Wikipedia:Advice for paid editors

This is an essay on paid editing.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

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This page in a nutshell: Tell your employer or client that Wikipedia is not the place for what they're trying to do.

If you have been given a link to this essay and asked to read it, it is likely because you are an employee or PR/marketing contractor who is attempting to create an article on behalf of your company/client/employer.

The primary purpose of this essay is not to advise you on how to maximise your chances of success in this endeavour; because the maximum chances of success are very low. The purpose of this essay is to advise you that what you are trying to do is more than likely doomed to failure, and continuing to do it anyway will only waste your own time, your client's/employer's time, and the time of the volunteer Wikipedia editors trying to help you.

If you don't want to read any of the rest of this essay, the summary is that promotion isn't allowed on Wikipedia. If you are here to promote a company or individual, (and, if they are paying you to write an article about them, or otherwise asking you to do so as part of your capacity as their employee, then you definitely are), then there is no amount of good prose or good references that will overcome the fact you are trying to do something which is explicitly forbidden. You are trying to force a square peg into a round hole. No ifs, ands, or buts; especially considering the vast majority of companies in the world do not meet our corporate notability guidelines under even the best circumstances.

Wikipedia is the wrong place

A brief search for "Wikipedia" on a freelancing website (which may be how you ended up here) turns up jobs offering enticing sums for tasks like the following (with added emphasis);

I am looking for someone that can help establish (and retain) a wikipedia page for my company

We are seeking an experienced Wikipedia Manager to identify opportunities for including our organization's contributions within relevant Wikipedia articles.

Just looking to make / start a new Wikipedia for myself as I am an athelete .

We are an enterprise software company in the tech sector seeking an experienced Wikipedia editor to help us establish and maintain a company page

These are all written from a position that fundamentally misunderstands Wikipedia's purpose, ethos, and its policies and guidelines.

Wikipedia does not have articles "for" individuals or companies, nor "company pages." We are not a business directory nor are we a billboard to advertise a company or individual's products, services, accomplishments, accolades or 'contributions'. This includes purposes like 'raising awareness' or 'making sure customers can find information about our company.'

Many of these listings by companies, as shown above, also stipulate that their paid editors must "maintain" the article once it's created. Once again, this is not how Wikipedia works. Companies and individuals do not own nor have any unique editorial control over the articles about them. On the contrary, we require that editors refrain from directly editing articles about subjects to which they are connected and instead submit edit requests for other, neutral editors to implement. Companies and individuals have no particular right to update, maintain, or control the article about themselves.

These job postings are the equivalent of walking into a coffee shop, ordering a coffee, and asking the barista to file your taxes while they're at it. The task that your employer or client is asking you to do is fundamentally at odds with Wikipedia's actual function, and as a result, is likely to be impossible.

What is Wikipedia for?

Wikipedia has little interest in what the subject of an article says or wants to say about themselves, or what their associates say about them. A Wikipedia article should be a neutral summary of what the majority of people who are wholly unconnected with the subject have independently chosen to publish about the subject in reliable publications, (see Golden rule) and not much else.

The result of this is, invariably, something that will not be promotional, flattering, or appealing in any way; because it's not supposed to be. The nature of our requirements means that an article cannot contain an overview of the wonderful products and services a company offers to its customers, nor a laundry list of minor awards received by an individual for excellence in their field, nor interviews with a company's founder where they talk about how revolutionary their product or service is and how their hard upbringing inspired them to make the world better for others.

At best, if by some miracle your company or meets the relevant notability requirements, the article is likely to be a stub focused more on the company's history and the major scandals it's beem embroiled in (the sort of thing independent, reliable sources tend to write about when it comes to companies) rather than its latest stock valuation, the amount it raised in series A funding, and the benefits of its product or service.

The existence of other bad corporate articles doesn't give you a free pass

If you go looking, you are likely to find many articles which do not meet the corporate notability guidelines or other relevant policies and guidelines. It is very common for paid editors to point towards these as an example of why their article should be accepted; "our competitor's article only cites routine and primary sources and they're in mainspace, so why is my article declined?" This is an unfortunate consequence of Wikipedia being a large volunteer-led project. Many of these were around before our standards evolved to what they are today, or were simply created directly into mainspace and have thus far evaded scrutiny. Ideally they would all be improved or deleted; but that is not a task that many volunteer editors seem keen to spend time on. Please do not take any of these as a model, or point at them to justify your failure to meet the guidelines. We review every new article on its merits against the ideal case, not against possibly deficient models. If you wish to take an existing article as a model, please choose one that is a featured article or a good article.

The art of writing for Wikipedia

Writing for Wikipedia is unlike most other kinds of writing. (See below for some details).

If you have not written for Wikipedia before, even if you are a professional writer, then it is likely that you have not yet acquired some of the necessary skills. We very often get paid editors who are not aware of this, and plunge straight into a task which in fact they are unprepared for - and volunteers end up giving their precious time to explain the some of the fundamentals to professionals who are getting paid for what they are doing.

As with any other skillset, these skills are best acquired by practice, not only by reading about them. We suggest that you would need to spend at least a few weeks improving existing articles where you have no involvement in the subject, and learning in that way how this works in Wikipedia: once you have acquired a practical understanding of the various principles linked in the next section, you may be ready to study Help:Your first article.

You, or your employer, may be unhappy at spending this time before you get down to the task. But if you were undertaking any other task in the course of your professional work that required new skills, would you regard it as professional to embark on that task without spending time acquiring those skills?

What is distinctive about writing for Wikipedia?

This is a brief summary of some of the major points: please follow the links in these points to learn more fully what is required.

Verifiability. Every piece of information in a Wikipedia article should be verifiable from a reliably published source (and it is recommended that that source be cited inline at the end of the sentence or paragraph). If you cannot cite a published source, do not include the information, no matter where you got it from. Unpublished documents, notes, emails, personal communications are not acceptable as sources, and information derived only from them should not be included in an article. Reliable sources discusses what is a reliable source, and excludes anything that is not under some sort of editorial control (including most social media, blogs, wikis, and also iMDB and Discogs).
The bulk of an article should be written entirely from secondary sources. Information that derives from the subject or the associates of the subject (whether directly, eg from their website, or indirectly, eg in interviews or articles based on press releases) as well as primary sources such as official documents, should be used sparingly, and only for uncontroversial factual information.
An article should never contain original research. That includes unpublished information, mentioned above; but also an article should never contain any argument or conclusion, except where it is summarizing an argument or conclusion from a single independent reliable source that it cites. This is one way in which writing for Wikipedia is different from academic writing, and from some journalistic writing. If you have researched something and come to a conclusion, publish it somewhere other than Wikipedia. This applies whether your research is primary, or from a literature survey: you may and should summarize what different sources say about a subject, but you should never attempt to resolve any differences, or choose between them.
Neutral point of view. An article should present summaries of the major sources which discuss the subject, but not favour any of them. If it is about a person or an organization then it should be written in such a way that neither the most committed fans, nor the direst enemies, of the subject, have grounds to object to it. (It may contain partisan statements that are explicitly attributed to cited independent sources, but must not contain any in Wikipedia's voice).
No promotion is permitted. This is interpreted more widely in Wikipedia than generally. If an article reads as what its subject wants people to know about it, then it is promotional. The article should tell what people who have no connection with the subject have chosen to publish about it. Most paid editors are being paid by or on behalf of the subject of the article. What they need to do before they start editing is to set aside everything that they know about the subject, and confine their writing to what the independent sources say. This is different from most other kinds of writing, and possibly the biggest challenge for a paid editor.
No editorializing - the article should not direct the reader what to think about the subject, whether explicitly, or more subtly, by weasel words like "undoubtedly" or "fortunately"; sometimes words like "achieve", can be troublesome, and so can "but".

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