that, it will take time, and you will almost certainly only be unblocked if you agree not to edit about Acme. In other words, pretty much game over.

The above advice assumes you're working for or with Acme. That is taken in the broadest possible sense: you may be an actual employee, or you may be a contractor, or an agency worker, or a consultant, or something else; even an unpaid intern. What matters is that you're writing on behalf of Acme, and taking instructions from them.

This also applies to other similar entities besides your employer. If you're writing about the golf club you're captaining, or a charity or association you're helping to run, or the summer camp you volunteer at, consider yourself 'working for or with' them, and them being your employer for the purposes of this guidance.

It is tempting to give yourself a free pass and think the above doesn't apply to you. It probably does. If unsure, err on the side of caution, and assume it does.

When you're a paid editor, you have a conflict of interest (COI) in the subject you're writing about, and must disclose that, ideally as your very first edit.

It doesn't matter whether you're explicitly paid to edit Wikipedia. The fact that you're writing about your employer makes you automatically a paid editor in our book.

It doesn't even matter if you are actually paid anything at all. We have no way of knowing that. If you're writing about your employer or client, we can reasonably assume you're being paid or otherwise rewarded somehow.

If you own the business you're writing about, or are a non-exec director or trustee or similar, and don't get paid a salary or otherwise compensated, you're still a paid editor, because you have an obvious financial interest in the subject.

Again, it is tempting to think the above doesn't apply to you. Again, it probably does, so err on the side of caution.

You must do one or both of the following:

1. Place the {{paid}} template on your userpage; and/or
2. Place the {{connected contributor (paid)}} on the talk page of every draft and article to which your COI relates

In both cases, you must complete the template with the relevant details. In the first case, you must add the name(s) of your employer or client, so that others can see which articles or drafts this means. In the second case, you must add your own username, so that it is clear to others which editor is disclosing their COI. Both of the template pages linked to above provide instructions for this.

Technically speaking it is also allowed to make the disclosure in an edit summary when you're creating a draft. However, this is by far the least obvious way of doing it, and will be missed by most users looking for such a disclosure.

If you're using the drafting wizard at WP:YFA to create your draft, it offers the option of disclosing a COI, but please note that this is not a permanent disclosure, because it disappears when the draft is accepted as a published article in the encyclopaedia, at which point you will need to make one of the disclosures described above. So you might as well do that from the outset.

First thing to note: 'promotion' is a much broader concept than 'advertising'. It also applies to a much wider range of subjects than you might at first realise. We often hear "but I'm not selling anything", or "we're a not-for-profit", or "we're not promoting anything, we just want to share information". As WP:YESPROMO explains, whenever you're telling the world about yourself or your employer, you are by definition engaging in promotion. Even if you're not using any promotional language, by the fact that you're seeking to spread awareness about your entity you're still promoting. Rewriting the same content in more 'neutral' terms doesn't change the fact that it's still you talking, and that's what makes it inherently promotional.

What you need to do instead is summarise what reliable and independent secondary sources have said, nothing more, and nothing less. The process is succinctly outlined in WP:GOLDENRULE. Follow it exactly, it is the only approach that will produce acceptable content, the necessary references, and the required proof of notability. Any other approach will result in failure.

It is probably difficult to accept that you are not allowed to say what you want about your employer, and must instead limit yourself to summarising what others have said. That's the only deal on offer, though – take it or leave it. (And try to get your boss also to accept this. Good luck with that!)

If you've followed everything up to this point, you should be reasonably safe to create an article draft on your employer.

You absolutely must not attempt to create it directly in the main encyclopaedia. You need to instead create a draft in the Draft: name space, and submit it for review at WP:AFC. (The wizard at WP:YFA will help you do all that.)

There's a good chance your draft won't be accepted at first review; you will be given the reasons why, and you must address them before resubmitting. If you have any questions, you're welcome to ask them at the AfC help desk, just be mindful of the fact that reviewers are all volunteering their time, whereas you're doing this as a paid editor, so there will be a limit to how much help you can get – the reviewers aren't there to do your job for you.

While you're working in the draft space, you may edit the draft freely yourself. However, if and when it is accepted into the encyclopaedia, that's when you must stop editing it yourself (except for straightforward grammar etc. corrections, or to revert obvious vandalism). After that, you may only make edit requests via the article's talk page, or by using the wizard at WP:ERW. Once more, if you're not quite sure whether you are or aren't allowed to make an edit yourself, best to assume you're not – no point in getting yourself blocked now, if you've made it this far!

I've seen the following happen countless times. All the stuff on this page is trying to help you avoid the same fate.

1. You've registered 'Acme' as your username.
2. You haven't bothered to disclose your status as paid editor, or even look into the whole COI issue.
3. You've created a promo piece on your company at User:Acme/sandbox, and submitted it for review. (For extra points, you may have done it using AI, and in a really obvious way to boot. That's an outstanding way to annoy the reviewers. Kudos.)
4. The next thing you know, your sandbox draft is deleted, and you are blocked as an undisclosed paid editor ('UPE') engaged in promotional editing.
5. You appeal against your block, but your appeal is denied on the basis that you're clearly only here to promote your employer, which is against the rules, and you've gone about it in exactly the wrong way. If only you'd known.
6. Undeterred (and with your boss breathing down your neck), you register a new account, 'Ac-me-too', maybe even make the paid-editing-disclosure this time, and submit essentially the same content as what was in the earlier, now-deleted sandbox draft.
7. That account gets blocked as the sockpuppet of the earlier Acme, and the new draft gets deleted as well, on the basis of having been created by a blocked user.
8. If you keep registering more accounts and creating more drafts, and/or asking colleagues to get involved, eventually it will all get to a point where anyone trying to submit a draft or create an article on Acme will be suspected of sockpuppetry and likely blocked on sight. Then, all you've succeeded in doing is to ensure that there will almost certainly never be an article on Acme.

Don't be that person. Your boss will really not be pleased. And this will come up at your next review.