Wikipedia

Why Wikipedia Matters

Wikipedia is one of the most used and powerful research tools online. It’s not only read daily by millions of potential investors, employees, job candidates, prospective clients, passionate researchers, would-be scholars, and everyone else, but also gives Google and Amazon what they need to give people what they want.

  • Articles are almost always a top 3 search result.
  • Wikipedia content populates Knowledge Panels.
  • Google’s People Also Ask results pull from Wikipedia.
  • Carousel search results, popular on mobile devices, not only pull data from Wikipedia, but also contain page urls, driving more traffic to the site.
  • Siri, Alexa, and other smart assistants use Wikipedia articles to answer voice searches.

This means that your Wikipedia page is reaching and influencing your market audience, even if they never visit Wikipedia.

How Wikipedia Works

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia and crowdsourced platform. That means there is user generated content and the platform is largely governed by the users themselves. Continued success depends on thousands of engaged Wikipedians keeping pages factual and up-to-date. Each editor has their own passions and biases, which can make editing pages more difficult than sneaking past the Sphinx.

The fate of your page is in the hands of whoever decides to show an interest. For them, your page doesn’t exist to make your organization look good. It exists to give millions of readers a comprehensive, high-level summary of who you are, what you’re doing, and what you’ve done.

Wikipedia For your online reputation (Let’s Do This)

Quick recap:

  • Wikipedia is powerful and influential.
  • It’s definitely affecting your online reputation.
  • It can’t be directly or tightly controlled by your PR and marketing teams.
  • It can be influenced by any person on the planet with access to the Internet.

This means that, when it comes to your online reputation, you may want to:

  • Learn how a brand can interact with Wikipedia, what the limits are, and what the proper channels are to influence change.
  • When appropriate, update your brand’s page(s) with relevant Wikipedia-friendly content.
  • Create new encyclopedic content that improves Wikipedia’s knowledge base about your topic.
  • Understand how to monitor and maintain your brand’s Wikipedia pages over time.
  • Learn what to do when your brand’s Wikipedia page has significant content reversions or is tagged as an issue by the editor community.
  • Learn how to navigate the complicated history of a Wikipedia article.
  • Track and understand how Wikipedia is changing over time and how that impacts your strategic priorities. To learn more about this check out our Wikipedia Chaos Level Report

The best way to accomplish these goals? Work with a partner who has Wikipedia expertise.

Wikipedia for Champions (aka us + you = the winning team)

We help to align Wikipedia pages, SEO goals, and online reputations for some of the largest Fortune 500 companies, international brands and consultancies, and high-profile non-profit organizations.

If you want to know more – and we think you should – give us a call.

Wikipedia for the Knowledge-Hungry (this should be you)

While you wait on the edge of your seat for our meeting, check out a few of our most popular blog posts and our book.

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