Verified as of 27 September 2026.
You control your website, your CV and your dossier. A Wikipedia article, you do not. It depends on independent sources, the project's policies and the decisions of a community of editors who do not answer to you. That is why neither a long career, nor exhibitions at institutions, nor press mentions guarantee an article. Nor is it wise to write your own biography, have someone close to you write it or pay for it to be published without disclosing that relationship.
What matters is that there are enough reliable, independent sources. Who writes also matters when they have a personal, professional or financial relationship with the subject.
An encyclopaedia, not a personal page
A personal page is for introducing yourself and explaining your work from your own position. Wikipedia summarises knowledge already published in reliable sources. It is not a CV, a dossier, a directory of everyone active in a field, a reputation service or a place to publish original research. Nor is it an archive that the subject of a biography can manage or approve.
Being true is not enough for a piece of information to be included. It must be relevant, verifiable through an appropriate source and compatible with the neutral point of view, one of the project's core policies.
Notability is not merit
Encyclopaedic notability does not reward the quality, importance or length of a career. Nor can it be inferred from the number of exhibitions, awards, followers or posts held. The question is whether the subject has received significant coverage in reliable, independent sources.
An isolated mention, a short entry or a reprinted press release may help to verify a fact, but they do not show that there is enough material for an article of its own.
Wikipedia does not measure what a work is worth, but how much and how others have written about it. Not having an article is not a verdict on your work.
Nor does notability make a page untouchable. The community can debate the sources, propose merging it with another article or open a deletion discussion.
Which sources count
There is no mechanical list. The value of a source depends on its independence, reliability, depth and relation to what is being claimed.
Sources that usually help to establish notability:
- books from independent publishers;
- critical or academic studies;
- newspaper and magazine articles with substantial coverage;
- institutional catalogues based on their own research;
- publications by museums, archives or universities that are independent of the subject.
Sources that may help to verify facts, but are not usually enough on their own to justify an article:
- your personal website;
- your CV;
- a biography circulated by a gallery;
- press releases;
- exhibition listings;
- social media;
- databases that reproduce information supplied by the subject;
- self-published catalogues;
- interviews that simply record the subject's own statements.
A connected source shows how someone presents themselves or what an institution states. It is not an independent assessment of their work.
It is the same criterion I explain in the guide Primary source or back cover: what matters is who writes each text and from where.
Why you should not write your own page
Wikipedia discourages creating or editing articles when there is a conflict of interest, whether the relationship is personal, professional, institutional or financial. This applies to anyone writing about themselves, their family, a client, their company, their gallery, their foundation or a project of their own. Writing in the third person does not remove the conflict. Nor does it disappear because someone close to you prepares the text.
Bad faith is not presumed. Someone who knows a career from the inside knows a great deal, but also decides what matters, what words to use and what to leave out. Wikipedia wants those decisions to depend on published sources and on editors who do not represent the subject.
Autobiography is not technically prohibited, but it is strongly discouraged because of problems with neutrality, verifiability and self-promotion. If the article already exists, the right course is to disclose the relationship and propose changes on its talk page for someone else to review.
Paying does not solve the conflict
Paid editing does not make an article independent. Wikimedia's Terms of Use require anyone who receives, or expects to receive, compensation for their contributions to disclose the employers, clients, intended beneficiaries and affiliations related to that contribution. The disclosure must be made at least on the user page, on the relevant talk page or in the edit summary. A community may adopt an alternative disclosure policy.
A company may offer research or writing, but it cannot legitimately guarantee that the article will be accepted, that it will not be challenged or deleted, that it will keep favourable wording, that nobody will change it or that criticism will disappear.
Be wary of phrases such as 'official Wikipedia page', 'guaranteed article' or 'maintenance to prevent changes'. An article belongs neither to the person it is about nor to whoever created it.
If an article does not yet exist
First of all, separate independent sources from your own material and that of entities linked to you.
- Gather books, articles, catalogues and studies that discuss your work in some depth.
- Check who published each one and what relationship they have with you.
- Distinguish substantive coverage from brief mentions.
- Ask yourself whether those sources make it possible to write something more than a CV.
- If you ask for advice in the project's community spaces, disclose your conflict of interest.
- Accept that there may be no consensus to create the article.
Avoid creating several accounts, asking friends or collaborators to pose as independent, copying your biography or dossier, hiring covert editing or pressing editors to create the page.
If the article already exists
The subject of a biography does not own the article. They do not approve changes, and cannot demand a favourable version or control its title, structure and length.
If you spot a problem:
- check the history to see when it was introduced;
- check the cited source;
- distinguish a verifiable error from a disagreement with the approach;
- disclose your relationship with the subject;
- make a specific request on the talk page;
- provide a reliable source that supports the correction;
- let another editor assess the change.
Damaging information is not necessarily false. Favourable information is not necessarily relevant. The discussion should focus on sources, accuracy and proportion, not on what suits your reputation.
How to request a correction
A useful request identifies the passage, the problem, the source and the proposed wording. It also discloses the relationship with the subject. For example:
I declare that I am the subject of this article and therefore have a conflict of interest. The section 'X' states 'Y'. The cited source does not contain that information. I propose replacing it with 'Z', in line with this source: [reference]. I ask that another editor review the change.
Be clear about what kind of problem it is, because they are not resolved in the same way:
- a factual error;
- outdated information;
- an unsourced statement;
- a problem of neutrality or proportion;
- a disagreement with the selection of facts;
- a possible breach of the rules on biographies of living persons.
Someone with a conflict of interest may revert obvious vandalism and remove or flag content that clearly breaches the policy on biographies of living persons. Beyond those uncontroversial actions, it is best to set out the proposal on the talk page and ask another editor to review it.
What you can prepare
A conflict of interest does not stop you from providing information. It requires you to do so transparently and without controlling the outcome.
You can prepare:
- a chronology of events;
- an inventory of independent sources;
- complete bibliographic references;
- verifiable dates and titles;
- standardised identifiers;
- images with a compatible licence;
- a clear list of errors and proposed corrections.
None of this is an article ready to publish. An encyclopaedic entry is organised according to the sources and the project's rules, not your priorities.
Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons
They are related projects with different functions. Wikipedia publishes articles. Wikidata gathers structured data and identifiers. Wikimedia Commons hosts files that meet its scope and licensing requirements.
Having an item on Wikidata does not show notability for an article. Uploading a photograph to Commons does not create a biography either. Before uploading an image, check who holds its rights, which licence applies and whether other people or protected works appear in it, as I explain in the guide Selling a painting is not selling its rights.
Your archive, at home
An article can be expanded, cut, merged, renamed or deleted. Whoever created it acquires no right to its permanence.
Wikipedia should never be the main archive of a career. Your CV, exhibition history, bibliography, authorised images and the documents that prove dates and works should be kept on your website or in your own archive, as I propose in the guide How to document the provenance of your own work.
Documenting a career from the inside is legitimate and necessary. Encyclopaedic notability depends on how others have treated it from the outside.
On the open conversation
This guide summarises general criteria of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, based on their own policy pages. Rules and consensus change, and editions in different languages do not always apply the same rules. Before getting involved, check the current pages of the edition you are interested in.
If you edit Wikipedia or work with archives or cultural communication and spot an error or omission, write to me.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Conflict of interest.
- Wikipedia: Autobiography.
- Wikipedia: Reliable sources.
- Wikipedia: Verifiability.
- Wikipedia: Biographies of living persons.
- Wikipedia: Neutral point of view.
- Wikipedia: Wikipedia is not a primary source.
- Wikimedia Foundation: Terms of Use, section 'Paid contributions without disclosure'.
- Wikimedia Foundation: frequently asked questions on paid contributions.
- English Wikipedia: Notability.
- English Wikipedia: Conflict of interest.
- English Wikipedia: Autobiographies.