Can Wikipedia used for marketing?

For short: Yes and no.

  • “marketing” is not allowed on Wikipedia. But if you are sharing the facts of your company or your products, it could help you in marketing them for your target groups. You cannot buy adds on Wikipedia either.
  • not all companies can get into Wikipedia bu you need to be “wiki-notable”. Very often that is defined by the amount of media hits – if media never makes news of you or your products, you usually can’t have a Wikipedia article either. And it’s not any media but media that Wikipedians thing is trustworthy. If you’ve been mentioned in some blog hosted by an influencer – skip it!

Can anyone help you to get into Wikipedia?

For short: no.

Wikipedia has plenty of rules and processes. If you don’t bother to read masses of text you may end up breaking some of them and then the article you’ve written never gets in.

Johanna Janhonen is a Wikipedian and a Wikimedian who has been editing and creating Wikipedia articles on behalf of her customers since 2010. She is one of the the rare paid Wikipedians with a white hat (= meaning she is following the Wikipedia rules about COI editing.)

William Beutler of Beutler Ink and Johanna Janhonen of Hidden treasure were visiting Disambiguation podacast on August 2020. The hosts, Stephen Harrison & Omer Benjakob, were wondering if paid Wikipedia editing can be ethical too.

Johanna’s been editing the Wikipedia articles for customers since 2010. See her profile pages in Finnish and ask if she can help you with your content too either by editing or by teaching you to do it yourself. Anyone can update Wikipedia but if  one is doing it for money (or salary) it needs to be told openly.

By June 2022 Johanna had started over 200 new articles in Finnish Wikipedia for wide variety of companies and personal brands.

For 12 years she was editing in English Wikipedia with about 3000 edits. In August 2022 she was banned from editing in English Wikipedia. Long story, read more from her blog. So for the time being she is giving Wikipedia trainings and consultation for other COI (conflict of interest) editors to guide them through the complicated Wikipedia processes and teaching them other things they should know about Wikipedia editing.

Some of her customers:

Aidon, Basware, Cimcorp, Componenta, DA-Group,
Digia, DNA_Oyj, Efecte, Elematic, Elisa (company),
Ensto, Fennovoima, Fingersoft, Fiskars, Framery,
HappyOrNot, Honkarakenne, Innofactor, Kemira,
Kemppi, Konecranes, Kotipizza Group, Molok (company),
Neste, Novita (company), Olvi, Orthex, Outotec,
Raute (company), Solar Foods, Stora Enso,
Suominen Corporation, Taura Stinson, Valmet,
Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company, and Zibby Owens .

Johanna Janhonen is also a part of Wikimedia movement – she was a board member of Wikimedia Suomi ry in 2014-2016 and has also been part of global Wikimedia activities e.g. as a Wikimania 2019 social media team leader volunteer.