A founder came to us convinced he was already on Wikipedia. The year before, an agency had promised him "Wikipedia visibility," and Google had obliged: a knowledge panel now sat beside his search results, his photograph, his title, a short paragraph of biography. He forwarded a screenshot as proof the job was done.
It was not a Wikipedia article. No page existed under his name on the English Wikipedia, or on any other language edition. What fed the panel was a Wikidata item, an entry on Wikipedia's sister project, citing his own company website as its only source. Google's panel had simply read it, the way it reads structured data from dozens of databases every day.
Wikidata and Wikipedia share a foundation and a login system, and little else that matters here. Wikipedia decides what belongs in an encyclopedia article by asking whether independent, reliable sources chose, unprompted, to write about a subject in some depth. Wikidata asks something much smaller: whether an entity can be identified and described using at least one public reference, including a subject's own site. An agency can build a Wikidata item for almost anyone in an afternoon. Getting an article past a Wikipedia deletion discussion is a different undertaking entirely.
An item is includable if it refers to an identifiable conceptual or material entity and can be described using serious and publicly available references. Notability requirements on other Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia, do not apply here.
The confusion runs in both directions. A Wikidata item is not evidence that a Wikipedia article would survive review, and losing one to deletion says nothing about a subject's actual standing either. They are separate projects, judged by separate volunteers against separate rules that were never written to agree with each other. We have watched agencies sell a knowledge panel as proof of placement on Wikipedia. We have also watched anxious clients read a deleted Wikidata item as a verdict on their Wikipedia prospects, when the two communities had never discussed the case at all.
What we ask clients to check now is simple: open the exact page you were told you are on. wikipedia.org, not wikidata.org, and not a search engine's side panel assembled from either. A knowledge panel can be a pleasant side effect of coverage that already exists elsewhere. It is never the coverage itself, and it was never the article.
