The Hidden Ways Wikipedia Influences Your Customers
When prospective customers search Google for information on a specific brand, it’s overwhelmingly likely that they will come across the company's Wikipedia article.
Wikipedia ranks consistently as a top-five website in monthly page views, with tens of millions of visits each month. When conducting a Google search, there’s a 99% chance that a Wikipedia link will be on the first page, with those links often ranking in the top three of results.
With Wikipedia appearing so prominently in Google search results, brands have a clear incentive to harness that reach by optimizing their profile there. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, though, not a promotional website, and editors maintain strict guidelines as to what kind of content can stay on the site.
Let’s look into the secret ways Wikipedia influences customer behavior, and what you can do about it.
Wikipedia’s Impact on Customer Experience
Whether you like it or not, if your company has a Wikipedia article, it is a popular (and ostensibly impartial) source of information for customers, investors, and journalists. With its prominent ranking in Google searches, Wikipedia is one of the most visible parts of a company's digital presence, and yet, few companies are spending time and energy monitoring their own page on the site.
With Wikipedia articles on brands often ranking in the top three organic links on Google, it’s likely the company's Wikipedia article gets the customer's attention before the company’s website even does.
With that in mind, it becomes clear why it’s so important for companies to want to make sure the correct information is displayed in their article, and for those who don’t have one to want and to try to acquire one.
What You Can Do To Monitor Your Company’s Wikipedia
Wikipedia articles are constantly changing, making it imperative for you to monitor the alterations and see what’s been updated.
Rather than reading the whole page regularly, you can quickly see recent changes in the page's edit history. You can do this by going to the View History link on the top right of any Wikipedia article. From there, you’ll be taken to an archive, where every single change for the page is recorded along with what was changed and who made the change.
Another important page to familiarize yourself with is the Talk page, located on the top left of a Wikipedia article.
There, you can see discussions among editors and those with an interest in the topic.
If you happen to catch a change made to a page you are monitoring that is false information, we do not recommend you go in yourself and revert the changes. While it will remove the content instantly, it likely will not stay and isn’t a solid long-term solution to make sure the content of the article remains accurate moving forward.
Wikipedia demands high-quality, third-party sources when adding information to an article. This means that not every single detail about a company and its products is going to stay on a page. The website is also not a place for advertisement, so don’t expect to maximize profits when considering making changes to an article. Instead, you should view this as an educational tool when accurate and a reputation risk when inaccurate. Inaccurate content on a Wikipedia page can quickly find its way into news articles and suddenly become much harder to correct.
In short, Wikipedia is only interested in keeping content on the site that has been highly reported on, and that is crucial to a company’s history and operations.
Categories & Navigation Boxes on Wikipedia
In addition to the Wikipedia page about the company, there are other places on the site where your brand name may appear. Similarly, it is important to check for these other mentions to ensure that your brand is accurately represented across Wikipedia. Here are just a couple that we recommend checking:
Categories are found towards the bottom of an article and help categorize articles into broader groups. Review the categories at the bottom of the Wikipedia article for your brand to make sure they are all a fit and don't accidentally link the brand to a topic that is unrelated or inaccurate.
Navigation boxes help readers easily browse between pages that fall within an overall topic. They appear near the bottom of pages that are already included in the "nav box". For example, a sports team will have a navigation box that links to Wikipedia articles for its arena, key players, rivalries, etc. If your brand is part of an overall topic area, you may look to see if it has a navigation box by checking Wikipedia pages for similar brands and consider making a request to Wikipedia's community to add your brand, too.
Do keep it in mind, though: Wikipedia discourages brands from adding their details across all relevant pages, so it is best to focus on ensuring that existing mentions are accurate and representative first and foremost. Attempting to "spam" Wikipedia with brand mentions and links to your website would be a clear violation of the site's content guidelines, and would not only result in the mentions and links being removed but could also create a bad reputation for your brand with editors.
