Edit your charity's entry on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, collaborative encyclopedia that is written by volunteers across the world. In 2008, Wikipedia had 9.5m users in the UK. The site has good rankings on Google, making it the primary source of information on various topics.

Anyone can update Wikipedia, although the site has a policy against allowing people to create entries on themselves, their organisation, or the projects they are involved with. However, I suspect a number of charities have ignored this policy as their Wikipedia entry reads like marketing copy.

The first step is to check Wikipedia to see if there is already an entry on your charity or social enterprise. If there are no entries, it is possible that your organisation does not meet Wikipedia's criteria for Notability - a topic should only have an entry if it has received significant coverage in 'reliable sources' such as books or mainstream newspapers.

If you satisfy this criteria, you can create a page on your organisation by following Wikipedia's instructions. Make sure the entry does not sound like marketing copy and include references. You should declare your Conflict of Interest on your user page and the talk page.

Once you have created a page for your organisation, you can add it to the appropriate Wikipedia category pages. For example, if you are a health charity, you could add your charity to various category pages, such as charities based in England, and health charities in the UK.

If there is already a Wikipedia entry for your charity, see if there is any important information that is incorrect or missing from the page. Edit the page by following Wikipedia's instructions, declaring your conflict of interest and including references.