About the Wizards

Wizards of Wiki began life as a marketing company called Jive Pepper. The initial agency focused on social media, website development and finally Wikipedia. This all began in October 2011, with Wikipedia becoming the strongest service of the three in late 2012. This led to spinning the service out into its own brand, Wizards of Wiki. These dates and most importantly the foundation date of Wizards of Wiki can be traced back using Wayback Machine here.

Since the creation of Wizards of Wiki, the agency has played a major role in shaping the industry of paid Wikipedia editing. During the 2010s, Wikipedia and the PR industry went through an uncomfortable period. Numerous large PR firms and specialist Wikipedia editing agencies were caught in the crosshairs by the Wikimedia Foundation as can be seen here. Despite these problems, Wizards of Wiki navigated this turbulent period of reform of the encyclopedia unscathed, and most importantly, so did our clients.

In 2014, Wikipedia began to reform the way it asked PR firms to interact with Wikipedia. Our founder was one of many who offered assistance into how this reform could take place. The result was a change in Wikipedia rules, and also a statement from a number of US-based PR firms, known as CREWE.

Our founder Mark Bray disagreed with this approach, believing that mass paid editing from one account could lead to abuse of power by Wikipedia editors, especially if a particular agency became too big. Therefore Mark shifted his approach from content marketing to consultancy. In late 2014, Wizards of Wiki became the first Wikipedia consultancy, as seen here by our change in website language and page titles. Others soon followed our approach, but many today still focus purely on content marketing, ran from one or two Wikipedia accounts.

After the dust had settled from the PR-fallout between 2013-14, Mark built today what is one of the most respected Wikipedia agencies globally. We help and assist with creation, editing and management of Wikipedia pages for some of the world’s most influential people and corporations. In 2016, Mark conducted his first major media interview with The Financial Times. This followed in 2019 with an interview with Entrepreneur magazine about the dos and donts on Wikipedia.

Today, Wikipedia is on the verge of its next big crisis - unethical black hat editing. While black hat editing works in some scenarios, Wikipedia now has a way of ethically editing Wikipedia and that method for consultants who know how Wikipedia works can get results. The growth of the industry has led to an influx of shady businesses offering Wikipedia services that are often impossible to deliver. While our founder Mark Bray created the modern day Wikipedia consultancy, it seems that we’re currently in the age of Wikipedia fixers, that operate in the shadows and are proud of their unethical approach. For this reason, we ask every client to not only research us thoroughly, but anyone they deal with in the industry.

One of the most valuable lessons we have learnt since 2012 is quality is better than quantity when it comes to Wikipedia clients. We focus heavily on building strong relationships rather than quickly putting a page live within 5 days of an introductory email or inquiry. Since we establish strong relationships and aren’t a generic online service, we don’t receive bad reviews, but we don’t receive good ones either! We never push for reviews or share experiences of one client with another. We take your privacy very seriously.

So why is privacy still so important - especially in a world of declaring conflict of interests on Wikipedia? The reality is, Wikipedia still don’t assume good faith when it comes to paid editing. Our founder is a firm believer that each PR firm involved on Wikipedia is one mistake away from serious repercussions or even an outright ban. Wikipedia also has previous. In 2016, a major person in the ethical Wikipedia editing movement was criticised heavily and narrowly avoided a ban after one innocent mistake. When you have dozens of clients relying on you for advice and guidance, that format just doesn’t work for large operations.

For this reason, we pride ourselves on having an end date with every client we deal with, where they can essentially become self sufficient in editing Wikipedia internally. Just like any consultant, the consultancy service will eventually come to an end when we have taught you everything the client needs to know.

We don’t ask for reviews, we don’t share clients details, we pride ourselves on the day when thousands of companies and individuals know exactly how to interact with Wikipedia. The only way that can be done in our opinion is through private consultancy interactions, not mass paid editing from one account on Wikipedia.

Mark Bray is the founder and senior editor at Wizards of Wiki. He prides himself in being involved in nearly every project we take on, since relationships with clients are incredibly important in the world of consultancy. Mark started editing Wikipedia as a University student nearly two decades ago. While the encyclopedia was first starting to grow, Mark spotted many sports pages needed populating. As a volunteer, he spent many late evenings editing Wikipedia sports pages instead of focusing on his Marketing degree assignments.

After heading up a Marketing & Communications department for a procurement software firm, Mark started Wizards of Wiki in 2012. After a decade moulding the industry to what it is today, he has featured in the press numerous times to talk about Wikipedia. He hopes in years to come to continue his role as an unofficial ambassador of neutral information online, especially with recent developments squeezing how the truth is portrayed online.

When Mark isn’t working on encyclopedic projects, he’s enjoying sport, traveling with his family or going for long walks with the family dog, Ted.