A lived-experience post about Wikidata patrollers, deletion timelines, and the readiness ladder we now ship inside MentionFox.
Our deletion story
We tried to put MentionFox on Wikidata in April 2026. We had a Crunchbase profile, a Twitter handle, an active website, an active product, statements about industry and headquarters and founder. By the standards of Wikidata's written notability guidelines, our entry should have been accepted.
Both entries — for the company and for the founder — were deleted by volunteer patrollers within a few weeks.
Wikidata's own notability page allows entries that "describe an entity referenced in some Wikipedia entry, or in another Wikimedia project," or entries that "describe an entity that can be linked to clearly identifiable conceptual or material entities" with reasonable sources. By the written rule, we should have qualified.
The unwritten rule is the one that matters: patrollers detect spam-shaped submissions, and "new account creating a company entry plus a founder entry simultaneously, in the same week, with thin third-party sourcing" matches the spam pattern almost perfectly. Even when it's not spam.
We don't bear ill-will toward the patrollers. They are protecting Wikidata against a genuine flood of spam from agencies that auto-generate entries to influence LLM training data. The unfortunate side effect is that legitimate companies with thin citation piles get caught in the net.
So here's what we recommend instead.
The readiness ladder
Earn independent press coverage. Aim for 3–5 substantive, feature-length mentions in independent secondary sources before attempting Wikidata. Press releases don't count. Paid placements don't count. Industry-directory listings don't count. The bar is "an editor with a byline wrote about you, on a domain that is not your own."
Use a personal account that has existed for weeks before the submission — not one created the same day. Add multiple references per statement. Don't create a founder entry the same day as the company entry — patrollers see paired creations as a spam signal. If a patroller marks your entry for deletion, do not create a second one. Wait, build more citations, and try again later under a different submission strategy.
Submit through Articles for Creation, not direct article creation. Most successful first submissions are made by experienced editors, not first-timers. The article title gets salted on rejection, which blocks future attempts under the same name. If your company has a name collision with anything else (especially with a person, a band, or another product), the salting risk is higher.
Personal Wikidata and Wikipedia entries come after the company has both. Personal notability bars are higher. Wikipedia in particular is hostile toward founder-only entries when the company itself is not yet on Wikipedia. We don't recommend founder-Wikipedia attempts under three personal feature profiles in tier-1 outlets.
What we don't do: we won't auto-submit for you. The platforms detect automated submissions and ban accounts that try. The widget you see in MentionFox is a readiness signal — nothing more. The actual Wikidata or Wikipedia submission is yours to make, on your own schedule, with your own personal account.
If you've already tried and been deleted: the title may be salted. Wait at least 6 months. Build more citations in the meantime. When you try again, do not use the exact same name in the title — consider a more specific descriptor (e.g. "Acme Co. (software company)" instead of "Acme Co.").
Wikipedia and Wikidata are weighted heavily by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. A successful Wikipedia entry can move the needle on how often LLMs cite your brand. But a rejected Wikipedia entry can do the opposite — the rejected article history becomes a public signal that your brand failed notability review, and competitors can use it against you.
The asymmetric risk is the reason we ship the readiness ladder. Submitting too early is worse than not submitting at all.
The brass ring has thorns.
Build the citation pile first. We'll show you when you're ready.
Build the pile first. The Wiki Readiness widget tracks your stage automatically.