Why and how should you make a Wiki Page for your business?

Having a Wikipedia article is a really big deal: anything you search online, any name, entity, product, subject, even a random word, and results on Wikipedia is sure to be amongst the first four to five results featured on Google’s SERPs.

Any web designing and development company or an SEO expert will tell you exactly how precious ending up on even the first page of Google is.

You probably don’t even need an SEO expert for that. Consider an example from your own time: how often has it happened that you heard of a topic that you didn’t know anything about, ran to check it on your smartphone, and despite so many websites proclaiming to have knowledge about it, instantly clicked on Wikipedia?

The inexplicable reason for this reflexive reaction is that Wikipedia is, for all intents and purposes, the most authentic source of knowledge. This it has been able to do due to years of vigilantly sticking to its core purpose: providing unbiased and holistic knowledge of almost every topic in the world.

How will a Wikipedia page of your business positively impact your business?

These are the ways in which a Wikipedia page of your business helps it:

• Authenticating your business: Such high credibility associated with Wikipedia, naturally, does wonders for your business. A Wikipedia page can push the visibility of your business, whether physical or online, by leaps and bounds. People who come across subjects having their own Wikipedia article attribute those subjects as high-profile and important, and most importantly, authentic.
• Branding your business: Due to its research paper-like format, it doesn’t matter how obscure a company is, once it has a wiki page of its own, people consider it ‘important enough to land a wiki page’. This helps greatly in the branding process of your business.
  Steps in making a Wikipedia page:It must be noted that making a Wikipedia article is no easy task. It requires a strict adherence to its guidelines and lots of patience. If you are a beginner and wondering what you should do, read up:
  1. Research: Diving headfirst into writing the article is ultimately going to be futile. This is because there are a lot of guidelines and rules that Wikipedia insists on its editors to follow. Read about these guidelines and rules thoroughly, so that your final draft won’t be contested or rejected by the Wiki community
  2. Create account: to contribute to the content body of Wikipedia, in terms of editing other pages or making your own, you need to register an account with Wikipedia.
  3. Start small: Making a Wikipedia article is quite a complicated process, which requires an understanding of Wikipedia’s editing guidelines as well as the format and tone of its contents. So, try to make small edits to existing pages to get the hang of contributing to Wikipedia. Eventually, you will feel ready and confident when you make your first new article.
  4. Collect sources of info: In Wikipedia, referencing is VERY important. Extremely important. You do not want to post information about something just because you feel like it. In Wikipedia, every line has to be verifiable. Therefore, do not think of posting information that has no references anywhere. Therefore, take your time, and collect every bit of information that you can get about your business.
  5.  Make a draft: make the draft according to information that is published out there in reliable sources like newspapers or online journals. Write the copy first into word, and then cut it from there and paste it onto the sandbox, and then format it from there.
  6. Submit for review: once you’re confident that you have done everything you can do to make your Wikipedia approval-worthy, you can submit it for review. It may take time, as there are thousands of articles pending for publishing every day.

  But, once your article has been published, all those long hours of waiting will have meant something. Sure, making a Wiki article is complicated; your article might be rejected, or never published. But trust us, it will be a learning experience that you will be glad to have devoted time to.