One of my clients asked me whether it would be worth creating Wikipedia pages for her and her husband. I had my doubts, so I quickly responded that LinkedIn was more powerful, as are Reddit and YouTube. However, that got me thinking. Not knowing much about the intricacies of Wikipedia, I thought I’d ask Claude…
Can I Create a Wikipedia Page for Myself?
The quick answer is yes, you can, but it will be deleted by the powers that be. So, is it worth the trouble? No. Read on for details and my conclusion at the end.
This is what I asked Claude…
Since Wikipedia is so often cited by the AI bots, for someone who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, is it worth the trouble of creating one? What does Wikipedia’s future look like? Will it still be around as a data source in 2 or 3 years?
Claude’s Response
Note: I did edit it somewhat for formatting, legibility, and grammar.
Probably not by hand, and here’s why. Wikipedia has gotten a lot stricter about self-created content in the last year. In August 2025, editors adopted a new speedy-deletion rule (called G15) specifically targeting AI-generated pages, and in March 2026, English Wikipedia voted 44–2 to prohibit using large language models to generate or rewrite article content, with only narrow exceptions for copyediting your own writing or machine-translating an existing article. Reviewers are now actively trained to spot the telltale signs of AI drafting, and pages that show those fingerprints get pulled fast.
On top of that, Wikipedia’s long-standing rules already discourage writing about yourself (conflict-of-interest [COI] guidelines) and require you to clear a “notability” bar. That is independent, substantial coverage in reliable sources, not just your own bio or press releases. If you don’t clear that bar, a self-written page usually gets deleted regardless of AI concerns, and the deletion history itself becomes a public record that can look worse than having no page at all.
So the realistic paths are:
If you genuinely meet notability standards, have someone else write it through normal channels, disclose any COI if you’re involved, and expect real scrutiny. Or…
If you’re not there yet, it’s not worth the effort or risk right now. The upside if you do land a legitimate page is real. Though, research analyzing 680 million AI citations found Wikipedia makes up nearly 48% of ChatGPT’s top-10 cited sources. Therefore, a solid Wikipedia presence genuinely does flow into how AI models describe you.
Will Wikipedia still be around as a data source in 2–3 years?
Almost certainly yes, but its role is shifting. Two things are happening at once:
Traffic is declining. Human traffic fell roughly 8% between May and August 2025 compared to the same period a year earlier, which the Wikimedia Foundation attributes mainly to AI search summaries and social media pulling people away from clicking through to source sites.
But Wikipedia is monetizing that shift rather than just absorbing the loss. In January 2026, around its 25th anniversary, Wikipedia announced AI licensing deals with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, building on an earlier Google deal from 2022. Annual revenue from these AI partnerships could reach tens of millions of dollars, on top of over $150 million in annual donations.
Financially, the Wikimedia Foundation isn’t in crisis. It keeps a working capital reserve equal to 12–18 months of operating expenses, and it’s actively diversifying revenue rather than just hoping donations hold up. There is real organizational strain, though: leadership just turned over (a new CEO, Bernadette Meehan, took over in January 2026), and there’s an open worry about a feedback loop where less traffic means fewer new volunteer editors, which could eventually affect content freshness.
My honest read: Wikipedia isn’t going away in 2–3 years. If anything, it’s becoming more entrenched as backend infrastructure for AI systems rather than less. What’s changing is its relationship with readers: fewer people visiting the site directly, more consuming its content secondhand through AI answers, and Wikipedia leaning into paid enterprise licensing to make that trade work financially. The bigger long-term question isn’t survival, it’s whether that shift erodes the volunteer base that actually keeps the content accurate — since AI still depends on humans writing it in the first place.
A caveat worth flagging: a couple of these (WinBuzzer, MediaNama, WikiBusines) are smaller trade/blog outlets rather than major outlets, so I’d treat specific figures from them as directionally reliable but worth double-checking against the Wikimedia Foundation’s own blog or TechCrunch/Reuters coverage if you’re citing this somewhere yourself.
In Conclusion, don’t bother with Wikipedia. It’s not worth it. Instead, focus on your website, which you own. LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube. They are much easier to work on. In fact, you have more freedom on LinkedIn and YouTube. Reddit is more challenging, but worth it if your topic of expertise is popular and you can add your opinions without being spammy.
Giselle Aguiar is a social media, inbound and content marketing strategist and trainer helping business owners learn how to leverage the power of social media marketing, increase traffic to their websites, generate leads, increase brand awareness and establish themselves as experts in their fields.
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