How to Create a Wikidata Item for Your Company (Without Getting It Deleted)

Speed matters, because review is fast. A Wikidata admin's guide to creating items that survive warns that new items "are typically reviewed very quickly and, if they don't clearly establish notability, swiftly deleted." Wikidata's public deletion log shows the scale. On 30 September 2026, admins and bots deleted 286 items, and 129 of the logged reasons cited notability.

This is the step-by-step version. For why Wikidata matters to search and AI, what's documented and what isn't, read our full guide to Wikidata SEO and machine-readable authority. Nothing in this post was created on live Wikidata; the one step we checked by hand used Wikidata's separate test site.

Step 1: Check Before You Create

Three checks come before the form: does an item exist, does the company qualify, and who should create it.

Search for an existing item

Search Wikidata for your company name, its legal name and any old names. Then search by website, since name search misses odd labels. Our entity authority guide has the exact website lookup. If an item exists, improve it within the rules instead of making a second one. A duplicate splits your facts across two IDs.

Test notability honestly

Wikidata's notability policy accepts an item with a Wikipedia link, one that "can be described using serious and publicly available references," or one that meets a structural need. For a company without a Wikipedia article, the middle test is the one that matters.

Two rules of thumb help. The self-promotion essay suggests "at least three independent, reputable sources that provide substantial coverage of you." The admin's guide says two articles from different national newspapers, "primarily about the target concept," will settle it. Either way, these don't count:

• your website, blog, press releases or sponsored posts;
• profile IDs such as Crunchbase, LinkedIn, X and GitHub, which Wikidata itself tags as IDs that don't imply notability;
• interviews, podcasts, passing quotes and directory listings.

The hub's Evidence Ladder sorts every common kind of evidence in one table.

Decide who creates it

The first route is the safe one, and it may soon be the only one. A draft policy posted on 9 June 2026 says "creating an Item about yourself, your close relatives or your business is not permitted." As of 1 October 2026 the vote is still open.

Step 2: Gather References Before You Open the Form

Collect every source first, so each fact goes in with its proof. Wikidata's sources guideline asks a web reference to carry the page URL (P854), its title (P1476), and a publication date (P577) or the date you read it (P813). An archived copy (P1065) helps if the page later moves.

A few rules save trouble:

• Use the best source for each fact. A registry for the legal name and legal form. Independent press for the founding date, founders and industry.
• Your own site is fine for plain facts. Wikidata's autobiography page says your own website may be used "as references for information about yourself, not others." It can't prove notability.
• Don't cite Wikipedia. The sources guideline says such references "should be removed if other sources are already present."
• IDs prove themselves. A Crunchbase or LEI value that links to its own record needs no extra reference.
• Skip what you can't source. An unsourced revenue figure invites a closer look at everything else.

Step 3: Create or Request the Wikidata Item

The Pre-Flight Sheet

Before anything goes live, fill in one sheet that holds the whole item. Here's the sheet for Tallyfold, a fictional invoicing and payments app for agencies, a year after it earned three independent features. The company, its sources and its IDs are invented for this example.

Note what's missing. Tallyfold's founders have no items of their own, so "founded by" waits; making founder items just to link them is a known trap. And note the Q-numbers. On 1 October 2026, the first match for "Bristol" in Wikidata's search API was a city in Connecticut. Check every description before you pick.

Then run the go or no-go check. Every answer must be yes.

1. Is there no existing item, by name or website?
2. Do at least three independent sources cover the company in depth?
3. Does every fact in the sheet have a source or an ID?
4. Is the description 2 to 12 words, lowercase and neutral, as the description guideline asks?
5. Have you written down how you're connected to the company?
6. Can the whole sheet go in during one sitting?

Requesting the item

Post on Requests for new items. Its form asks for a label, a description, a reason for the request, evidence of notability, sources and identifiers. The page asks people connected to the subject to "briefly explain your connection." Paste your sheet's sources into the evidence field and state the connection in the reason field.

Expect a real review. In the requests archived for August 2026, nine of 28 were marked not done, with notes like "Sources are not independent. No valid identifiers." If yours is declined, the reply tells you what's missing. Add evidence later instead of arguing now.

Creating it yourself

If you do create the Wikidata item, sign in to an account first. The admin's guide calls an account "highly recommended," and it gives reviewers someone to talk to. Open Special:NewItem. It asks for four things: language, label, description and aliases separated by a pipe. Save, then add every statement and reference from your sheet straight away. The guide's warning is blunt: creating "a bare item with the intention of coming back later" is a common way to lose it.

Practising on Wikidata's test site

Wikidata runs a separate sandbox at test.wikidata.org. We loaded its create form on 1 October 2026 and saved nothing; it shows the same four fields as the live site. One catch if you practise there: property numbers differ. On the test site, P31 is a "website" property and "instance of" is P82. Search properties by name, and never copy test IDs into the live site.

Step 4: Connect Identifiers and Your Markup

Add your profile and registry IDs as their own statements. Enter the ID part only. Wikidata's guide calls pasting whole URLs "a common new-user mistake," and the X property says "do not include the '@' symbol."

Then close the loop on your own site. Add the item's URL to sameAs in your Organization markup, next to your other profiles. Our free schema generator builds that block, and the hub's ID crosswalk shows how an LEI maps to Google's iso6523Code. For the wider picture of how sameAs and @id tie a brand together, see building a knowledge graph for AI.

Step 5: Disclose and Keep It Accurate

Disclosure isn't optional when money is involved. Wikimedia's Terms of Use require you to "disclose each and any employer, client, intended beneficiary and affiliation" for paid edits, on your user page, a talk page or in edit summaries. Wikidata's paid editing policy asks for it on your user page, and says a clearly disruptive editor can be blocked without a warning. If editing is part of your job, you're a paid editor.

Use one account. Wikidata's account policy treats a second account used "to appear as a neutral third-party" as sockpuppetry. After that, add the Wikidata item to your watchlist, fix clear errors with a source, and leave sourced claims alone. For anything you'd rather not edit yourself, post on the item's talk page. When facts change, add the new value and keep the old one with an end date, as our semantic drift guide explains.

What Gets a Wikidata Item Deleted

Wikidata's deletion policy lets admins delete items that aren't notable, are vandalism, or contain "no data." To see which reasons dominate, we grouped the public deletion log for one day, 30 September 2026, by the reason written in each entry.

Each row has a fix:

• Not notable. Wait until three independent sources exist, and put them on the item.
• Lost Wikipedia link. Don't rely on a new Wikipedia article. If it's deleted, a bot removes items with no other good facts. Never write a Wikipedia article about your own company; Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guideline says "COI editing is strongly discouraged."
• Empty. Add every fact in the first sitting.
• Spam. Keep the description neutral and the facts plain.
• Recreated. If your item is deleted, ask the deleting admin to restore it and explain which test it meets. Making it again gets a fresh deletion and can get you blocked.

Two traps don't show up as log reasons but cause the same result. Don't rewrite an existing item about something else into your company. And don't create items for your founders and brands just to link them together; the admin's guide says it "tends to invite batch deletion."

Where Rankbox Fits

Rankbox doesn't create, request or edit Wikidata items, and it doesn't track citations. It helps with the part you control. The Citation-Ready Writer writes source-backed articles, such as a facts page, that state your founding date, founders and category in plain sentences on your own site. The Business plan is $49.50 a month, and the 7-day free trial before it includes 7 articles and requires a card. See pricing.