Start with the literal answer: yes, you can. No Wikipedia rule forbids creating an article about yourself. The guideline that governs the situation, WP:AUTOBIOGRAPHY, calls writing an autobiography "strongly discouraged" — which is policy language for permitted, with a warning attached, not for banned. Anyone can register an account, open a draft, and start typing. With a declared conflict of interest and the right submission route, a self-written article can, in principle, be accepted.
In practice, the odds are stacked against you before you write a word, and the failure mode is public. This guide covers the narrow question — a page about you, written by you: what the policy says, why self-written pages fail at a high rate, the decision tree, and what to build instead if the honest answer is "not yet."
Two adjacent questions have their own guides. If you are still deciding whether you, your founder, or your company qualifies at all, read Wikipedia for companies vs founders vs public figures. If a page about you already exists and you want to change it, that is a different problem with its own failure chain — read why you shouldn't edit your own Wikipedia page before touching anything.
What the policy actually says
Three layers of policy apply, and none contains an outright ban.
The autobiography guideline. WP:AUTOBIOGRAPHY treats writing about yourself as a textbook case of conflict-of-interest editing and strongly discourages it. The reasoning is structural, not moral: it is genuinely hard to write about yourself with the neutrality and proportion an encyclopedia requires — which achievements feel central, which criticism feels unfair, which sources feel authoritative. Its standing advice: if you are truly notable, someone else will eventually write the article without you.
The conflict-of-interest guideline. WP:COI says editors with a stake in a subject "are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly, and can propose changes on article talk pages instead." You are the maximal case. Nobody has a stronger stake in an article about you than you do.
The sanctioned route. If you proceed anyway, the compliant path is to disclose the conflict on your user page and the draft, then submit through Articles for Creation (AfC) — a review queue where an independent editor checks the draft against notability and sourcing standards before it goes live. AfC is the route Wikipedia recommends for conflicted creators. It is slower than publishing directly, and that is the point.
Above all three sits the gate that actually decides the outcome: WP:GNG, the general notability guideline. It asks for significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of you, and it notes that even strong coverage "creates an assumption, not a guarantee" of an article. Who writes the page changes the risk. It never changes the bar.
Why autobiographies go wrong
Four mechanisms, each compounding the others.
A conflict of interest by definition. On Wikipedia, COI is about the relationship, not your intent. An autobiography is the one article where the conflict cannot be argued away — subject and author are the same person. Every editorial judgment you make is suspect by default, including the honest ones.
Neutrality blindness. Self-written drafts fail neutrality in ways their authors cannot see. The tell is rarely a false claim; it is selection and framing — the award listed, the lawsuit omitted, the adjectives that read as fact to you and as advertising to a reviewer. Independent editors fix this by not caring how the subject feels about the result. You cannot replicate that from inside.
The notability mirror problem. The hardest one. An autobiography requires you to judge your own sources, and almost nobody can. The coverage people are proudest of — interviews, their own columns, funding announcements, the podcast circuit — is mostly non-independent in Wikipedia's eyes, because it originates with you or transmits your words. What counts is coverage about you that you did not initiate and do not control: a journalist-written profile, a critical feature, an award with genuine editorial selection. People reliably overvalue the first kind and overestimate how much of the second they have. The mirror flatters.
The autobiography premium on scrutiny. A new account whose first contribution is a biography matching its own username is one of the most recognizable patterns on the platform, and reviewers treat it accordingly. The draft is read more skeptically because it is an autobiography: sources get checked harder, tone gets parsed line by line, and borderline calls go against you. A marginal subject written up by a stranger might survive review. The same subject, self-written, usually does not.
The decision tree
Run this in order and stop at the first instruction that fits.
| Step | Question | If yes | If no |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Are you notable under WP:GNG? Can you name two or three in-depth, journalist-written pieces about you — not interviews, not your posts, not press releases? | Go to step 2 | Stop. No author and no route fixes missing sources — see "what to build instead" below |
| 2 | Could the page happen without you? Is your coverage prominent enough that an uninvolved editor plausibly writes it? | Wait. Organic creation is the strongest, most stable outcome | Go to step 3 |
| 3 | Still set on writing it yourself? | Disclose the COI, submit through AfC, accept the reviewer's verdict — never publish directly | Go to step 4 |
| 4 | Worth doing professionally? Do you want the notability case tested and the draft built by someone without a stake? | Use a disclosed professional working within WP:PAID and the same review gates | The honest answer is "not yet" — build sources first |
The three legitimate paths
Path 1 — wait for organic creation. If your coverage is strong, the cheapest and most durable page is the one you never commission. Articles created by uninvolved editors start with clean histories, attract less suspicion, and survive deletion debates better. The cost is control over timing — and that is the only cost.
Path 2 — write it yourself, disclosed, through AfC. Compliant, and slow. Declare the conflict, draft as if you were a stranger, source every sentence to independent coverage, and submit. Expect review queues measured in weeks and a rejection rate unkind to autobiographies. If the reviewer declines on notability, believe them — resubmitting the same case rarely changes the verdict.
Path 3 — a disclosed professional. The Wikimedia Terms of Use permit paid editing when the editor discloses who pays and who benefits, and routes work through the same independent review as everyone else. The value of a legitimate operator is not access — no honest one has any — but judgment: reading your sources the way a reviewer will, declining cases that will not pass, and drafting in the register that survives scrutiny. That assessment-first approach is how our Wikipedia page creation service works, and for executives and founders, the public-figure track covers the biography-specific risks.
What a failed vanity page actually costs
This is the part most guides soften, so here it is plainly. When a self-written page is challenged, the venue is Articles for Deletion — a public discussion, permanently archived, in which strangers debate whether you matter, by name, with reasons. "Non-notable entrepreneur" and "promotional autobiography" are standard phrasings in those verdicts. Anyone who later searches your name on Wikipedia — a journalist, an investor, a due-diligence team — can find the discussion.
The deletion compounds: recreating a deleted article is harder than creating one fresh, since sufficiently similar drafts can be removed speedily by reference to the first debate. A premature autobiography does not just fail — it leaves a public record that your notability was examined and found wanting. As reputation building, it is the exact opposite of the goal.
Not notable yet: what to build instead
If step 1 of the tree stopped you, the work is upstream of Wikipedia.
- Earned coverage. The only input that moves the verdict: independent journalists choosing to write about you in depth. Awards with editorial selection, profiles, substantive features — typically 6–18 months of deliberate work, not a transaction.
- A Wikidata item. Wikipedia's structured-data sister project has a lower inclusion bar. A properly sourced item establishes you as a machine-readable entity — feeding knowledge panels and AI answers — without the notability exposure of a premature article.
- Re-assess on evidence. When new coverage exists, rerun the tree honestly, or have someone without a stake run it for you.
That last clause is the whole problem with autobiographies: you cannot referee your own case. Our Notability Audit (from €490, credited toward any project) reads your real sources against WP:GNG the way a reviewer would, and tells you which path — wait, AfC, professional, or not yet — your evidence actually supports. At WikiBusines we would rather say "not yet" before you spend than defend a vanity page after it fails.