It is not uncommon for governments, celebrities, and private corporations to have questions regarding information about them on Wikipedia. A European company that sells cleaning products reached out to the Wikimedia Foundation in November 2020 to ask us to remove content from Wikipedia. Their brand name was repeatedly used in multiple French Wikipedia articles, as well as on French Wiktionary, to refer to certain types of cleaning products, instead of being used only to refer to the company’s own products. The company was therefore concerned the name was being used generically; this happens when a brand name becomes so identified with a product that people tend to call any product of that type, regardless of maker, by the brand name. The Foundation team explained that, while a company cannot stop the public from using a brand name to refer to products generally, they were welcome to address the issue on the article’s talk page.
