A subject we worked with, an accomplished research engineer, drafted her own Wikipedia article herself: patents, one sentence per role, dates checked twice. Every claim was accurate and cited to something real. The draft was declined anyway, and not for anything she had written incorrectly.
Wikipedia's guidance on this is direct: editing an article about yourself is strongly discouraged, whether or not what you write is true. The objection is not to inaccuracy. Reviewers assume, correctly in most cases, that a subject can be accurate about themselves. What is out of reach, writing from inside your own account, is the selection an outside editor would make without ever noticing it as a choice.
Editing an article about yourself, especially in a promotional manner, constitutes a conflict of interest and is very strongly discouraged.
The engineer's draft was accurate in every sentence and still shaped like a résumé, because a résumé is what a person writes when asked to describe their own career. Without noticing, she had ordered her achievements by the ones she was proudest of rather than the ones independent sources had covered at length, left out a project that ended badly even though it had been reported on, and given a single line to a controversy that had, in fact, produced most of the independent coverage a reviewer would go looking for. None of this was dishonest. It was simply what anyone does describing themselves, and no fact-check catches it, because every individual sentence stays true.
The fix was not to correct her draft. It was to set it aside and start again from what independent, published sources had actually reported, in the order and proportion those sources gave it, written by someone with no stake in how the résumé should sound. The engineer disclosed her involvement, as required, and submitted the result through an edit request rather than editing the page directly, the same route we recommend to any client with a financial or personal connection to the subject.
What changed was not the facts. It was who decided which facts mattered enough to include, and that decision, we have found, is one a subject is structurally unable to make about themselves, however honest the attempt.
