Most people who try to create a Wikipedia page assume the hard part is writing it. It isn’t. The hard part is everything Wikipedia checks before that writing ever goes live: whether the subject is notable enough, whether the sources hold up, whether the tone reads as neutral, and whether a volunteer reviewer somewhere will agree with all three. Most drafts that fail don’t fail because the writing was bad. They fail because one of those checks was skipped.
This guide is the short version of that whole process — what actually has to be true about a person, business, author, or book before a Wikipedia page is realistic, what reviewers are checking for, and where the process most commonly breaks down. Each section links to a deeper, dedicated guide if you want the full detail on that step.
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Who This Guide Is For
This is for authors, business owners, founders, and public figures who are considering a Wikipedia page — either writing one themselves or evaluating whether it’s worth hiring someone to do it. If you’ve already started a draft and it’s been declined, the troubleshooting section near the end will be the most useful starting point.
The Wikipedia Approval Process, Start to Finish
A new Wikipedia article doesn’t go live the moment it’s written. It almost always passes through Wikipedia’s Articles for Creation (AfC) process first: a draft is submitted, a volunteer editor reviews it against Wikipedia’s policies, and the draft is either accepted, declined with feedback, or in rarer cases flagged for deletion. None of this is automatic, and there’s no fixed timeline — review can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on reviewer availability.
The review centers on a handful of policies that show up again and again: notability, verifiability, reliable sourcing, and neutral point of view. Getting any one of these wrong is enough to sink an otherwise well-written draft. For the full breakdown of how reviewers evaluate a submission step by step, see our Wikipedia Page Approval Process guide.
Notability Comes First — Before You Write Anything
Before a single sentence gets written, there’s a prior question worth answering honestly: does this subject actually meet Wikipedia’s bar for notability? This is where most people overestimate their chances. Having a published book, an active website, a large social following, or a successful business is not the same thing as being notable in Wikipedia’s sense. Wikipedia is looking for significant coverage in independent, reliable secondary sources — meaning real journalism or published commentary about the subject, written by people with no connection to it.
A few patterns are worth knowing upfront. Press releases, sponsored features, and a subject’s own website or social media don’t count, no matter how many of them exist. Neither does a passing one-line mention inside a larger article. What does count: in-depth reviews, feature articles, interviews conducted by independent journalists, awards coverage, or academic citations. For authors specifically, a self-published book with no outside coverage will almost always struggle, and even traditionally published books can fail this test if no independent source has written about them.
Running this check before drafting saves a lot of wasted effort. Our Wikipedia notability guidelines breakdown walks through the test in more detail, including how it differs for businesses, authors, and individuals.
Why the Majority of Drafts Get Rejected
It’s worth being direct about this: most first-time Wikipedia submissions are declined, and it’s rarely close. The leading cause by far is failing the notability bar described above. After that, the next most common issues are promotional tone (writing that reads like marketing copy rather than an encyclopedia entry), reliance on sources connected to the subject rather than independent ones, and missing or weak citations on claims that need them.
There’s also a policy worth knowing about directly: conflict of interest. If you’re writing about your own business, your own book, or yourself, that’s not automatically disqualifying, but undisclosed promotional editing from someone closely tied to the subject draws extra scrutiny from reviewers and is a common reason otherwise-solid drafts get flagged. A full list of what trips up most submissions, with examples of language that reads as promotional versus neutral, is in our guide to why Wikipedia pages get rejected.
Sourcing and Citations: The Part Reviewers Check Hardest
Even a notable subject can get declined over sourcing. Every meaningful claim in a Wikipedia article needs a citation, and not just any citation — Wikipedia draws a hard line between sources that establish facts and sources strong enough to support a stronger claim. A book’s publication date might be fine sourced from a publisher page. A claim that the book was a major literary success needs something more substantial: an independent review, an award, or serious press coverage.
This is also where a lot of avoidable mistakes happen. Citing the same press release across multiple sources doesn’t create multiple independent sources — Wikipedia treats repeated coverage of one announcement as a single promotional source, no matter how many outlets ran it. Claims about living people get held to an even stricter standard, since unsupported claims about real people can be removed quickly.
If you’re handling citations yourself, our step-by-step guide to citing sources on Wikipedia covers how to match source strength to claim strength, and how to add citations correctly using the visual or source editor.
Writing and Submitting the Draft
Once notability looks solid and sources are lined up, the actual writing follows a fairly standard shape: a neutral opening sentence that states what the subject is without editorializing, a clear structure (background, work, recognition, and so on, depending on the subject), and citations placed close to the claims they support. Tone matters as much as content here — Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy means even true, well-sourced statements need to be phrased like an encyclopedia entry rather than a pitch.
From there, the draft goes into Wikipedia’s draft space and gets submitted through the Articles for Creation process for review. Our complete walkthrough of creating a new Wikipedia article covers the practical steps in order, from checking whether the topic already exists to formatting the submission correctly.
If Your Draft Has Already Been Declined
A decline is not the end of the road — most rejected drafts can be revised and resubmitted, and reviewers typically leave feedback explaining what fell short. The most useful next step is usually going back to the notability question first: if the decline cited notability specifically, no amount of rewriting will fix that without finding stronger independent sources. If the issue was tone, sourcing density, or formatting, those are usually fixable within the existing draft.
