Wikipedia For Marketers: The Last Word

SHIFT Communications gets Wikipedia. The holy waters of neutrality. The feverish protection against marketers. The religious fanaticism for verification. They even acknowledge a history of misbehavior by marketers, something not many are willing to swallow.

And it’s true that as an industry we’ve done terrible things to Wikipedia. We’ve censored content, posted advert and introduced bias. In the headlines you see complex conspiracies exposed, but Wikipedia deals with our inadequacies every day.

We spam external links because we didn’t know about Wikipedia’s rules on official links. We create articles on companies that haven’t earned them because we didn’t read Wikipedia’s criteria for notability of companies. We edit anonymously, even though Wikipedia urges us to disclose our identity.

Editing Wikipedia is easy and tempting, but being a good Wikipedian is hard.

It’s about time we take up the challenge. We can’t improve Wikipedia with a hands-off policy like SHIFT’s, nor with this form of a hands-on policy nor by pushing for broader editing privileges we haven’t earned. We can atone for marketers’ past misdeeds by becoming students, creating experts and making Wikipedia a better place because we were there.

Too Big to Ignore
Wikipedia is the sixth largest website on Alexa. It’s been ranked as the most influential website in the world. Articles from the site top 96.6% of Google searches. According to data from the Pew Internet & American Life survey, about 25 percent of Wikipedia readers have post-graduate degrees and 56 percent of adult internet users read Wikipedia. No social media platform has more educated, adult, online readers than Wikipedia. The first thing we can do to make it up to Wikipedia, is give it the respect, time and attention it deserves.

Why It’s Hard
In a world accustomed to 140 character answers and 500 word DIY (do-it-yourself) blog posts, Wikipedia’s 200 policies and guidelines are some heavy reading material.

You may be looking for “three quick tips” to become an overnight Wikipedian, but the only golden rule you’ll ever get is “it depends.”

Wikipedia is complicated for good reasons – but then again, there are plain and simple guides like this one, which is only read 15 times a month. Wikipedians have spent a lot of time putting together instructions for us. It’s about time we read them.

What Everyone Should Know
As long as you’re civil, patient, non-argumentative and don’t engage in canvassing or votestacking, Talk pages and noticeboards will always be safe.

There are a few things everyone should know and be comfortable doing themselves.

• Request edits. Instead of editing articles directly, use {{request edit}} on the Talk page to request a neutral editor to evaluate your proposed edits and implement them on your behalf.

• Discuss it. Even volunteer editors are encouraged to discuss controversial issues on the Talk page before making edits.

• Ask Questions: The COI Noticeboard isn’t just a place to report bad actors. The COI guideline actually encourages you to ask questions there. There’s also a new Paid Editor Help Page I started as part of Wikiproject Cooperation.

• Grammar and Facts (with exceptions): You’re allowed to make grammatical fixes, revert vandalism, and make certain factual corrections, but be careful, many Wikipedians feel this is a slippery slope.

• Disclosure: Disclose your identity on your user page and on every page you edit, but if the username itself is named after your company, you’ll be banned for violating username policy.

Drawing the Line
Every SEO, digital marketing or PR professional or firm needs to decide what they can comfortably do themselves, without putting reputations at risk, and where to draw the line.

Following the advice above you can flag issues, make corrections, fix grammar, and update information, but, volunteer contributors won’t create an article on your behalf or make one that is substantially more complete. That’s where I suggest most draw the line, unless you’re willing to make a large, long-term commitment to earning your Wikipedia stripes.

Uploading images, creating company information boxes, handling tricky ethical situations, and making compliant content belongs in the hands of an expert that can reflect on case stories of criticized paid editing, consult on copyright rules and follow content guidelines.

Just like companies trust knowledgeable SEO firms to avoid blackhat SEO, companies need to have experts they can trust to be a guardian of ethics. I have no monopoly on this knowledge.

Continue reading here: Cut the PR Agency? Are You *Sure* About That?

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