Talk:Missouri Gas Energy

Content dispute

This is in answer to the comments left on my talk page. Wikipedia's guideline on the notability of organizations and companies states:

“ An organization is generally considered notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. All content must be verifiable. If no independent, third-party, reliable sources can be found on a topic, then Wikipedia should not have an article on it. ”

Notability requires verifiable evidence, and the burden of evidence lies with the contributor. Your talk page comments mention a book entitled Cities of Light and Heat, but nowhere in the article did you cite this as a source for the material you added. If this book does indeed verify of some of the statements you added, I emplore you to cite specific pages of this source, using the {{cite book}} template. You claim that what you have posted was independently researched, but if it is not published and available from any other source than your own business, then it is not verifiable and would be considered original research. From my interpretation of Wikipedia's notability guidelines, the answer to your question "Are we not a credible source of our own history?" would be "no", because of the lack of verifiability and inherent perception of bias.

However... I will concede that a regulated utility is perhaps in a similar situation as a state-owned enterprise, where the subject is widely known but perhaps not the subject of independent coverage. Are there other state-regulated utility company articles to compare this one to? I've requested a third opinion to help in this case. --Drm310 (talk) 06:06, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

• Third opinion request response: WP:V is policy, as is WP:NOR. Frustrating as it may be to editors who are familar with the subject matter that they are editing, all content needs to be verifiable. The company's website, however, is a valid primary source (though most of the article should not be based on primary sources, and it is important not to misuse this kind of source). As for the notability of the subject, there appears to be plenty of media coverage to meet the WP:GNG:

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Note also that we are interested in both current and historical information regarding the company, so text should not be removed solely because it is out of date. VQuakr (talk) 18:30, 9 September 2012 (UTC)