Dear Wikify: Can man live on Wikipedia alone?
Or maybe just on Quora answers from Jimmy Wales?
Face front, true believers, Wikify is back and better than ever! First up we look at Wikipedia as a source of news. How informed would you be if you learned about the world around you exclusively through an online encyclopedia? Next we make the case for keeping a close eye on your brand's Wikipedia article during and immediately after a relevant news cycle, as article content could change considerably. Finally, we look at how page moves work on Wikipedia and when such re-namings are implemented.
Let's get going!
Can you get all of your news from Wikipedia?
So, spoiler alert: Wikipedia is not a newspaper. If you don't believe us you can read Wikipedia's own Wikipedia is not a newspaper essay. The site does not employ journalists or aim to document day-to-day affairs. Wikipedia is, instead, an online encyclopedia with a mandate not dissimilar from that of Brittanica or other reference works.
Or that’s the argument, anyway.
In reality, Wikipedia editors treat Wikipedia like a newspaper. If you look at the list of top Wikipedia articles by edits over the last 7 days, you'll see that articles about current events ("2024 United States presidential election", "Donald Trump", "November 2024 Amsterdam attacks") occupy nearly all of the entries. This is not an election-related blip. Each year the Wikimedia Foundation releases a list of the most viewed Wikipedia articles and each year the list is filled with contemporary subjects.
Given this context, it would be more accurate to say that Wikipedia is a supplement to the news. It’s where people go to learn more about subjects they hear about elsewhere, whether that’s the evening news or a morning scroll through social media. A 2018 study by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization, found that information-seeking related to current events was the second-largest driver of traffic to the site, behind only intrinsic learning.
In addition to this supplemental role, there are a handful of ways you can use Wikipedia and the Wikimedia ecosystem to proactively keep up with news from around the globe.
For starters, there's Wikinews, a Wikimedia-backed project aiming to "collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view." The site features short-form news articles constructed in Wiki-fashion by editors collaborating on content and citing citations to back up their work.
As of this writing, the front page is populated with coverage of the U.S. Presidential Election, along with an article titled "Smithsonian National Zoo euthanizes elderly Asian elephant." (The elephant was named, in a cruel twist of fate, Kamala.) The site also covers global news stories and delves into politics, sports, technology, and other relevant subject areas.
Wikipedia's home page is also a decent place to keep track of major world events through the 'In the news' section. This column lives on the right-hand side of the page and briefly summarizes major news events involving the subjects of Wikipedia articles.
The Wikipedia home page might not replace the New York Times and Washington Post in your daily media diet, but it does provide a good recap of important global news and can occasionally surface stories you might have missed elsewhere.
Wiki advice: Are you in the news? Keep an eye on your page.
Your brand's Wikipedia article might read like a unified piece of content—but if it's been around for any amount of time, that content likely represents an accumulation of many discrete edits made by numerous individuals. Most of those edits are more like adjustments than additions: one person tweaks the grammar of a single sentence, another revives the link in a citation.
Larger edits tend to occur in the wake of substantial news coverage. The scope of that expansion correlates with how big and widely reported the story is. For instance, if the brand announces a new CEO and that appointment gets picked up by reputable media outlets, editors might add a line or two about the leadership change to the article's History or Operations section. If that same company is involved in a high-profile scandal narrated by months of relentless press coverage, the company's Wikipedia article would likely undergo substantial content expansion to capture the controversy.
We often say that Wikipedia is a lagging indicator of your media footprint. That's why it's a good idea to keep a close eye on your brand's article during and immediately after relevant news cycles, as article updates might closely follow. This is especially true for prominent product launches, leadership shakeups, acquisitions, or lawsuits. Any newsworthy development that generates press coverage has a chance of generating Wikipedia updates as well!
This is a process that you can and should think about proactively. If you're hoping that positive updates get added to your article, then you need to work to ensure that these developments are covered in prominent media outlets.
Wikify glossary: Page move
You might have noticed that when you're looking at a Wikipedia page in a browser, the name of the page is at the end of the URL. Obviously, this makes really clear links, but has an interesting impact on how Wikipedia's editors can change the titles of pages. It's not so simple as just changing the name of the page in the "Edit" tab, you have to move the page any time there's a change in name.
A page move on Wikipedia is essentially then, a re-naming of a page. This can happen if the name of the page is wrong in some way (for instance, if it was created with a typo in it) or if there's been some kind of change that introduced confusion around the existing page name. Although there are myriad reasons why this can happen, here's a couple of the most common we've seen:
The entity, person or event becomes better known by a different name (e.g. "2019-2020 China pneumonia outbreak'" → "COVID-19 pandemic")
Initially the page name is specific to just one entity, person or event, but then that page name might refer to two (or more) entities, people or events
A good recent example of #2 is the page for "Presidency of Donald Trump". This was the page name for Trump's presidency starting in 2017, but after the 2024 election, editors realized there should be two pages, one for each presidential term. The original page became a disambiguation page listing the two new pages, and the original page's content was moved to "First presidency of Donald Trump".
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