Originally published August 2015. Rewritten July 2026. Part of the EPR Reputation Management cluster — the procedural walkthrough for engaging Wikipedia compliantly.
Part of the EPR Reputation Management Cluster. Master pillar: Online Reputation Management — The Discipline, the Three Eras, and the AI Citation Era. Wikipedia sub-cluster anchor: The Wikipedia & GEO Hub.
You cannot edit your company's Wikipedia page. You can file a request that a neutral editor makes the change for you. Those are different operations, and the second one works.
Most brands never learn the difference. So they either edit directly and get reverted and flagged, or they give up and leave a wrong entry live for years while the AI engines cite it as fact. This is the procedure for the third option.
For why Wikipedia carries this much weight in AI retrieval, start at Wikipedia Owns Your AI Answer. For what is and isn't permitted, see Can You Edit Your Own Wikipedia Page? This piece is the mechanics.
Step 1 — Disclose before you touch anything
Wikipedia's Terms of Use require anyone paid to contribute to disclose their employer, their client, and their affiliation. The disclosure goes in three places: your Wikipedia user page, the Talk page of every article you engage, and the edit summary of any edit you make.
The standard user-page template is {{Paid}}. The standard Talk-page template is {{Connected contributor (paid)}}. Use them — hand-written disclosures get challenged for being incomplete.
The wording that works names the client, the employer, and the articles: "I am employed by [agency] and am being compensated by [client] to propose changes to [article]." No hedging. Editors read vagueness as evasion.
Do not create an account from a company IP range, and do not run a disclosed account alongside an undisclosed one. Account overlap is how undisclosed operations get caught.
Step 2 — Build the source packet first
An edit request without sources is ignored. An edit request built on brand-owned sources is rejected. You need independent, reliable, secondary coverage — Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, WSJ, FT, NYT, or authoritative trade press.
Screen every intended source against WP:RSP, Wikipedia's perennial sources list, before you cite it. A deprecated outlet sinks the request no matter how accurate the underlying fact is. That list is longer and stranger than most communications teams expect — Wikipedia's Banned List Is Now AI's Banned List covers what's on it and why it matters.
Archive every URL at web.archive.org at the moment you cite it. Sources disappear. Archives don't.
Step 3 — File the Edit Request
On the article's Talk page, open a new section and use the {{Edit COI}} template. The request needs four things and nothing else:
- The exact current text you want changed, quoted.
- The exact replacement text you propose.
- The source supporting the change, with a full citation.
- One sentence on why the change is warranted.
Do not write an argument. Do not write a paragraph about the company. Do not request tone changes. Specific, sourced, factual, small. Requests that read as marketing get declined on sight. Requests that read as corrections get implemented.
Step 4 — For a page that doesn't exist yet: Articles for Creation
New entries go through Articles for Creation, not direct publication. You draft in your own userspace or in the Draft: namespace, then submit for review by an experienced editor.
AfC will reject on notability before it looks at anything else. Notability means significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources — not a funding announcement, not a press release pickup, not a contributor byline. If you cannot assemble ten to fifteen qualifying citations, the draft will be declined, and resubmitting won't change that. Earn the coverage first.
Step 5 — When you get reverted
Reversion is normal and is not a verdict. The escalation ladder, in order:
- Ask the reverting editor on their user Talk page, neutrally, what would make the change acceptable. Most will tell you.
- If the disagreement is factual, take it to the article Talk page and request input from uninvolved editors.
- If it's a sourcing dispute, take it to the Reliable Sources Noticeboard.
- If it's a neutrality dispute, request a third opinion or open a Request for Comment.
What not to do: re-apply the edit. Edit warring triggers page protection, draws community attention to the article, and converts a small problem into a documented one. Legal threats are treated as a policy violation and will get the account blocked.
Step 6 — Set the timeline expectation internally
Edit requests are implemented in days to weeks. AfC review can run months. Wikipedia runs on volunteer attention, not on your campaign calendar.
Brief whoever is asking for the change before you start. The pressure to "just fix it" is what produces the violations.
What changed since 2015
When this piece was first published, Wikipedia editing was an SEO consideration — a page that ranked, a link that helped. The disclosure rules existed and were widely ignored, including by people who described the work openly as a business.
That arbitrage is gone, for two reasons. The community got much better at detecting undisclosed paid editing, and exposure now generates press coverage worse than the original problem. And the stakes moved: Wikipedia is now the highest-weighted source in AI retrieval, which means a flagged or protected entry degrades how five engines describe the brand for months afterward.
The compliant path is now also the only path that works. That is the change.
The Wikipedia & GEO Sub-Cluster
Sub-cluster anchor: The Wikipedia & GEO Hub. Related:
