Wikipedia talk:Companies, corporations and economic information/Notability and inclusion guidelines/Archive

message: I move that Wikipedia:Companies, corporations and economic information/Notability and inclusion guidelines be adopted as an official Wikipedia policy. 24.54.208.177 01:48, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, cool. That was my vague opinion after just glancing at the proposal. For PSU's, can we have a simple criterion which says, The company is a statutory company (ie., bought into existence by legislation). Of course, I think the first criterion should satisfy most companies. Pamri • Talk 12:14, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

text: I'm concerned about the second section (products and services). particularly "The product or service has been the subject of published works whose source is independent of the company itself," which seems to me to be a loophole through which one could drive a truck, since (for example) specialty magazines will routinely carry articles on _many_ small companies. You can make a case for including the top three bicycle companies (say) even if they're not huge companies, but a cycling magazine is likely to carry articles that mention dozens of brands, ditto a snowboarding magazine, a photography magazine, etc. Now in many, many cases those articles will just happen to be about brands that coincidentally have ads in the magazine in which the articles appear, but on the face of it they are not press releases or advertising themselves. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:04, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

text: What does "The company holds more than a 20% share in the market area that it competes in" mean? I see that OwenX cites this provisional policy here and says "a hospital with 230 beds and 900 babies delivered each year will more than likely" qualify as notable under this proposal. Does this mean that "the market area" means only the local community served by any small company? That is, would Dick's Supermarket in Lancaster, Wisconsin count (because Lancaster, Wisconsin, a town of 3,000, is served by only one grocery store which therefore has almost 100% of the market)? If this is the interpretation, it seems a little out of scale with the criterion that "The company has more than one million customers," and it seems as if the number of companies qualifying under the "20% share" criterion would be several orders of magnitude higher than those qualifying under any of the other criteria. Dpbsmith (talk) 14:46, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Is there a second?

message: We had a request for a second and much discussion.  I think the current proposal address most, if not all, of the concerns raised so I'll second making this an official Wikipedia policy.  Vegaswikian 18:45, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Is there a second?

message: I have temporarily removed these two bullets from the inclusion criteria.  Vegaswikian argues above that this is a sufficient threshold for inclusion.  I'm afraid I have to disagree.  Lots of companies sell their shares on a public exchange yet are in no way notable.  There are some incredibly small companies listed on very small exchanges - so small that we can not write a non-stub article that is functionally verifiable.  While some of those very small companies are notable, it is not true that all of them are.
I also have concerns with how that standard would be interpreted given changes in listings.  If my family business gets listed, sells a few shares, then falls below one of the exchange's criteria and gets de-listed, does that mean we now have to delete the article or that we never should have had the article?  I would argue for the latter.  I bought stock in an internet company that tanked.  It's still around but now it's a penny stock - no longer available on any exchange (though it is still available over-the-counter).  It definitely does not deserve an article in its current state and in hindsight never deserved an article when it was listed.
Vegaswikian does make an argument above that we should set the bar low to be consistent with the standard he/she sees in other situations.  The fact that we incorrectly set low standards for other situations is not, in my mind, a good reason to make the same mistake here.  Let's set the right standard (whatever we finally decide) and then try to bring the other situations up to the same standard.  Rossami (talk) 20:05, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is "being a listed company" sufficient? 

message: I added as a notability criterion:
# The company has more than one million customers.
205.217.105.2 20:48, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Do remember that this is an or with the other criteria.  You only need  to meet one.  See the previous discussions. Vegaswikian 05:15, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Point taken, but I still believe that the million customers criteria is redundant. I find it inconceivable that there is a company with a million customers that does not qualify under the other criteria.--TheJeffMiller 11:07, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

text: 2. The combined total of regular customers, employees, and shareholders exceeds 1000.
Essentially all companies covered by the old criteria are included in this, and many more. And if the number of people affected by a company is under 1000, it can truly be considered as non-notable. Owen× ☎ 13:25, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Number of customers

message: I added "The company is cited in at least 10 other articles." to the list of criteria. Generally it there are red links, it is OK to add an article. I just picked the number 10 to avoid the case where someone wants to create a mention just to be able to create the article. Don't know if the number 10 is reasonable. I think 1 is too low, but if someone suggested 3-5 I would not have a problem supporting that. Vegaswikian 18:51, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The company is cited in other articles

message: I would like to request for this page to be moved to a title that is less ludicrously long. Radiant_>|< 09:54, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 

message: I'm generally in favor of setting the bar fairly low on notability.  Continuing the criterion of verifiability will automatically eliminate a lot of the junk, like the neighborhood dry cleaner.  Furthermore, corporate PR people turning their own press releases into Wikipedia articles is a different problem, one that could occur with regard to any company still lacking an article.  (There are several red links on our list of Fortune 500 companies.  An advertisement written up as an article for one of them surely couldn't be deleted for nonnotability under any sensible criteria.)
So, putting aside the articles that are unverifiable or puffery, do people perceive a problem with a significant number of current articles?  Can someone give examples of existing articles that should be deleted?  JamesMLane 23:38, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Verifiability is enough! To whom are they of no interest? To you? How can you possibly know that the structure of holding companies is not of interest to anyone? Trollderella 01:15, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  A solution in search of a problem? 

message: I'm currently defending Everything Linux from being deleted, and used guideline #4 - "The company holds more than a 20% share in the market area that it competes in." to back up my claim.  I was brushed off by User:ScottDavis, who said "Guideline 4 can be met by almost any corner shop for a suitably narrow definition of "market area"."  It just makes me wonder, what is the point of the guideline if it can just be ignored.  (By the way - the market area in this case was the entire population of Australia.)
(Also, there aren't any published market share figures for the market the company is in (the Australian online Linux retail industry) but a quick, informal poll (see AfD page above) shows that 60%+ of Australian Linux users named Everything Linux first when asked to name an Australian online Linux store.) -- Chuq 12:30, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Guideline #4. 

message: There's currently a debate going on over a group deletion I've proposed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Various "Mills".  Regardless of the outcome of that particular AFD, I think it's important for Wikipedia to set some clear and explicit standards for the inclusion or exclusion of individual locations of a larger chain.  We'd all probably agree that McDonalds as a company is clearly notable but most individual McDonalds stores clearly aren't.  But what about individual malls that are part of a chain.  Or each of the dozens of Six Flags amusement parks, or each of the Hard Rock Cafes?...
Where does it cross the line to being the stuff of advertizing or business directories?  Blackcats 07:38, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Advertising is a different issue.  You could write an article about McDonald's Corporation that was advertising, and you could write an article about your local McDonald's that wasn't advertising.  As for business directories, I agree that lowering the bar of notability for companies moves us in that direction, but what's wrong with that?  Wikipedia has some characteristics of specialized reference sources in many fields, such as IMDB.  JamesMLane 12:24, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

text: You have crossed the line when you include a list of stores with phone numbers.  Or when you include every store.  Yes, this type of data was in several mall articles before they were cleaned up.  Vegaswikian 17:16, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Criteria for individual stores that are part of a chain

message: It seems from the criteria, that the issues that people are worried about are a) self promotion, b) speculation. I would suggest that simply insisting that any company or product that as several neutral (non advertising, not the company itself) sources that can be verified and referenced should go it. I think that that would be the same thing that most people mean when they say 'notable', and does not need a new rule. It's one that we already have. Trollderella 18:30, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Verifible companies / services / products

message: This policy seems to reflect superseded ideas on importance. It sets the bar far higher than is applied in practice and is wildly inconsistent with the policies for other things. Why does a company need 1,000,000 customers when a band needs to sell just 5,000 albums I believe. And Walmart doesn't meet the 20% market share criteria! But as it is having little or no effect on article retention, I can't be bothered with the hassle of fighting deletionists to get it changed. CalJW 00:05, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: This looks out of date and misleading

message: Why is it that a great deal of thoughtful and productive discussion was removed when this guideline relpaced [[Wikipedia talk:Notability (organizations}]]? Are we supposed to re-fight all battles fought there which had unresolved issues? Or should I copy and paste the discussion I am interested in from there? Was the merge process supposed to discard the discussion, or was it done incorrectly? I did not see notice of the proposed merge, and if it means loss of the discussion, I suggest we undo it. Is there a consensus for such an action? This guideline may fit businesses, but it does not fir organizations that well, and there is loss of a great deal of collaborative editing. Edison 22:12, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Where is the discussion previouly at [[Wikipedia talk:Notability (organizations)]]?