Can you create a Wikipedia page about yourself?
Yes. Anyone can register an account, open a draft and type. The guideline governing the situation calls writing an autobiography "strongly discouraged", which is policy language for allowed, with a warning attached. With a declared conflict of interest and the right submission route, a self-written article can in principle be accepted. In practice the odds are stacked against you before you write a word.
Two adjacent questions have their own guides. Whether you, a founder or a company qualifies at all: company, founder and public figure notability. If a page about you already exists and you want it changed: why you should not edit your own Wikipedia page, read before touching anything.
What does Wikipedia policy say about autobiographies?
Three layers apply, and none contains an outright ban.
The autobiography guideline.
WP:AUTOBIOGRAPHY treats writing about yourself as a textbook case of conflict-of-interest editing. The reasoning is structural: it is hard to write about yourself with the neutrality and proportion an encyclopedia needs. Its standing advice is that if you are truly notable, someone else will eventually write the article.
The conflict-of-interest guideline.
WP:COI says editors with a stake in a subject are strongly discouraged from editing the article directly and can propose changes on the talk page instead. You are the maximal case.
The sanctioned route.
If you proceed anyway, disclose the conflict on your user page and the draft, then submit through Articles for Creation (AfC), a review queue where an independent editor checks the draft against notability and sourcing standards before it goes live. It is slower than publishing directly, and that is the point.
Above all three sits WP:GNG, the general notability guideline: significant coverage in reliable sources independent of the subject. Even strong coverage creates a presumption, not a guarantee.
Why do self-written pages fail so often?
Four mechanisms compound each other. We have not measured a failure rate for autobiographies, so none is claimed here; the mechanisms are what policy and reviewer practice describe.
Conflict of interest by definition.
On Wikipedia, COI is about the relationship, not your intent. In an autobiography, subject and author are the same person, so every editorial judgment is suspect by default, including the honest ones.
Neutrality blindness.
The tell is rarely a false claim; it is selection and framing: the award listed, the criticism left out, the adjectives that read as fact to you and as advertising to a reviewer.
The notability mirror.
You must judge your own sources, and almost nobody can. The coverage people are proudest of (interviews, their own columns, funding announcements, podcasts) is mostly non-independent in Wikipedia's eyes. What counts is coverage about you that you did not initiate and do not control. The full test is in does your company qualify for Wikipedia; the logic is the same for people.
Extra scrutiny.
A new account whose first contribution is a biography matching its username is a recognizable pattern, and reviewers read it more skeptically: sources get checked harder, tone gets parsed line by line.
Which path should you take? A decision tree
Run it in order and stop at the first instruction that fits.
| Step | Question | If yes | If no |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Are you notable under WP:GNG? Can you name two or three in-depth, journalist-written pieces about you, not interviews, your own posts or press releases? | Go to step 2 | Stop. No author and no route fixes missing sources; see "What to build instead" |
| 2 | Could the page happen without you? Is your coverage prominent enough that an uninvolved editor plausibly writes it? | Wait. Organic creation is the most stable outcome | Go to step 3 |
| 3 | Still set on writing it yourself? | Disclose the COI, submit through AfC, accept the verdict, never publish directly | Go to step 4 |
| 4 | Worth doing professionally? | Use a disclosed professional under the paid-contribution disclosure rules | The honest answer is "not yet" |
What are the three legitimate paths?
Path 1: wait for organic creation.
If your coverage is strong, the cheapest and most durable page is one you never commission. Articles created by uninvolved editors start with clean histories and survive deletion debates better. The cost is control over timing.
Path 2: write it yourself, disclosed, through AfC.
Compliant and slow. Declare the conflict, draft as if you were a stranger, source every sentence to independent coverage and submit. Expect a queue of weeks. If the reviewer declines on notability, believe them; resubmitting the same case rarely changes the verdict.
Path 3: a disclosed professional.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use permit paid editing when the editor discloses who pays and who benefits, and the work goes through the same independent review. The value is not access, which no honest operator has, but judgment: reading your sources as a reviewer will, declining cases that will not pass, and drafting in a register that survives scrutiny. Details in paid editing and COI disclosure. For executives and founders, the public figures track covers biography-specific risks.
What does a failed vanity page cost?
When a self-written page is challenged, the venue is Articles for Deletion: a public discussion, archived, in which strangers debate by name whether you are notable. "Non-notable" and "promotional autobiography" are standard phrasings in those outcomes, and anyone searching your name on Wikipedia, whether a journalist, investor or due-diligence team, can find them.
It also compounds: a sufficiently similar re-creation of a deleted article can be removed speedily by reference to the first discussion. A premature autobiography does not just fail; it leaves a public record that your notability was examined and found wanting. We cover the common patterns in why Wikipedia pages get deleted.
What should you build instead if you are not notable yet?
The work is upstream of Wikipedia.
- Earned coverage. The only input that moves the verdict: independent journalists choosing to write about you in depth. Awards with editorial selection, profiles and substantive features usually take many months of deliberate work.
- A Wikidata item. Wikidata's inclusion bar is lower than Wikipedia's; a well-sourced item makes you a machine-readable entity, feeding knowledge panels and AI answers, without the exposure of a premature article.
- Re-assess on evidence. When new coverage exists, rerun the tree honestly or have someone without a stake run it.
You cannot referee your own case, which is the core problem with autobiographies.
Frequently asked questions
No. It breaks no law and, strictly, no ban: Wikipedia treats it as a conflict of interest to be disclosed and strongly discourages it. The risk is editorial, not legal: rejection, deletion and a public discussion.
Yes, you can draft in a user sandbox or the draft space, and it is a sensible way to work. A draft is not published until it passes review, and the conflict of interest still has to be disclosed.
Only with care. If they are connected to you, they have a conflict of interest too and must disclose it; having someone write the page to hide that you are behind it is the kind of undisclosed arrangement that gets accounts blocked.
You are strongly discouraged from editing it directly, but you can request changes on the article's talk page with sources, and clear factual errors are often corrected. See why you should not edit your own page.
It is a review queue where an independent editor checks a draft for notability, sourcing and neutrality before it becomes an article. The outcome can be acceptance, a decline with reasons, or rejection.
A Wikipedia article is prose and needs notability from independent sources. A Wikidata item is a structured record with a lower inclusion bar, and it can support knowledge panels and AI answers.
Review queues are measured in weeks and vary with backlog. Our own end-to-end timeline for a managed English page is 4 to 5 weeks, which is not a promise for a self-submitted draft.
How WikiBusines helps
We do not draft pages for people whose sources do not hold, and we do not guarantee that an article will be published. Paid work is disclosed on Wikipedia in WikiBusines' name.
- Notability audit, from €490, credited toward any project ordered within one month: reads your real sources against WP:GNG as a reviewer would and tells you which path your evidence supports.
- Wikipedia page creation, from €2,400 for English, 4 to 5 weeks, with 90 days of monitoring and guarantee after publication.
- Wikidata, from €680, when the page is premature.
We would rather say "not yet" before you spend than defend a vanity page after it fails. Start with the free 10-minute assessment: contact us. If the case is unclear, we offer the paid notability audit from €490, credited toward the page if you order it within one month.
Authors and editorial policy
Bohdan DubylovskyiCo-founder and CBO, WikiBusines→
Roman MelnykCo-founder & Chief Editor, WikiBusines→The article was prepared by the WikiBusines co-founders. We sell paid Wikipedia services, so we disclose this interest: paid editing is always declared on Wikipedia in WikiBusines' name, and claims about the rules are backed by links to primary sources.
Editorial policy: payment disclosure, conflicts of interest, sources