Wikipedia and Wikidata Presence Under Paid Disclosure

About half of the requests we assess end in a recommendation not to file, and we deliver that recommendation inside three weeks rather than after a year of drafting. The governing test is WP:NCORP, and it has nothing to do with revenue, headcount or awards. It asks whether sources exist that are independent of you in both funding and authorship. A funding round written up from your press release does not count. An interview in which your chief executive supplies every claim does not count. A contributed column under a founder byline counts against you. The assessment: We build a source dossier before a sentence is drafted. Each candidate source is scored on the three questions the guideline actually asks — is the publisher independent of you, is the content intellectually independent of material you produced, and does it treat the organisation itself in some depth rather than mentioning it in passing. You receive the dossier with every source classified and the reasoning attached, and a verdict: file now, file once two more independent pieces land, or do not file. When the verdict is do not file, the engagement ends there and we tell you what would change it. Disclosure, because there is no quiet version of this: We edit under an account that names the client on its user page, as the Wikimedia Terms of Use have required of paid contributors since June 2014. Every change we want made to a live article is posted publicly to that article's talk page as an edit request, with the proposed wording and the source behind it, and left for an uninvolved editor to accept or decline. We do not edit a live article about a client directly. This is slower, and it is the only method that survives a scrutiny thread on the administrators' noticeboard. Filing and the queue: Drafts go through Articles for Creation, where an unpaid volunteer reviews them on their own schedule. That queue routinely runs months deep and nobody, including us, can shorten it. Anyone quoting you a publication date is editing under an undisclosed account or planning to. The draft we submit is written to the sourcing rather than around it: any claim no independent source supports is cut before submission, because a reviewer who finds one unsupported promotional line rereads everything else with suspicion. Wikidata: Most buyers ignore the item, and it is the part that moves fastest. An item with referenced statements — instance of, inception, headquarters, industry, key people, official website, and identifiers such as an LEI, a ticker or a charity registration number — is what knowledge panels and answer engines read when they resolve who you are. Its notability rules are far more permissive than the article guideline, so an organisation that will never sustain an article can still hold a properly referenced item. What we refuse: We will not remove sourced criticism, and we decline briefs whose real object is that. We will not create or use undisclosed accounts, pay volunteers or administrators, buy or take custody of an existing article from a broker, or guarantee that anything is published. If a properly sourced negative paragraph is the problem, hire a litigator rather than a communications firm. Who this is not for: Companies whose only coverage is funding announcements and startup directory listings. Executives who want a personal page with no independent biographical writing about them anywhere. Anyone working to a launch date, because the review queue does not observe launch dates. Monitoring: Where an article exists, we keep it watched and report monthly on page moves, category changes, unsourced claims added in either direction, and biography-of-living-persons problems, which are the ones that need attention the same week they appear.