The Wikipedia writer saving clients from themselves
James Lawrie on invisible writing, the encyclopedia's exclusive club, and why 98% of inquiries get turned away
Welcome to all my new subscribers! This is Eleanot.es, a newsletter about people who use writing to build “things,” which this week means nothing less than the largest repository of human knowledge in history...
Wikipedia.
Your teachers barred you from citing it. But now it’s one of the frequently cited sources by LLMs. Which means if you work in comms or marketing, you will inevitably be asked to conjure up a Wikipedia page. I usually answer, “Commit a heinous crime today—then you can have one tomorrow!”
Most people assume it’s a piece of cake to insert themselves in its digital pages. What they don’t know is that its 66 million articles (spanning roughly 300 languages) are maintained by volunteers who check content against strict standards. Nothing stays that does not have reliable sources to back it up. Getting in is harder than finding unicorn poo—to borrow the words of my esteemed guest this week.
James Lawrie is a Wikipedia editor and page creator who makes a living creating entries for clients who meet a very high bar. In one of the most hilarious conversations I’ve had for this newsletter, we chatted about paid editing on the encyclopedia, the art of boring writing, and his proudest Wiki moment.
Key takeaway
Don’t try to advertise on Wikipedia. James says his first job with most clients is convincing them that posting promotional content disguised as encyclopedia entries will backfire.
The best Wikipedia writing is invisible: bland, meditative, encyclopedic prose designed to serve the platform’s mission.
Our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, below.
How did you get into the Wikipedia business?
Completely by accident. I was doing my MA in creative writing, and I always thought my writing would go down the fiction route. I took creative nonfiction as my secondary subject and got really into the research aspect of writing. I enjoyed doing deep dives, rooting through archives, information, documents—getting to the core of a subject.
In 2018, I started taking copywriting jobs on Upwork. Most of them were awful.
What’s the worst one you had to do?
My first Wikipedia gig—it was $30. It was for a guy from Newcastle who had tried to make his own Wikipedia page, but it had been nominated for deletion, and he brought me in to fix it.
I did have some experience with Wikipedia because I was editing in areas that interested me—music and mountain biking—but no paid editing experience. I went in there and gave it my all. And of course, the page got deleted.
He gave me five-star feedback anyway because he saw I’d given it my all. The next day I had an inquiry: “I see you do Wikipedia stuff?” And I thought, ‘Sure, why not?’ Gradually I started to get better.
Then in June or July 2018, I got an email from the Rhodes Trust—the people who run the Rhodes Scholarship. This was in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall scandal.
Did you take the job?
I had no idea what the Rhodes Scholarship was. Who Cecil Rhodes was. I’m just a hillbilly from Shropshire, right? So I go down to Oxford to pitch to them. And I got the project.
That was my first major client, and it was a baptism of fire. I couldn’t fake it anymore. I threw myself into it, learned the ropes, learned how to edit a Wikipedia entry in a way that was low-impact, that didn’t give the game away. It took off from there.
How many clients do you work with in a month?
Five or six? It all depends. I’m very picky about who I take on. I get a lot of inquiries, but only about 2% of inquiries are viable. Viable clients are as rare as unicorn poo.
This is exactly what I try and explain to companies! It’s really hard to get on Wikipedia. Could you explain what you need to get a Wikipedia page?
Most people who come to me haven’t invested in a PR campaign, or if they have, the press hasn’t been interested in them. And they think I can somehow make them famous by typing them onto Wikipedia. It’s just wishful thinking.
If you’re doing a PR campaign, you’re probably going to want to spend about ten years on that campaign, getting featured in places like Sifted, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times. You need to build up independent secondary sources, because a Wikipedia entry is a tertiary source—it’s one step along in the food chain. A lot of people come to me thinking that they can take the Wikipedia shortcut to fame, and most of them end up disappointed.
“A lot of people come to me thinking that they can take the Wikipedia shortcut to fame, and most of them end up disappointed.”
What kind of clients do you work with—businesses, individuals?
Just about every sort of business. Universities, overfunded tech startups—though that line of work has pretty much dried up. Nowadays, a lot of the businesses are quite established. They’ve been around for 30 or 40 years. A lot of them are pretty boring, but they have somehow managed to get themselves featured in The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, or The Guardian and build up the press they need to make an interesting encyclopedia entry.
What do those businesses want to get out of having a Wikipedia article?
They want to post content on Wikipedia that looks like it’s been posted by the public, that looks organic, like it’s part of the encyclopedia’s ecosystem.
My first job is to convince them that that’s really not in their best interests. Native advertising—using Wikipedia or Reddit or any user-generated platform for advertising—it’s going to make you look bad. My role is basically to save my clients from themselves.
This is often the role of someone in comms, a field I’ve worked in, too. A bit like that meme of the soldier protecting the sleeping child...
I make it very clear: I cannot cite your website, your press releases or your boilerplate. We even have to be pretty careful when we’re citing interviews—even if it’s published via a reliable source.
I come up with something that uses their secondary source material and resembles an encyclopedia entry. I’ll share that with the client on Google Docs. Then the client will then have a narcissistic meltdown.
Yep. We have all been there.
When people see their whole career condensed down to 200 words on a blank page, their brains can’t handle it. They’ll leave a load of abuse in the comments, and then we’ll have a good fight. We’ll go back and forth for several months: “Can we cite this website? Can we cite this press release?”
The worst is when they say, “Well, our rivals’ Wikipedia page says this.” And I’m like, “Well, they have completely different sources. They might have been around for 30 years longer.”
There’s usually a lot of conflict involved with the client. But eventually, they capitulate. They just want the Wikipedia page. They realize that a new page creation is all about just creating a page that A) shows the subject is notable via reliable secondary sources, and B) complies with Wikipedia’s content policies, guidelines, and manual of style.
“When people see their whole career condensed down to 200 words on a blank page, their brains can’t handle it…We’ll go back and forth for several months…But eventually, they capitulate. They just want the Wikipedia page.”
Then once that’s done, I code the page in Wikitext and upload it to Wikipedia from an account with new page creation rights. I never submit my drafts through the slush pile or the articles-for-creation process.
Interesting! When I did this process once, we used an agency that told us the article would have to be submitted to a slush pile that the Wikipedia editors would review before it was published. Is there a difference between disclosed and undisclosed paid editing?
A bit of Wikipedia history. The site begins in 2001, grows in popularity. Round about 2006, 2007, Wikipedia comes onto the radar of PR. The most infamous case was Bell Pottinger—they got busted editing Wikipedia pages of politicians and things. That’s when Wikipedia realized that paid editing was a thing.
One public relations professionals inside Wikipedia’s community, a gentleman by the name of William Beutler, held a conference with a few big shots from the PR industry and a handful of people in the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia’s broader community wasn’t consulted—that’s important to keep in mind.
They decided that if you’re going to do paid editing on Wikipedia, you shouldn’t edit your client’s page directly unless you’re just making minor edits. Instead, you should put in edit requests via the talk page. And if you’re creating a new page from scratch, you should create it in draft mode and submit it via the articles-for-creation process.
What’s the problem with this approach?
That works great for the white-hat paid editors [editors who disclose their conflict of interest and submit proposed changes for review by volunteer editors], because they charge by the hour. And because they’ve got this agreement with Wikipedia, they’re like, “We’re the legitimate ones.”
I’ve tried white-hat editing, and I found that when you put in your edit request on behalf of the client, or you submit your page to the slush pile, because most of Wikipedia’s community is opposed to paid editing—very anti-business—they’re not going to help you. Why would a volunteer take time out of their day to implement edit requests or clean up a page that somebody else is being paid to do?
What about the style of editing you do? You directly edit, correct?
There is another school of thought in paid editing that basically says that paid editing, if done properly, should be invisible.
If you went on Wikipedia now, you would not be able to spot my work. I write in a bland, encyclopedic style. If it sounds boring, then that means I’m doing my job properly. I have a creative writing background, but what I do is the opposite of creative writing. I have never received a compliment on my writing.
“I have never received a compliment on my writing.”
I do a very low-impact style of writing that contributes to the encyclopedia and its mission to document the entire sum of accepted human knowledge. My clients may not be happy that they don’t get to advertise on Wikipedia, but at the end of the day, they’re getting a page on Wikipedia. They’re getting listed in a very exclusive website that only a fraction of businesses get listed on. The Wikipedia Club is a very exclusive club.
I like the writing style, because it’s very meditative and bland. I like the structure, the manual of style, the fact that there are all these little rules and conventions and policies on absolutely everything. The part of Wikipedia that the public see—that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s rare now to see something on the internet that is the result of this kind of consensus, sustained purely by volunteers.
It is a rare thing. And Wikipedia is in a difficult place because it’s got all these existential threats. Governments don’t like it. If they’re not overtly trying to shut it down, they say, “Well, you can’t trust Wikipedia—it’s written by volunteers.” They’re not aware of its peer review system, the fact that we’re constantly checking each other’s work, the fact that the Wikipedia page on a corrupt politician has gone through way more editorial verification than the kind that happens at British tabloids that put out rubbish. The lengths we go to to protect the privacy of Wikipedia’s living subjects and the integrity of people…we’re not supposed to publish anything about anybody unless a reliable secondary source has already published it.
I also feel that this suspicion towards Wikipedia has something to do with authority. People are used to authority coming from one entity or person, instead of a community. How can you trust a huge, nebulous group of people?
One of my favorite essays is David Foster Wallace’s “Authority and American Usage,” [a review of a usage dictionary] in his book Consider the Lobster. He talks about that very thing. Who decides? Whoever puts themselves forward, whoever volunteers for the job—that’s who decides.
But we’re not writing anything original on Wikipedia. We’re not coming up with any original thought or conventions. We’re just taking the knowledge that’s already out there and compiling it.
Have you had clients who want a Wikipedia article specifically because Wikipedia is now a big source for AI tools?
Last year, there was a period where ChatGPT was surfacing a lot of Wikipedia results. Whether it’s always going to be that way is another question.
I’m speaking from the viewpoint of an English-speaking Wikipedian who only operates on the English Wikipedia. But the other Wikipedias—say, the Welsh Wikipedia or the Gaelic—they are the largest corpuses of those languages online. If you want to learn Gaelic with ChatGPT or whatever, there’s a chance that chatbot is basing its knowledge of Gaelic on the Gaelic Wikipedia.
What’s something you’re really proud you got on Wikipedia?
One of my first Wikipedia pages, the page for my local mountain biking trail: Eastridge Mountain Bike Trail Centre. I went out and took all the photos myself on a bike ride, and pieced it together from bits of press I found here and there.
This is so cool!
It actually caused a bit of local controversy because all the dog walkers and horse riders and boomers read this Wikipedia page and thought, “What’s this about unofficial mountain bike trails?” So they called a meeting, and the BBC showed up and reported on the “scourge of unofficial mountain bike trails” at Eastridge. That’s how the controversy section of the Wikipedia page came about.
Knowledge making new knowledge. That’s the beautiful thing about epistemology— knowledge is constantly expanding. You put knowledge out there in the form of an encyclopedia, people pick up on it, they read it, they go away, they make something new, and then that becomes knowledge. It’s like a nuclear reaction. It’s beautiful and terrifying.
📖 James’s reading list
David Sedaris: “His view of British society, the way he sees us, it’s just wonderful.” If you haven’t read him, start with Me Talk Pretty One Day.
Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: Lee’s memoir of growing up in rural Gloucestershire reminds James of his own home in the Shropshire Hills, and on the latter, he says, “Every Englishman can relate to legging it to Spain.”
Etgar Keret: James discovered the Israeli writer through the indie film Wristcutters: A Love Story (based on Keret’s novella) and fell for his tiny, page-or-two-long stories.
🎧 James is also a big audiobook evangelist: “It frees up the mind to visualize things a bit more...it’s a nascent art form that hasn’t quite come into full fruition.”
What do you think will happen to projects like Wikipedia in the AI age? Message me on LinkedIn or reply to this email.
Absolutely love that he added his bike path to wikipedia