Can I Create or Edit My Own Company's Wikipedia Page? What the Conflict-of-Interest Rules Actually Say

Wikipedia does not ban people connected to a company from editing. What it does is put them under a separate rulebook. The conflict-of-interest guideline (WP:COI) calls COI editing "strongly discouraged" and spells out three working rules for anyone in that position:

• Existing article: do not edit it directly; propose changes on the article's talk page instead.
• New article: do not create it directly; put it through the Articles for Creation (AfC) review.
• Anyone paid: disclose the employer, client and affiliation. This is a Wikimedia Terms of Use requirement, not a courtesy.

The guideline gives the reason in one line: COI editing undermines public confidence and risks embarrassing the very companies it promotes. Nobody can tell you in advance whether a given edit will be reverted, tagged or lead to a block — that is decided by independent volunteers, and no vendor controls them. What you can know in advance is which side of the rules you are standing on, and the rest of this guide shows you where that line is. For one-sentence versions of these answers, see the FAQ.

A conflict of interest is a situation, not an intention. Believing you can be neutral does not remove it. The rules treat these people as conflicted:

• Owners, founders and employees of the company, including anyone whose job touches its marketing or communications.
• Interns. The paid-contribution policy says interns are considered employees for this purpose.
• Agencies, freelancers and PR people. Anyone compensated for publicity efforts related to the subject counts as a paid editor, even if nobody paid them specifically to edit Wikipedia. Compensation includes money, goods or services.
• Anyone you ask to do it for you. It makes no difference if the text is written off-site and a second person pastes it in. Both people are required to disclose.
• Close relationships — family, friends, business partners — covered by the guideline's section on external roles and relationships.

The practical consequence is the next point of this guide: "I asked a friend who is not on our payroll" does not remove the conflict. It adds a second conflicted editor.

The guideline keeps a short list of changes a conflicted person may make directly because they are uncontroversial. Everything outside this list goes through a request.

• Remove obvious vandalism or spam.
• Remove clear violations of the policy on living persons — for example, unsourced damaging claims about a named founder or executive.
• Fix spelling, formatting markup and broken links.
• Revert your own earlier COI edit.

One condition decides all four: if another editor objects, the edit stops being uncontroversial, and you should stop and go to the talk page. This list does not cover adding or changing facts, figures, products, awards or leadership, and it does not cover removing criticism you dislike. Well-sourced criticism is protected by policy, and a conflicted person deleting it is the pattern volunteers look for first.

For an existing article, the sanctioned route is an edit request on the article's talk page, flagged with the {{edit COI}} template so that it enters the review queue. A request that gets handled usually contains four things:

• Disclosure first. One line saying who you are and your relationship to the company.
• The current text, quoted exactly.
• The proposed text, written neutrally, one change per request.
• Independent sources for each claim: coverage not produced by the company, not a press release, not your own website.

Set expectations honestly. The volunteer who responds is told to run their own search for independent sources and not to rely on the ones the paid editor offered, and to watch for detail added to overwhelm something negative. There is no deadline: answering requests is volunteer work, and a request about a small company can wait. Reposting daily does not help. If the answer is no, the reason is usually in the sources, which is a different problem from the wording. Cases where your page is wrong and you do not know which route to use are covered on the page editing service page.

If you are paid or expect to be, the Terms of Use and the English-Wikipedia policy require the same thing:

• What to disclose: each employer, client and affiliation. The amount of compensation need not be disclosed.
• Where: your user page, the talk page that accompanies the contributions, or the edit summary.
• Under your own name, not the company's. The guideline forbids organization-named and shared company accounts: the account is yours, not your employer's.
• No confidentiality. The policy says non-disclosure agreements do not override disclosure, and that there is no confidentiality for the employer or client.

Two limits matter. First, disclosure is the minimum, not a permit: the Foundation's own paid-contributions FAQ says paid contributions are not automatically allowed just because they are disclosed; neutrality and the other policies still apply. Second, the consequence of not disclosing is written into the policy: editors who fail to disclose paid contributions are prohibited from editing, and the Terms of Use provide a binding mediation procedure for undisclosed paid editing.

Everything you do here is public and permanent in the sense that matters: edits sit in the page history and in your account's contribution list, and volunteers read both when they next look at your company. That is why the first edit is the one to get right, and why many owners choose not to be the author at all.

Paid editing is not forbidden. The Wikimedia Terms of Use have required paid-contribution disclosure since 16 June 2014; the current version has applied since 7 June 2023. A disclosed professional working through talk-page requests and Articles for Creation is inside the rules. The risks sit around that route:

• The quiet favour. A friend, colleague or freelancer who edits without disclosing is undisclosed paid editing, and the conflicted party is you. The accounts, the page history and the investigation threads are public.
• The market skews undisclosed. The volunteer-maintained list of paid-editing companies listed 197 entries under "Undisclosed paid editing" and 11 under "Disclosed paid editing" on 5 October 2026. It is a working list, not a verdict, but it shows how rare the disclosed route is.
• Scams aimed at companies that already failed. In Operation Orangemoody, discovered on 31 August 2015, volunteers found 381 sockpuppet accounts running a paid-editing ring that extorted businesses whose drafts had been rejected at Articles for Creation. The COI guideline states flatly that offers to guarantee a page will be saved from deletion for money are always fraudulent, and Wikipedia's scam-warning page says any unsolicited offer of Wikipedia services for payment is a scam.
• Fake credentials. The COI guideline advises asking for the user names of claimed "experienced editors" and checking their user pages for a paid-contribution disclosure. Its absence likely means the claim is false.

A short, mechanical test for any vendor — disclosure, no promised outcome, named editors, written terms — is in how to choose a Wikipedia agency.

A one-screen summary of everything above.

• Safe for anyone with a connection to the company: reading the policies; collecting independent sources; removing obvious vandalism or spam; fixing typos and broken links; posting a disclosed edit request on the talk page; asking a disclosed professional to do the work.
• Allowed only with disclosure and review: proposing factual updates via {{edit COI}}; drafting a new article and submitting it through Articles for Creation; any paid work at all.
• Block territory: editing the article directly to add praise, figures or awards, or to delete criticism; creating the article directly in main space; using a company-named or shared account; using several accounts; asking someone else to do it quietly; paying for "guaranteed" or "protected" pages; hiding the paid relationship, or the sale of it, behind an NDA.

The route that holds up years later is the one with an audit trail from day one: a disclosed account, an Articles for Creation draft or a talk-page request, and independent sources that would convince a reviewer who has never heard of you. That is what "do not be the author" means in practice. It is also why the first question is not who writes the page but whether the company is eligible for one. Before spending anything, run the free self-test in the requirements guide or commission a notability audit, a go/no-go assessment with a written verdict. A disclosed professional can then work to the rules; our own disclosure standards are published on the ethics page and at wikibusines.net.