Contributing to Wikipedia Again
Just like we did for Merchant Accounts, we’ve contributed to Wikipedia once again. Wikipedia now features an article for Authorize.net.
It was surprising that an article did not exist for them prior to this entry but while trying to create this article it became apparent why. We first submitted this article a few days ago and was writing a blog post about it when it got marked for “quick deletion”. They cited too much of the information matched the content on the Authorize.net website. That’s a fair enough reason to delete it so it was rewritten to not include any content from the Authorize.net website. It didn’t make a difference. Whomever deleted the article didn’t bother to check to see if the content was corrected (in Wikipedia you can provide notes for an article so editors can collaborate and discuss an article. The notes for this article clearly explained what happened but apparently the editor whom deleted the article didn’t read it or didn’t care).
Well, you can’t let one lazy person ruin it for everyone so we resubmitted the article with original content. It got marked for “quick deletion” again. This time it was cited as not showing that Authorize.net was a worthy enough company to warrant an article about it. So we did some research and found that if you can provide enough evidence, usually through media reports, then the listing can stay. So we added media reports showing the importance of Authorize.net (and we added a note of course). Didn’t matter. The editor deleted it instantly.
Fortunately we’re persistent here and were going to allow a couple of lazy editors to ruin a good thing. So, armed with more experience, we wrote the Authorize.net listing to include the media reports. It has been published and now the powers that be at Wikipedia seem to be happy with our submission. Naturally we’re going to keep an eye on it to make sure they don’t delete it from under our feet but if they haven’t marked it for deletion yet I feel pretty good about our chances.
In the future it would be good to have a time line of the company’s history listed. They have one on the Authorize.net website but we can’t use it as it copyrighted material. One day maybe we can go through their press releases and news stories to make our own time line.
October 2nd, 2023 at 7:40 am
Having seen a bunch of very small, unknown gateways having pages on there, it is surprising to hear that they denied authorize.net. I think it was probably a case of an editor having a complete lack of knowledge on the subject.