Corporations on Wikipedia

I was recently asked for advice for a company wanting to know if they should start a corporate Wikipedia profile and how that can be done. Here is my reply, I hope it's helpful to others as well:

I’d have to do more research to confirm this, but to my knowledge Wikipedia discourages corporations and individuals from creating their own Wikipedia pages unless they are “noteworthy” (i.e. worth talking about in an encyclopedia). You also have to be careful if you are going to edit any information on Wikipedia while on a corporation’s network because Wikipedia can track this and your corporation can get a bad reputation from it. (You can track changes made on Wikipedia by corporations here: http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/)

To discourage link-building using Wikipedia, the site recently made all links on the site no-follow links, so they actually no longer contribute to Page Rank . That being said, you might still get a lot of traffic from a link on Wikipedia if you manage to get a link up there. A good way to try and do this is if you have educational information on your site somewhere that you can link to as a reference. For example, an air-filter site that has a lot of information on allergies might put a link to reference the info on their site at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry about allergies.

I would say, go ahead and try to create a Wikipedia page, because there’s no harm in trying – and if it gets left there, then it could drive traffic to your site. But chances are, Wikipedia is going to take the page down quickly and it will be difficult to keep your links up there.

I would try creating a corporate profile on places that would allow it, without the “no-follow” problem – like Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, etc. and linking to the site in directories with high Page Rank, like Yahoo! Submit Basic.