If you are trying to boost your online reputation, then you know that having a quality listing on Wikipedia is one of the first steps. And how do you find that quality listing, we’ll Ann Smarty over at Search Engine Journal had a great post today about 3 Wikipedia tools she uses. We tested them and here are our findings….

First of all, I like how Ann opens up her post, “Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is a widely used, vigorously discussed and actively updated reference resource.” True, sometimes we hate it and you know what I’m talking about if you’ve followed our WikiGate situation this past summer.

But enough about our disdain for Wikipedia and on to reviewing tools that can make your entries top notch.

The first tool is one that I’ve covered on Reputation-Watch before but it’s still worthy to discuss again – Wikipedia Article Statistics. In the spirit of the upcoming election, I’ve tested “Obama” and “McCain”to see which entry gets the most views. This can be really helpful for you if you can get listed on an entry that gets good traffic and has high rankings.

Sadly, Sarah Palin had more views last month and was ranked higher than both – she came in 7th, where Obama was 22nd and McCain 39th.

The second tool is Similpedia, and as the name implies this tool will help you find similar content on Wikipedia. Just type in some content or a url and this tool will give you a list of Wikipedia entries related. They also have a widget (who doesn’t these days!). Very helpful when you want to cross link and cross reference entries.

The third tool is Deletionpedia, which claims to have an archive of about 63,505 pages which have been deleted from Wikipedia. Ann points out a great use for this tool by using it as a trend tracker and watching pages that have had over 200 edits. These pages are supposed to be pretty hot. 

So by using these tools and following our advice on Wikipedia best practices, you might get some good rankings and traffic from Wikipedia.