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Media & Communications: Wikipedia

By Rhiannon Ruff
June 01, 2016

The usefulness and ubiquity of Wikipedia makes it nearly everyone's first port of call for online research. Because of Wikipedia's importance, it presents both a huge opportunity and a great danger to companies and people written about in its virtual pages.

The opportunity is easy to articulate: Your information appears in the one place that you know people will be looking, and is presented in Wikipedia's authoritative voice. What's more, having a Wikipedia article can be a great SEO boost, spotlighting your most important information in a forum many trust as an independent information source.

The danger is more complex: Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at any time, so an article about you is open to potential vandalism, edits to insert bias, inaccurate information, and unflattering details. If you should receive even a little negative news coverage, your page may spin out of control. Just ask fashion designer Rachel Roy, whose entry was overwhelmed following speculation that she was the “other woman” mentioned in Beyonc”s “Lemonade.”

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