It’s frustrating to see outdated information about your university on the web, especially if it appears at the top of Google search results, in the AI overview, a rich snippet or another feature of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
The culprit, in many cases, is Wikipedia, which Google and generative AI platforms routinely scrape for information.
Your first impulse may be to edit the sourced Wikipedia page directly, but that might not be the best idea. Learning Wikipedia's editing policies will help you understand why.
Employees don’t count as objective sources
This isn’t an isolated problem. The Chronicle recently wrote about the ongoing issue of higher education grappling with Wikipedia’s strict rules on sourcing and edits.
Long story short, Wikipedia doesn’t consider university employees as objective sources. Any information you edit directly will likely be changed back quickly if it’s not from a credible secondary source (like a news organization or journal).
This may sound contradictory, but it exists for a good reason. As the article in The Chronicle points out, some higher-ed employees have tried to use Wikipedia to promote their institution by inserting brand language or deleting negative information.
Wikipedia takes its neutrality seriously, and that effort has directly led to more trust from readers.
Remember, Wikipedia has no centralized editorial board and is completely volunteer-run, so requests for edits don’t have a definitive timeline.
Requesting a Wikipedia edit
The best way to correct outdated information on Wikipedia is by requesting an edit. See the steps below:
1. Create an account
The first step is to create a Wikipedia account. Otherwise, you won’t receive a notification when someone replies to your request.
2. Click on the page's Talk tab
Once your account is set up, go to the page you want updated and click the Talk tab near the top of the page.
The Talk page is for discussing improvements to the page itself, not a forum to explore the topic at hand.
3. Start a New Topic
Once you’re on the Talk page, click the link in the top left corner to start a new topic.
State any conflicts of interest
Be sure to clearly explain the edit you’re requesting and provide a secondary source for any information you’ve provided. You need to state your conflict of interest as a university employee requesting an edit to a page related to your university.
It may not seem like a big deal to leave out your university affiliation if it’s just to correct outdated information, but Wikipedia takes potential conflicts of interest very seriously.
Wikipedia tracks the IP address of anyone who requests an edit. They can match your request to your place of employment, and any lack of transparency when making a request may result in your account being banned, as seen in The Chronicle article.
You can easily avoid this by using the {COI} template when requesting an edit.
Example of a COI edit request
While you don't need to follow the exact wording in the introduction, try to organize the request with the same format as what text you want edited, what to replace it with, the reason why and an external reference supporting the change.
Be proactive
The best approach is to stay ahead of potential problems. If you keep your content, especially profiles, up to date, anyone using your page as a primary source for Wikipedia will have the correct information.