Article I posted on my blog. Basically a how-to guide on how to get a Wikipedia article about your site. One of the holy grails of internet website marketing is Wikipedia. Able to deliver quality, targeted traffic, this site is excellent for anybody who needs to give their website a boost. Although the outbound links on the site are nofollow, there are hundreds, if not thousands of Wikipedia scraper sites that only copy the text, not the source code, which causes the removal of the nofollow link. As a Wikipedia veteran of 1 1/2 years, I teach you the easiest, most efficient way to get your site on Wikipedia. 1. First of all, you need press. Good, quality press. Many people are under the assumption that Wikipedia is editable by anyone, so that must mean anybody can put up an article about their site. Wrong! Wikipedia is roamed over daily by over a million zealotrous editors who desire to uphold the standards of their community, one of which is that an article needs to have references from unbiased, third-party sources, i.e. media support. It doesn't matter how popular the media is (it could be a local newspaper as far as they care), what matters is that it's non-affiliated with your site. On Wikipedia, they've actually removed very notable subjects due to lack of third-party sources, and yet keep non-notable, insignificant subjects to due their being somehow in the media. 2. So the very first thing you need is to get your website in the news. This is actually a lot easier than it sounds. First, determine what your site is notable for. Are you making money from the site? Then submit a press release to your local newspapers saying "Web Geek Helps Pay Bills From Site" (my local newspaper actually ran a similar story a few weeks ago). Is your site a charity? Submit a press release to local newspapers saying "Local Site Helps Disadvantaged" (trust me, newspapers eat up these sort of "soft stories" like candy). Figure out any hook or lead that your website has, and spin it into news. If you feel guilty "fabricating" news, remember the odds are in your favor that your local newspaper is already hard-hit for genuine news, and that your story is the next best thing. 3. Once you have a few news articles featuring your site, you're ready to begin writing your Wikipedia article. First, go to Wikipedia. Create an account, because the Wikipedia fellows trust user accounts a lot more than anonymous IP addresses. Once you've created an account, read some of the newbie user guides to learn how to write using WikiFormatting. When you're finished reading the formatting guides, make a few constructive edits (you don't want it to look like you only joined to create a single, self-centered article), add something to your userpage (a welcome message or warm greeting) and then begin to write your article. 4. Type the name of your site in the search bar on the left of the screen and click go. Since your article does not exist yet, near the top of the page, the name of your article will be in red-link. Click this link to begin writing your article. The easiest way to have a successfully formatted article is to find another article formatted similarly to the way you want your article to be, and copy the source code into your article. Now, all you have to do is the writing. Tips on writing a successful Wikipedia article: be objective, being overly adulatory of your site may cause unnecessary suspicion; be honest, don't hide any dirty truths your website may hide; most of all, don't intentionally abuse the system. 5. Once you've finished writing your article, it will no doubt go through scrutiny. Senior editors may dislike it, and nominate it for deletion. Don't be afraid to stand your ground when somebody criticizes. Likewise, if somebody makes a constructive edit to your article, don't try to edit it back to the original form. Wikipedia changes all the time, and you need to be able to adapt to the changes made to your article. 6. Now that you have an article that is in Wikipedia, make sure to link to it from other relevant articles to gain maximum exposure. For example, go to the article about the city you live in and add yourself to the "List of notable people" (although this may not work if you live somewhere such as New York or Atlanta). Be creative when trying to think about what should link to your article. 7. Relax, you're done. Congratulations on now having a Wikipedia article dedicated to your site! Make sure that you upkeep the article, reverting vandalism when needed, and defending it from deletion when required.
That's awesome. I know that Wikipedia is a great source of information, and it is pretty challenging to be able to get stuff up there for the world to see. These tips are great, would make a fantastic article. I think a lot of people are interested in this
I agree with TNF...I've never done it because it's a lot of work but having some steps to follow could make that a much easier process. Very well written tips and it's worth the work to do it. Many benefits come from having your site on Wikipedia.
Great tips and very useful article. I especially liked the ideas for how to get local press about your site - and in fact I'd be interested to see you write more on that subject. Great job
I'll probably write some more about it when I get the chance. I'd especially be interested in writing a "99 Misconceptions About Wikipedia". For example, contrary to what people may think, Wikipedia is NOT censored for minors. They actually take some amount of pride in being an uncensored website.
Blah, I tried this but it was rejected. I've spoken a lot with the wiki editors and even if you have a legit site, if it covers areas that they consider spamish, you may get your article rejected. I would add that you have to sometimes spin your wiki so it falls in line with what the editors feel is "safe".
Learning to type your Wikipedia articles for the first time is a bit tricky. All the special codes you need to know for linking pages and topics together can be a bit confusing at times.
It's a little difficult at first, but easier to learn as time goes by. If anybody needs help writing an article, PM me, because I have 1 1/2 years experience editing and 1500 edits on my account. They don't care as much about "safety issues" as they do about objective news (although that is something of any oxymoron). They've removed articles about 15 year old historic text games and the top player in a popular online game due to lack of third-party sources. But if you can somehow get your site in the news, then it's pretty difficult for the senior editors to deny its validity.
Nice article GIR, thank you. I personally found some reasonable success with custom writing a section specifically to link to Wikipedia. It is somewhat easy for me, due to the nature of my site mind you. I trolled Wikipedia on articles relevant to my site title, then basically compiled content specifically to be appropriate to link. Decent content, not spammy stuff. Its worked quite well for me - gives me a small, but steady flow of traffic from the links.
How about external linking? I mean how do you put your site as external link in a wiki article? Say I have a site about sports betting then I would like my site to be one of the external link at the bottom of some articles such as sports, bookmakers, betting, gambling, etc.. I kinda more interested in this than the actual wiki article of my site.
I would imagine you could probably just add this in as an 'outside link' - I've actually done that for one of my sites and it's worked well and never been removed. If you want to actually have your site listed as a source, that could be slightly more difficult as I don't think you can be a "source" if you're a blog without sources of your own as it would be too easy to see that as pure opinion.