Wikipedia is not a directory and it is not a marketing channel. It is an encyclopaedia written by volunteers who are, quite reasonably, suspicious of anyone whose interest in an article is commercial. Understanding the standard it applies saves a great deal of wasted effort.
What counts as a source
The test is roughly this: has the subject received significant coverage in sources that are reliable, independent, and secondary. Each of those words is doing work.
Independent excludes anything the company had a hand in: press releases, sponsored features, contributed articles, interviews where the company supplied the frame. Reliable excludes outlets with no editorial process. Significant excludes passing mentions, funding-roundup lines and directory entries.
A company can have hundreds of clippings and almost none that count.
Why the shortcuts fail
Paying someone to create an article without disclosure violates the site’s terms, and the community is unusually good at detecting it. The typical outcome is not merely deletion. It is a permanent, publicly visible record of the attempt attached to the company name, which is considerably worse than having no article at all.
The honest path is slower
If the sourcing does not exist yet, the answer is to earn coverage that qualifies, and to revisit in twelve or eighteen months. That is not a satisfying answer for anyone who wanted a page this quarter, but it is the only one that produces an article that survives.
The useful first step is an honest audit: list every piece of coverage, strike everything the company influenced, and see what remains. Most companies find the answer immediately.
Ganesh Sharma
