Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not the place to post your résumé

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Note: This essay is meant to convey a serious message, but it is also meant to be satirical and humorous. It is not meant to be used intentionally or unintentionally to bite the newbies. If you are new to Wikipedia and have been referred here, then please first check out WP:PROMOTION, WP:NOTADVERTISING, WP:COI, WP:AUTOBIO, WP:N, WP:NFT, WP:OWN, and WP:BAI for all of the policy-based reasons why it is inappropriate to post your résumé on Wikipedia. If you've already read those and are interested in a somewhat harsher explanation, or are an experienced Wikipedian looking for a good laugh, then read on brave soldier!


Many editors who have spent a significant amount of time participating in AfD discussions or looking at the list of new pages have seen that people occasionally post their résumés or curricula vitae on Wikipedia. These aren't our good old-fashioned vanity pages, which at least have the decency to masquerade as genuine encyclopedia articles. Some don't even pretend to belong in an encyclopedia. These résumé-posting editors create a page about themselves and post a detailed CV or résumé, or upload a PDF file of it (seriously!). Often, these lists of accomplishments state that the subject is a well-respected scholar or the recipient of some highly prestigious award or that the subject is otherwise supposed to be really, really cool.

Let it be put plainly and simply: if you were so cool, you wouldn't have to post your résumé on Wikipedia. If you were that cool, you'd at least be good enough for Monster.com. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, not a place for you to post your résumé. If that much isn't clear, then I seriously doubt that you are the Distinguished Professor of Complicated Stuff at the University of Smartsylvania (and if you are, that speaks volumes about the academic standards at the University of Smartsylvania).

Laying aside the obvious conflict of interest (read: VANITY) and advertising implications, posting your résumé to Wikipedia is just plain foolish, for the following reasons:

  1. Nobody's going to read your résumé on Wikipedia because people come here looking for information about mastodons, JavaScript, and Stephen Colbert, not for people with delusions of grandeur.
  2. If people do read your résumé, they're not going to hire you, because nobody wants to hire anybody so desperate as to post their résumé on Wikipedia (and, yes, this also applies to those of you looking to get hired by Wikimedia who think posting on Wikipedia will score you points with Jimbo).
  3. If you're not looking for a job and instead are looking for international recognition, you may find it here, but for all of the wrong reasons. Your résumé will get deleted and then all of the newspapers in Smartsylvania will laugh their heads off at you, which in turn will lead to the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse laughing at you, which will make you the laughing stock of the world. (Actually, none of those things will occur, because nobody in this world will know you exist. If you really want international recognition, we recommend actually going out and accomplishing some of those things that you claim to do on your résumé or CV. Then, international recognition will come to you, whether you post your résumé on Wikipedia or not.)
  4. Wikipedia is, by definition, the "online encyclopedia that anybody can edit". Nobody "owns" any Wikipedia page and anybody can edit any page. Thus, putting your résumé on Wikipedia invites people to mercilessly add and remove important stuff from your CV. And nothing looks worse than lies"[citation needed]" next to awards you've received.

So, seriously. Please don't post your résumé on Wikipedia. Most people don't know it's there and those who do know either don't care (because there's much more interesting vanispamcruftisement out there) or only care enough to get your résumé speedily deleted with extreme prejudice and then write a Wikipedia essay about their experience. If you're so interested in writing a résumé, then show or send it to a friend, boss, manager, or anyone else you know. Just don't post it here.

See also[edit]

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