The creators of Wikipedia pages follow a simple method: if the topic has received significant coverage in reliable independent publications, then it is significant by Wikipedia standards.
What is a reliable, independent publication?
Well, at this moment everything gets a little more complicated. If you are writing about a new stamp of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it is best to use well-known scientific journals such as New Scientist or the British Medical Journal. In this case, the Wikipedia content editor can create an article from only two sources, as Wikipedia editors usually prefer quality to quantity.
However, this method can’t be applied to business. The indicator of significance for enterprises is set much higher. Being innovative and successful is not enough to have a place on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's editors (also known as Wikipedians) make it much more difficult for businesses to be published on Wikipedia, as Wikipedia has no rules, only policies and guidelines. After all, it's not up to Wikipedia's editors to decide whether a topic is important or not.
What are significant appearances?
So, your company appears in one of the authoritative sources. Does this guarantee you a Wikipedia page? Unfortunately it doesn’t. The article you want to use as a source should make a full coverage of your business or at least discuss your company for a very long time. It is best when the activities of your company become the central theme of the publication.
If the publication mentions your business, it will still not be enough to establish significance. Quite often, Wikipedia freelance editors receive inquiries from companies about which only fragments of information can be found: comments from executives, references to a paragraph in the context of the topic, or even just a list of other companies. This does not meet Wikipedia's significance criteria.
Can you use your company's press release to increase media visibility?
You cannot do that because press releases are primary sources. Editors can use primary sources to show some basic information, but they are not relevant to Wikipedia.
Is the company significant if it has 1 million Instagram followers?
It doesn’t matter because Wikipedia prefers qualitative rather than quantitative data. Unfortunately, sometimes even three million is not enough if there are not enough publications in the authoritative press.
The process of organizing data on Wikipedia is simple and useful for documenting topics that appear in written discourse. However, for businesses located in areas with a disorganized publishing culture, such as Africa, the conditions are more complex: Wikipedia's policies favor articles about people of European descent and large multinational corporations.