Pickypedia

As a marketing communications professional, I am always interested to learn how to get more people to see the message. On the internet, one way to improve that chance is to climb to the top of the search engine pages.

Giving myself a break from teaching myself HTML, I thought I would toss together a page about my church on Wikipedia. How much would a link from a huge website like Wikipedia improve my church's PageRank, so that more people would find the church?

Ha! You don't quickly assemble a Wikipedia page, I learned. It took me several hours, during which time I fretted that Wikipedia's editors would toss out my work. Wikipedia has standards. It wants to be an objective encyclopedia, not a forum for organizations to promote themselves.

The organization must be notable in some way. Fortunately, my church has some architecturally significant windows, and photos of the same. So my article discusses the granite and glass, but not the fellowship and spiritual support that I find there.

As much as the Wikipedia article leaves out, if it helps one person find the church and provokes him or her to visit, I have done a good thing.