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Creating a Wikidata item for a company: what actually qualifies

Wikidata is not a company register and not a marketing surface — your item survives exactly as long as independent sources keep it alive.

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Wikidata is interesting because it is a machine-readable, openly licensed entity registry that many other systems reference. That makes it tempting to add an item for your company quickly. In practice most such items end in deletion, and that outcome is worse than never having tried: deletion leaves a trace, and if you already referenced the identifier somewhere, you are now advertising one that does not exist. We learned this on ourselves — an earlier batch of our items was deleted, and references to them were still live on three sibling domains months later. This recipe covers when there is any chance at all, what to prepare, and what the rules require when the company is your own.

The procedure

  1. Check whether there is a chance at all

    Wikidata's inclusion criteria essentially require that an item either correspond to an article on a Wikimedia project, or be a clearly identifiable entity that can be described using serious, publicly available references. For a company that means independent, non-promotional sources — trade press, research, official registers — rather than press releases or your own site. If you could list two or three of those right now, it is worth continuing. If not, the correct next step is not the item; it is getting the sources first.

  2. Collect sources BEFORE editing

    Write down the statements you intend to record — founding year, headquarters, industry, official website, perhaps a registration identifier — and find where each can be verified. An unsourced item is the most common deletion reason and the most easily avoided one. Official register numbers are particularly valuable because they are stable and publicly checkable.

  3. Disclose, if the company is your own

    The Wikimedia Terms of Use require disclosure of paid contributions: if you edit for an employer, client, or other principal, you must say so — typically on your user page and in the edit summary. This is not a formality. Undisclosed affiliation is itself grounds for intervention, and concealment discovered later costs far more than the item was ever going to return. Alongside disclosure, the safe practice is conservative editing: sourced factual statements, no adjectives.

  4. Write neutrally

    Wikidata is a set of statements rather than prose — but marketing still fits into the description field and into which statements you choose, and it stands out immediately. "Leading provider" is an opinion, not a statement; "software company, founded 2019, headquartered in Budapest" is a checkable fact. Neutrality here is an inclusion condition rather than a matter of style.

  5. Wire it in — but only once it is stable

    Once the item exists and has survived its first weeks, you can reference it from your own markup as `sameAs`. Do not do this in the other order: do not advertise an identifier before you are confident it will stay. A reference to a deleted identifier is a broken identity claim that reflects on your whole entity — and if you run several domains, each needs fixing, because the scope of a fix is the repository where you made it.

  6. Maintain it, and re-check periodically

    Items change: others may edit, merge or delete them. Check at least annually — or continuously with an automated check — that the identifier your pages advertise still exists and still describes you. Choose the instrument carefully: a misconfigured client of ours once reported a LIVE item as non-existent, so any such check must be able to tell a negative answer apart from its own failure.

Frequently asked questions

Can any company be added to Wikidata?
No. Inclusion requires that the entity be clearly identifiable and describable using serious, publicly available sources. A company described only by its own website and basic registry data typically does not qualify — and an item created anyway gets deleted rather than quietly persisting.
Can I edit my own company's item?
Yes, but the Terms of Use require you to disclose paid contribution, and conservative editing is wise: record sourced factual statements and avoid evaluative wording. Undisclosed affiliation is a problem in itself, regardless of whether the edits were substantively correct.
How long before it has any effect?
There is no reliable answer, and anyone quoting a number is guessing. The item is live immediately, but when and what each downstream system takes from it varies and is not observable externally. Treat Wikidata as one component of entity work rather than a channel in its own right.
What is the most common deletion reason?
Lack of sources, and obviously promotional content. The two often travel together: an adjective-laden item with no references breaches both conditions at once. The third common reason is duplication — search first, in case an item for the company already exists.
What should I do if our item was deleted?
First remove the reference from EVERY surface you control, sibling domains included, and do not substitute an invented identifier; your canonical URL is the anchor in that state. Then, if you genuinely have grounds, the deletion rationale tells you what was missing — usually independent sources. Those are what to obtain, rather than recreating the item.

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Notability. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Notability
  2. Wikimedia — Terms of Use (paid contribution disclosure). https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Terms_of_Use
  3. Wikidata — Conflict of interest. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Conflict_of_interest
  4. Wikidata — Deletion policy. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Deletion_policy