Jay Walsh, Wikipedia

My colleague Amy just turned me on to a PRWeek Q&A with Wikipedia’s head of communications Jay Walsh, who offers some helpful tips about contributing content to the site.

Wikipedia entries for technology companies and their market segments often rank in the top five search results on Google, making them an increasingly important communication platform. It comes as no surprise that companies often turn to their PR agencies for advice on shaping or correcting their Wikipedia presence.

Some common questions we’ve received here at the Bateman Group include:
•    Can we publish our own Wikipedia entry or does a third party need to do it?
•    The Wikipedia entry on our company was turned into a stub – how do we get it back?
•    How do we edit an article that misrepresents our product?
•    We want to be closely associated with XYZ trend –can Wikipedia help?
•    How do we go about engaging our circle of influencers to collaborate on a Wikipedia entry for a new market category?

These are all issues that PR agencies can and should be proactively helping their clients navigate, but it’s crucial to follow the rules of Wikipedia engagement.

I’ve highlighted a few of Jay’s tips about complying with Wikipedia’s policies below. Are you playing by the rules?

Be Neutral
According to Jay – and this should not come as a surprise to most of our readers – one of the single most important rules to keep in mind is that maintaining a neutral point of view is a key aspect to contributing and editing Wikipedia content.

Publicists and PR pros are often representing clients, or even their own firms, and often come to Wikipedia just to edit those relevant articles.  Wikipedians can tell if you might not have a neutral point of view based on your actions and your history (every single edit to Wikipedia is visible to anyone – transparency is very important).

What Jay doesn’t tell us is that non-neutral content contributed by brands is seen a mile away by Wikipedia’s community and almost always removed from the site.  If your company is just dipping its toes into Wikipedia waters, starting small with an initial stub article for the community to build on often makes the most sense. If a company self-publishes a long and overtly promotional entry about itself, it will almost definitely experience resistance from the community and lose credibility in the process.

Wikipedia Tips
Jay offers the following practical tips for PR pros. Most of these involve common sense and follow industry standard social media etiquette, but there are a couple of gems in here, too.

•    If you start a page, keep it short (or make it a stub).  No need to write 2000 words in a first submission.
•    Be transparent about who you are.
•    Create a user account – and make one for one person only.  Don’t create user accounts that are broadly named (for example. WidgetsPR).  Wikipedians edit on behalf of themselves, not entities or groups.
•    Before you edit, ask if someone else in your firm or business already knows how.  They could save you a lot of time and advise you on the best way to proceed.
•    Make your PR assets available to Wikipedians.  We only use freely reusable images, so make your press image available under a creative commons license whenever possible.  Build robust websites for your business or your clients – provide up to date and high quality information so Wikipedia articles can have good sources when necessary.
•    Get to know what’s going on in the history of a page – especially if it’s a page about you or your business. Every edit and everything that’s happened to that page since it was created is publicly shared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_history.

We’ll plan to share some specific Wikipedia case studies based on our client work in the future.