If your agency does anything on Wikipedia for a client, you are required to say publicly who you are working for. This is a requirement, not a matter of etiquette. It comes from the terms of use everyone agrees to when using Wikipedia, set by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, so it applies on every Wikipedia in every language. This page explains what the rule requires, how a well-run agency sets up its Wikipedia work, and the conversation to have with clients before any work begins.
What the rule requires
Wikipedia's terms of use say that anyone paid to contribute must publicly disclose three things: who employs them, who the client is, and any other relevant affiliation. For agency work, that means both names appear in public: the agency's, because it employs the person doing the work, and the client's, because the work is done on their behalf. If a specialist firm is subcontracted, that adds a third name, and the disclosure has to cover everyone involved.
The rule is triggered by payment, not by job title. An account executive who posts one Wikipedia request for a client is a paid contributor in exactly the same way as a full-time Wikipedia consultant. A single small request is not an exception.
The disclosure goes in specific public places: on the editor's user page (the profile page attached to every Wikipedia account) as standing information, and on the discussion page of each article being worked on, as each engagement comes up.
Two limits are worth knowing precisely. First, the rule covers paid work only. An employee who edits Wikipedia on their own time, about topics unrelated to any client, is a volunteer, and working at an agency doesn't require them to stop. Second, disclosure is the minimum requirement everywhere, but it isn't the only rule anywhere. Some language versions of Wikipedia add their own requirements: German Wikipedia requires company accounts to go through a formal verification step, and Chinese Wikipedia bars paid editors from editing articles directly at all. An agency working internationally has to follow several sets of rules, not one.
How a well-run agency sets up
Every person gets their own account, under their own identity. Wikipedia's rules prohibit shared accounts, so there should be no "agency account." Each person doing the work has an individual account, with the employer and client disclosures on their user page, kept up to date as client work changes.
Nobody edits the client's article. Everything is a request. Even where the rules would technically allow a disclosed person to edit directly, a well-run agency doesn't. Instead, every proposed change is posted on the article's discussion page as a formal suggestion, called an edit request: here is the current text, here is the proposed text, here is the news source that supports it, and here is who we are. A volunteer editor reviews it and makes the change if it holds up. This is slower than editing directly, and it is what allows agency Wikipedia work to be defended later, to Wikipedia's editors, to journalists, and to the client's own leadership.
Records are kept. Which account, which requests, which articles, and what happened, organized by engagement. Questions about Wikipedia work can come up years later, and an agency that can produce its full history in five minutes is in a much better position than one reconstructing it from memory.
The contract spells all of this out. The client agreement names the disclosure requirement, states that all work follows Wikipedia's terms of use, and assigns who maintains the account and who approves requests. Our guide to what an agency contract should say about Wikipedia covers the specific clauses.
The client conversation
Disclosure means the client's name appears in public next to every request, and some clients hesitate when they realize that. Have the conversation at the start, not after the work begins. It has three parts.
Openness is what makes the work succeed. Volunteers respond to requests from disclosed representatives because they know exactly who they are dealing with.
The alternative is not a quieter success. It is failure with a record attached. Secret paid editing is detected regularly, some volunteers specialize in finding it, and the resulting stories name the clients, not just the agencies.
And to anyone who checks, a disclosure shows a company doing things properly, which is the least damaging way a company's name can appear in Wikipedia's records.
If a client can't accept public disclosure, they are asking your agency to break Wikipedia's terms on their behalf and take on the risk. At that point, decline the Wikipedia part of the engagement. The agencies with long, clean records in this area are the ones that have said no when asked. There is history behind this standard: after a series of secret-editing scandals more than a decade ago, many of the world's largest communications firms signed a joint public statement committing to follow Wikipedia's rules, an effort Beutler Ink helped organize, and that commitment has largely held.
What skipping it costs
The pattern repeats often enough to describe in advance. The secret editing is noticed, through telltale editing patterns or investigation by volunteers. Accounts are blocked. The client's article gets a warning banner at the top, visible to every reader, saying someone with a conflict of interest has edited it. The work is undone or rewritten less favorably. And the notable cases end up in the trade press with the agency named. The client is left with a damaged article and a news story; the agency is left with the reputation.
By comparison, the cost of doing it properly is a user page, some patience, and the occasional declined engagement.
If your agency is building its Wikipedia practice, or has a client engagement that needs to be set up correctly, talk to us. We have run this workflow for more than a decade and are glad to compare notes before your next scope of work goes out.
Last updated September 28 2026.
