You spend an afternoon building a Wikidata item for your company. You add the founding date, the headquarters, the CEO, the industry, the official website, and links to your LinkedIn and Crunchbase pages. Three weeks later the item is gone. The deletion log says “does not meet the notability policy,” and nobody emailed you.
This happens constantly, and almost always for the same reason: the item described a real entity, but the only evidence for it came from the entity itself. Wikidata notability is a lower bar than Wikipedia’s, but it is still a bar, and it is enforced by volunteers who see thousands of promotional items a month.
This guide explains the three criteria in plain language, what kind of reference holds up, what gets deleted and why, and how to check an item before you publish it.
The three criteria in plain English
The Wikidata notability policy opens by stating two goals: to support Wikimedia projects and to act as a general knowledge base for the world at large. It then says “an item is acceptable if and only if it fulfills at least one of these two goals; that is, if it meets at least one of the three criteria below.” Here are those criteria, paraphrased closely.
First, the item contains at least one valid sitelink to a page on a Wikimedia project, such as Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikispecies or Wikimedia Commons. Drafts, user pages and talk pages do not count. If the link is to a template, the item needs at least two such sitelinks.
Second, the item “refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity that can be described using serious and publicly available references.”
Third, the item “fulfills a structural need, for example: it is needed to make statements made in other items more useful.”
Meeting any one is enough. That is why Wikidata holds well over 100 million items, far more than any language edition of Wikipedia has articles. A scientific paper, a street, a painting in a museum collection or a minor company can all qualify without an encyclopedia article.
The policy is also openly flexible. It says the guidelines “are intentionally left a bit vague,” that anyone can launch a request for deletion in a dispute, and that “the final decision is always up to the community.”
Criterion two is where businesses and people live
If you do not have a Wikipedia article, criterion one is out. Criterion three rarely applies to a company or a person on its own. That leaves criterion two, and it has two parts worth separating.
“Clearly identifiable” means the entity is distinct and unambiguous. A registered company with a legal name, a jurisdiction and a registration number is clearly identifiable. A side project with a logo and a landing page often is not.
“Serious and publicly available references” is the part that decides most cases. It means sources a stranger can find and check, produced by someone other than the subject, with some editorial or institutional standard behind them. Editors debating the policy in a 2026 request for comment pointed out that the wording uses the plural, references, which suggests more than one source is expected. In practice, an item backed by a single source is fragile.
Put simply, Wikidata notability for a company without a Wikipedia article comes down to one question: has anyone credible, other than you, written about this entity in a way a stranger could verify?
This is where the scenario at the top of this article went wrong. The company was clearly identifiable. But a company website, a LinkedIn page and a self-written Crunchbase profile are not independent references. They prove the company exists. They do not show that anyone outside the company has described it.
What counts as a serious, publicly available reference
Think of references in three tiers, from strongest to weakest for notability purposes.
The strongest tier is independent coverage and institutional records. News and feature articles in established publications, with real editorial oversight, count. So do official registries such as a national company register or a securities filing system, library authority files like the Library of Congress or VIAF, academic catalogs, museum collection records, and government databases. These sources describe the entity without the entity controlling the words.
The middle tier is semi-independent material. Trade publication profiles, conference speaker pages, award listings from recognized bodies, and directory entries maintained by a third party sit here. They can support notability, especially in combination, but on their own they may not persuade a skeptical editor.
The weakest tier is self-published. Your website, your press releases on a wire service, your social profiles and your own Crunchbase or Wikidata-adjacent profiles belong here. Wikidata welcomes them as sources for specific facts, such as an official website or a founding date the company states. They do not establish notability.
One more distinction matters: a reference should describe the entity, not just mention it. A news article quoting your CEO for one line in a story about an industry trend is weaker than an article about your company. Several passing mentions can add up, but one substantive piece is worth more than five name-drops.
What gets deleted, and why
Wikidata’s deletion policy lists the grounds for deleting an item. The item does not meet the notability requirements. The item is clearly vandalism. The item contains no data or is blank. And, finally, “any other common-sense reason for deletion not listed above.” Deletion happens after discussion on Wikidata:Requests for deletions leads to consensus, and only administrators can carry it out.
In practice, the items that get flagged share a few traits.
Self-sourced company and personal items are the largest group. An item for a small agency, a startup or a consultant with no references beyond the subject’s own pages gets nominated quickly, often by editors who patrol new items.
Promotional language is the second trigger. Descriptions like “leading provider of innovative solutions” signal that the creator is marketing, not documenting. Wikidata descriptions are meant to be short and neutral, along the lines of “American software company” or “British marketing consultant.”
Orphaned items come third. An item that nothing links to, with few statements and no identifiers, looks like it serves no one.
And mass creation draws attention. The policy notes that items for non-subpages “can be created with only one sitelink, but shouldn’t be created in great numbers.” Batches of thinly sourced items created by one account invite a closer look at all of them.
Enforcement may also tighten. In April 2026, an editor filed a bot request asking for an administrator bot that would periodically delete items that are surely non-notable under defined criteria. Whether or not that bot runs, the direction is clear: low-evidence items have a shorter life expectancy than they used to.
Structural need: the overlooked door
Criterion three gets little attention from marketers, but it explains why some items with modest sourcing survive.
An item fulfills a structural need when other items depend on it. If a notable person’s item says they are the founder of a company, the company’s item may be justified because it makes that statement meaningful. If a notable book’s item lists its publisher, the publisher needs an item for the statement to point to. The same logic applies to parent companies, subsidiaries, awards, and places.
This is not a loophole. Structural items still need to be accurate and should still carry references where possible. But it means the strength of an item often depends on its connections. An item that sits in a web of well-referenced neighbors is in a much safer position than one that stands alone.
The Reference Stack Score: a pre-submit check
Before we create or edit an item for a client, we run a quick test we call the Reference Stack Score. Score each reference you plan to use, then add them up.
Give three points to each independent, substantive source: a feature article about the entity in an established publication, an entry in a national registry, a library authority record, or an academic catalog entry. Give two points to each semi-independent source: a trade publication profile, a recognized award listing, or a third-party database entry. Give one point to each substantive passing mention in an independent source. Give zero points to self-published sources, however many you have.
Then read the total. Six or more points, with at least one three-point source, means the item has a solid case under criterion two. Three to five points means it may survive, but it is exposed to a deletion request, and you should build more coverage before you rely on it. Below three means do not create the item yet.
The score is not a Wikidata rule. It is a way to make an editor’s judgment visible before an editor makes it for you. It also tells you what to work on. An entity scoring two points does not need a better Wikidata item. It needs to earn independent coverage first.
How to build an item that survives review
Once an entity clears the bar, the way the item is built still affects whether it lasts. Editors who patrol new items look at a handful of signals in the first few seconds.
Start with search. Use Wikidata’s search box and check alternate names, former names and spellings in other languages. Duplicates are a common reason for cleanup, and merging two thin items is more work for editors than finding one good one.
Write the label and description the way Wikidata does. The label is the entity’s common name. The description is a short, neutral phrase that distinguishes it from similarly named items, such as “Canadian public relations firm” or “American journalist, born 1981.” No adjectives, no claims, no slogans. If your description would look at home on a sales page, rewrite it.
Add the core statements with references attached to each one. For a company, that usually means instance of (business or enterprise, or a more specific class), country, headquarters location, inception date, founder, industry, and official website. For a person, instance of human, citizenship, occupation, employer and date of birth where it is public and appropriate. Every statement that can carry a reference should carry one, and the strongest references should sit on the statements an editor is most likely to question.
Add external identifiers. These are the fields that connect the item to other databases: a national company registry number, an ISNI or VIAF identifier, a Library of Congress authority ID, an ORCID for researchers, and so on. Identifiers from independent institutions do double duty, because they both make the item more useful and serve as evidence that the entity exists outside its own marketing.
Connect the item. Link it to related items where the relationship is real and documented: the founder’s item, a parent company, a notable product, an award received. Connections are what turn a standalone item into part of the graph, and they bring the structural need criterion into play.
Finally, disclose any conflict of interest. If you work for the company or were paid to create the item, say so on your user page. Wikidata does not ban editing about your own employer, but undisclosed paid editing erodes trust quickly, and editors notice patterns.
Why this matters for AI search
Wikidata matters to marketers today because it feeds systems far beyond Wikipedia. Its data is openly licensed and widely reused. Google folded the old Freebase project into Wikidata in the mid-2010s, search engines draw on it to understand entities, and it appears in the training and retrieval data behind many AI tools.
When an AI assistant answers “who founded this company” or “what does this firm do,” structured, referenced data about the entity helps it answer correctly and consistently. A well-referenced Wikidata item, connected to identifiers like an official website, a company registry number and social profiles, gives those systems a clean anchor.
That is also why chasing an item before you are notable backfires. A deleted item gives you nothing, and a pattern of deleted items under your name can make editors skeptical of future attempts. The durable sequence runs the other way: earn independent coverage, document it, and let the Wikidata item follow the evidence.
Run the Reference Stack Score on your company today. If it comes back under six, you know exactly what the next quarter of PR work is for.