I think they have a point in that case. You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote. Also, unless your startup is notable it's not supposed to have an article.
"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list... If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article."
However, from my experience in CAD, Wikipedia's notability and importance ratings are strongly skewed towards open-source and against commercial systems.
No disrespect meant to the FreeCAD folks, but that is definitely back-to-front! The article on Solidworks lists 165,000 companies using the product as of 2013. How is that low-importance?
The skew tends to be even worse against enterprise class systems.
Those importance ratings are utterly unimportant. In the vast majority of cases, they are just the opinion of a single editor who looked at the article for 10 seconds, and they only affect how the article is listed in some automated report that nobody ever looks at.
> You didn't have any interest in contributing until you had a startup you needed to promote.
That's one explanation of the facts but it's not the only one. Any new user is likely to start out by contributing on topics close to them - places they've worked, technologies they've worked with, etc.
If employees aren't allowed to make articles on their employers then that's that. But treating a new account differently than an old one is just assuming bad faith.
I actually had been contributing small edits for grammar anonymously for a while, and was interested in getting more involved in Wikipedia. My intention wasn't to promote my employer, I just thought it met the notability requirements.
Additionally, "referenced some news articles" is not sufficient for notability because most startup coverage is PR [1]. Unfortunately, when you get genuine independent journalism, it is also not positive coverage (e.g. Theranos, Magic Leap).
"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list... If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Whether_t...