By Michael Wood
The role of PR professionals in editing Wikipedia has been a heated topic over the last couple of years, and remains controversial. On one side, volunteer Wikipedia editors believe that PR professionals are too compromised to write from a neutral or independent point of view. On the other side, public relation folks complain that they are shunned from Wikipedia simply for being in a profession that advocates for its clients.
William Comcowich recently took on the topic for CyberAlert, outlining the history of PR and Wikipedia as well as the role of public relation professionals who edit Wikipedia. Comcowich maintained that PR staff should only submit information to editors, not edit content themselves. This preceded an article in the Huffington Post which featured Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales giving advice to PR professionals. “It’s a really bad idea for them to do this because they get caught and it embarrasses their clients,” Wales told the Huff Post.
No one knows this better than Sunshine Sachs, a PR firm whose employees were recently exposed for editing Wikipedia pages of clients. What followed was an onslaught of media about them having a conflict of interest in editing but not addressing the specific edits and whether they were useful for Wikipedia.
It is common for Wikipedia editors to embarrass companies that have a conflict of interest, even if their edits are neutral.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use require anyone receiving compensation for editing on behalf of a client to disclose such conflicts. The purpose is to identify articles for editors to check for neutrality. However, according to PR professionals, the reality is that editors go to the identified articles and place tags on the article in an attempt to shame the company and editor who made the edits.
Editors will likely place tags at the top of articles they believe are written by anyone in the PR profession as this one on Stuart Miller.
Regardless of your position on the subject, the issue is not likely to go away any time soon. Until it is addressed in a manner acceptable to both sides, public relation professionals should adhere to Wikipedia’s best practices for editing. While the Wikipedia community has many best practices, here are a few of mine from the viewpoint of a professional Wikipedia editor.
Check Your Writing Style
When writing a Wikipedia article, you should first become familiar with the writing style and article format. Despite having great writing skills, many PR professionals have trouble adapting to Wikipedia’s writing style. It’s different from standard PR writing and can be difficult to master.
Wikipedia offers many guidelines that will help you, including a manual of style guide that lays out how to title articles, when to use italics, etc.
Examples are your best friend.
When creating a Wikipedia article, I recommend reading a few dozen similar articles before starting your writing. Read older articles, as they better represent the Wikipedia writing style because editors will have polished them over the years.
Pick the best articles as your examples. Do not choose a badly written article and use it as an excuse to incorporate similar information into your article. You will be met by the Wikipedia police who will be quick to point out that “other stuff exists” is no reason to create more of it.
Notability, Notability, Notability
Notability – the topic importance — is about 75% of the battle in getting content accepted into Wikipedia. The other 25% involves writing style (tone, layout, referencing, etc.). If a topic is not notable, there is really nothing you can do to make it notable. Posting a topic that does not meet specific notability guidelines will cause problems for you and your client when it is deleted. And believe me, it will be deleted.
Notability can be a confusing topic. This free guide by the author on Wikipedia Notability is designed to help authors understand what it takes to publish a Wikipedia page.
Be careful when hiring freelance Wikipedia authors. If you’re thinking about hiring a professional Wikipedia author, be wary of posting your project on freelance websites. While these are great places to find freelancers, it also attracts attention from the volunteer editor community. Some editors actually stalk these websites looking for paid editors. They will then destroy the article once it goes live on Wikipedia.
If you do elect to use a freelance website, check out the feedback on those who write Wikipedia articles. Once you decide who to hire, post your assignment privately so that only you and the freelancer can view it. This will protect you from the prying eyes of editors looking to redact the work of paid edits.
Keep it short and simple. I always advise people to keep their article as short as possible. Readers are there to obtain basic information, not read your dissertation. As such, it is often better to leave out things such as awards or anything that could seem promotional. If you have a product, simply state what it is and what it does. No one really cares if you made the Inc. 500 list or that your product took five years to develop.
Wikipedia is not a platform for promotion, but having an article about your company or its product in Wikipedia can help with your promotional efforts.
When in doubt, walk away. As a PR professional, your job is to promote your client in the best way possible. A Wikipedia placement about your company or its products is very much a NICE TO HAVE; it is NOT a MUST HAVE for successful public relations or brand promotion. If you can’t get a Wikipedia page about your client, there are plenty of other authoritative earned media outlets that accept company and product descriptions.
If your organization has “notability,” you play by Wikipedia’s rules, you follow Wikipedia’s writing style, and you work cooperatively with Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, you’ll have a pretty good shot at earning a page in Wikipedia.
Thanks for your post. It’s really hard to successfully edit wikipedia items.
Thanks, Manual.
You are 100% correct about Wikipedia’s terms. What has happened over the years is that so much content has been spammed to the site that the pendulum has swung into a “protectionism” state where all content is now under heavy scrutiny. Even edits that are within guidelines are often looked at as suspicious. You cannot fault volunteer editors as they are taking fire from spammers all the time. I would suggest if you want to get started to check out this link – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse – where you can familiarize yourself with guidelines and talk with other editors. It’s a great place to start.
Thanks again for the comment!