Why can you check a Wikipedia agency's claims when you cannot check other vendors'?
Because Wikipedia's revision history is a public ledger. Each article has a complete page history listing every change, who made it and when. Deleted articles leave a log naming the administrator and the policy reason. Every account's contributions, registration date and block history are one click away. And because paid editors must disclose employer and client on-wiki, even the commercial relationships are part of the record.
In most marketing categories a case study is a screenshot you cannot trace. Here it is the opposite, and still few buyers check, because nobody told them the audit costs a quarter of an hour. This guide assumes you have a shortlist. If you are earlier in the process, start with nine signs of a fake Wikipedia agency for the pre-screen and how to hire a Wikipedia agency for the questions to put on a call; this article is the hands-on verification that follows.
What is the Portfolio Autopsy?
The Portfolio Autopsy is our name for five checks of about three minutes each, run on the agency's three strongest claimed pages. Ask for the article titles first (how the agency responds is itself data), then check:
- Existence and survival. Does the page exist, and what does its deletion log say?
- Authorship. Which account wrote the live text, and in what proportion?
- The account. Is the claimed editor real, established, active and unblocked?
- Disclosure. Was paid editing disclosed where the rules require it?
- The enforcement record. Does the agency's name appear in sockpuppet or conflict-of-interest archives?
Each check returns a hard signal, not an impression. Together they tell you whether the track record is real and whether it was built in a way that will not blow up under your brand later.
Check 1: Does the page exist, and was it ever deleted?
Take sixty seconds per page. Type the exact article title into Wikipedia's search box.
If the article exists, open "View history," go to the oldest revision, and note the creation date and creating account. A page "created" two years before the agency existed is a borrowed trophy.
If it does not exist, Wikipedia tells you why: opening the deleted page's URL surfaces its deletion log with date, administrator and policy reason. Two reasons matter most. G11 means unambiguous advertising (see why Wikipedia pages get deleted). G5 means created by a banned or blocked user, so the text was written by an account with no right to edit at all.
Live page with a plausible creation date: continue. Deleted as advertising: the portfolio piece failed Wikipedia's most basic test. Deleted as G5 or in a sockpuppet cleanup: stop reading the proposal.
Check 2: Who actually wrote the text?
The most common inflation is not inventing pages but claiming pages that volunteers wrote. Attribution tools settle it.
XTools, the standard analysis suite for Wikimedia projects (xtools.wmcloud.org), has two relevant reports. Page History shows the creator, creation date and top contributors by edits and by text added. Authorship goes further: using WikiWho token-based attribution, it calculates what percentage of the article's current live text each account wrote. This is not who edited most often, but whose words survive on the page today.
Paste the title and read the table. If the agency wrote the page, its account should sit at or near the top. Community expansion dilutes the share over time and that is fine. What you should not see is the account missing entirely, or holding a fraction of a percent for a comma fixed in 2023. The first run takes three minutes; the next ones thirty seconds.
Check 3: Is the editing account a professional record or a throwaway?
Open the account's user page, then its contributions, as an employer would read a résumé. Three things matter:
- Age and volume. When was it registered and how many edits does it have? An agency claiming a decade of experience whose accounts are eight months old has a gap to explain, because Wikipedia experience belongs to the account.
- The shape of the work. A credible professional account shows real editorial life: drafts through review, talk-page discussions, edits across many topics. A burner shows a thin strip of promotional-adjacent pages and nothing else.
- The block log. A block, particularly for undisclosed paid editing or sockpuppetry, is the loudest signal in the whole procedure. Active, unblocked, multi-year accounts pass; blocked, abandoned or freshly minted ones fail.
One fair caveat: an editor's personal account may legitimately predate their job, which is fine when the agency names it and lets you check. "Our editors prefer to stay anonymous" is not a privacy stance. It is a refusal to be checked.
Check 4: Where is the paid-editing disclosure?
Wikipedia's Terms of Use require paid editors to disclose employer, client and affiliation, and WP:PAID specifies where: the editor's user page, the article's talk page or the edit summary. Look in all three, and see paid editing and COI disclosure for how the system works.
Then apply the binary. Disclosure present means an agency that works in the open, which is how this work survives. No connected account disclosed anywhere on a page it claims means either the page is not theirs, or it was produced in breach of the Terms of Use. One is portfolio fraud and the other is a compliance time bomb attached to your brand, and you do not need to decide which. If you can only run one check, run this one. Our own disclosed approach is on the page creation service page.
Check 5: Does the agency appear in the sockpuppet or conflict-of-interest archives?
Wikipedia's enforcement history is public and searchable, and it is where agency reputations are preserved against their will. Two archives matter: sockpuppet investigations (SPI), which document coordinated multi-account abuse, and the conflict-of-interest noticeboard (COIN), which archives years of discussion about specific firms and undisclosed paid-editing operations.
Search the agency name in Wikipedia's search box with prefix:Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations, then again with prefix:Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard. Add former brand names, since archives outlive rebrands and rebranding after a ban is a known pattern.
The precedent that shows the archives' reach is the Wiki-PR scandal: in 2013 the community linked one firm to a large network of undisclosed accounts, more than 250 were blocked or banned, the Wikimedia Foundation sent a cease-and-desist, and the case record is still public. Clients whose pages went through that operation inherited the cleanup.
A hit is not automatically fatal. Read the case, check the dates, and see whether the firm acknowledged it and changed practice. A hit the agency failed to mention when you asked directly is.
How are portfolio claims faked, and which check catches them?
The same claims recur in inflated proposals. Each has a matching check.
| Portfolio claim | How it is faked | The check | Signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| "We created [a recognizable company's] page" | Credit claimed for a page written by uninvolved volunteers, or one that predates the agency | Check 2 (top author of live text?) and Check 1 (creation date against agency founding) | Account absent from the authorship table = borrowed trophy |
| "500+ pages published" | A round number counting deleted pages or minor edits, with no list | Ask for ten URLs from the last twelve months and run Check 1 on three | A real list arrives in minutes; a lecture on confidentiality arrives when the number is decorative |
| Logo wall of famous clients | Logos imply authorship; the agency may have made one edit, or none | Pick two logos and run Checks 2 and 4 on those articles | Logos are cheap to display; authorship percentages and disclosures are not |
| "Senior Wikipedia editors on staff" | Unnamed editors with no linked accounts, or accounts with bought edit history | Check 3 (age, shape, block log) and Check 4 (whose disclosures name the agency?) | An editor who cannot be named cannot be checked |
| "Our pages never get deleted" | Survivorship framing: the deleted work is invisible unless you look | Checks 1 and 5 | Everyone loses pages sometimes; honest vendors say how they count survival |
What does a trustworthy portfolio look like instead?
Honest vendors face a real constraint: some clients do not want to be named, and a serious firm will not break a confidentiality agreement to win your deal. What credible evidence looks like in practice:
- A disclosed account, offered without friction, whose user page carries the paid-editing disclosure and whose contribution history you are invited to read.
- Process artifacts over logo walls: notability assessments, source maps, draft excerpts and review correspondence, redacted where needed. Work product is hard to fake.
- Survival framing with definitions: not "guaranteed" anything, but "of the pages we published, this share is live today, counted this way."
- A straight answer about deletions. Every long-running practice has lost pages. The honest version names a case and what changed after.
- Written terms. Ours are on the guarantees page: 90 days of monitoring after publication and an 80% refund if a published page cannot be defended after three attempts. We never promise that a page will be published.
"We cannot show client pages" is therefore half legitimate. Confidentiality never prevents naming a disclosed account, showing process artifacts or pointing at archives that come up clean. For a side-by-side of providers, see our agency comparison.
What should you send the agency after the autopsy?
One email with four questions. Each answer can be verified on Wikipedia, so each also tests whether the vendor knows you can check.
- "Which disclosed account or accounts would handle our work? Link the user page with the paid-editing disclosure." The only acceptable answer contains a username.
- "Link three articles from the last twelve months where that account is a top-three author of the live text." Verifiable with XTools in ninety seconds per link.
- "Which of your pages were deleted in the last two years, and what did the deletion log say?" "None" from a high-volume practice is its own red flag, and you can pull the logs yourself.
- "Has your firm, under any current or former name, appeared at SPI or the COI noticeboard, and what changed afterward?" You may already know the answer. That is the point.
If a vendor passes, the next step is scope and price, not trust. If one has already taken your money and stopped replying, read what to do when a vendor ghosts you.
Frequently asked questions
No. Page history, deletion logs, user pages, contribution lists, block logs and the XTools reports are all readable without logging in. An account is only useful if you want to save searches or watch a page.
It estimates what share of an article's current text was originally written by each account, tracking words through every revision. It tells you whose wording survives, which is a better test of "who wrote this" than counting edits.
That can be true for client names, but not for the editing account, process documents or archive history. Ask for those instead. A vendor that can show none of them has given you nothing to evaluate.
Look at when. Community expansion dilutes any author's share over years, so a low share on an old page is normal. A low share on a six-month-old page claimed as "our work" is a reason to ask what the agency actually did.
Check the Wayback Machine for earlier versions of its site, company registry records for name changes and the user pages of its named editors. Then repeat the SPI and COIN searches under each name.
Yes. The Autopsy proves the past was real and disclosed; it does not prove the next engagement will go well. Follow it with written terms on scope, monitoring and refunds, and a notability assessment before any drafting.
No. Review platforms do not verify that a reviewer was a client, and a strong score can be inflated. Wikipedia's own record is the stronger evidence, and the only one that cannot be edited by the vendor.
How WikiBusines helps
We would rather you verify us than trust us. Ask which account will edit, and read its user page and history before any proposal. Our services run on that basis:
- Notability audit, from €490: a paid source review, credited toward the page if ordered within one month, before any drafting.
- English page creation, from €2,400, 4-5 weeks: disclosed in WikiBusines' name, 90 days of monitoring and an 80% refund if a published page cannot be defended after three attempts.
- Annual Support, from €720/year: up to four updates, with a 12-month guarantee.
To start, contact us and ask for the editing account.
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