Wikipedia talk:Notability (organizations and companies)/Archive 27

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Notability of products vis a vis notability of the corporation

Say that there is an article about a consumer facing business (such as a chocolate company) currently up for deletion. In the deletion discussion, Alice cites a bunch of reviews for their chocolates. Bob doesn't dispute the reliability or independence of the reviews, but argues that, since they are not coverage of the company per se, they don't establish notability

I have issues with Bob's argument. For all but the largest companies/products (e.g. Cadbury/Cadbury eggs), it will be desirable to have information about the two in the same article (this is explicitly stated in WP:NPRODUCT). So, if the notability of one of those things is undisputed, deleting an article for not being notable in the other way is pointless. This is obvious if you consider a scenario in which someone later creates an article about the product, and information about the company is gradually added back in. If that happens, that means that the original article should have never been deleted, because any issues with it could have been resolved by normal editing (such as adjusting the relative promenince of information about the company/product, or moving the page title)

(In case it wasn't obvious, I have seen the "Alice" and "Bob" arguments made at AfD before. Also I know this scenario wouldn't apply to organizations for which there isn't such a clean division between "products" and the corporation) Mach61 22:59, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies)#Significant coverage of the company itself says:

Sources are not transferable or attributable between related parties. Sources that describe only a specific topic related to an organization should not be regarded as providing significant coverage of that organization. Therefore, for example, an article on a product recall ... is a significant coverage for the Wikipedia article on the product[,] ... but not a significant coverage on the company (unless the article ... devotes significant attention to the company itself).

That said, if there are several products by a company, and those products have received sufficient significant coverage such that they are notable as a group or notable independently, I think an article about the company that is effectively a list of those items would meet WP:NLIST. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:28, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

That bit has always confused me... Most articles about product recalls or CEOs devote significant attention to the company itself, but the way its written makes it seem like thats an outlier rather than the norm. Its like saying the right thing, but in the least constructive way possible (seriously I'm not joking, I think whoever crafted that bit was either messing with people or has English language competence issues "a significant coverage" etc). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:44, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree that significant coverage of a product recall could constitute significant coverage of a company, and not just the product. However, I think the first two sentences are trying to implement a rule for corporations analogous to WP:INVALIDBIO, so that someone can't just write "Elon Musk created a shell company in Delaware, therefore this article about that shell company should be kept since there's SIGCOV of Elon." voorts (talk/contributions) 18:06, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

IMO that just falls under standard inherited notability same as ownership of anything else, and I almost never see the case where the CEO is notable but the company isn't... What we see all the time is cases where the company is notable but the CEO isn't and someone is trying to create an article for the CEO. Likewise with products the major problem is articles for the non-notable products of notable companies... Not articles for non-notable companies which make notable products. Maybe CEO and recall just happen to be bad examples (recall being particularly bad as a recall is always something the company does and never something the product does). It also seems to say that an article about a product recall "is a significant coverage" of the product itself but that isn't true, it might not be significant coverage of anything or it might be significant coverage of the company (or a regulator, activist group, etc) but not the product. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:29, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I think that your rationale argues for bundling of product articles, not for having an article on the company. That said, if there is GNG coverage of the products, and at least near-GNG coverage on the company, IMPO it would be within the norms in this area (albeit not explicitly supported by the guidelines) to have an article on the company if it is the place that the products are covered. North8000 (talk) 23:52, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I think this aligns with what I was trying to get at above. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:53, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I was already adding "Or a bundled article on the products as voorts suggested" and it ec'd with your post.  :-) North8000 (talk) 23:55, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I think you agree with Alice, then Mach61 00:06, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree with the Wikipedia end result of Alice's argument (Maybe per wp:IAR.) without endorsing the argument. North8000 (talk) 14:02, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I would generally say that the purposes of the encyclopedia are better served by bundling notable products under their manufacturer, and treating the notability of the products as the notability of the company that makes them. This would only apply for products that are, in fact, notable, and discretely made by a single manufacturer. BD2412 T 02:05, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Optoma Corporation is an AfD where "Notability of products vis a vis notability of the corporation" is being discussed. I have quoted the comments of several of the editors in that AfD. This topic has come up in previous AfD discussions, so should guidance about this be added to WP:NCORP? Cunard (talk) 09:25, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Notability is not inherited. If a company is notable, the sources will reflect that notability by discussing the company. If a product is notable, the sources will reflect that by discussing the product. And if both are notable the sources will reflect that by discussing both. Follow the sources. That is the only “one-size-fits-all” rule that works. Blueboar (talk) 12:08, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

How often do you see this issue arising? If this is relatively uncommon, I wouldn't amend NCORP. If it is a common issue and clarification is needed, I think something like what I said above can be adapted into a short guideline, such as: If several of a company's products meet the list criteria, then a list on those products may be created at a page using the company name as the title. voorts (talk/contributions) 14:21, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

@Voorts, I have seen this argument multiple times, both at AFD and in general discussions. The usual story goes something like this:

"SIGCOV requires that we have ______ or the subject isn't notable and must be deleted. Here, we have three completely separate subjects: the entrepreneur, his first business, and his inventions. Looking at the sources I found in my BEFORE search, the BLP is only 90% of the way to notability, the first business is only 75%, and the second business has only 50% of the coverage needed for a stand-alone article. Therefore, all three subjects are non-notable, and we must delete them all."

It is usually accompanied by comments about how this source mostly covers the BLP "as a person" (e.g., about his family's role in the business), so that doesn't count at all for anything about the business, and that source mostly covers his business (e.g., about how his decisions during a business crisis resulted in success), so that doesn't count at all for anything about the person.

The obvious counter-argument is WP:WHYN: if you've got that much coverage, you can write a decent article about all three subjects together, and besides, splitting up an entrepreneur and his businesses is silly, because it's impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. But these editors are trying to make their decisions algorithmically based on possible inputs, rather than seeing what can actually be accomplished. They are also usually operating under the belief that sources can only be "about" one isolated subject at a time, and that the recommendation to merge in WP:FAILN doesn't exist. I've even seen experienced editors say that they didn't know that it's okay to merge information about non-notable subjects into other articles. If you [incorrectly but genuinely] believe that it's "anti-policy" to merge a sentence about the non-notable "Smallville Manufacturing" into a section about the ==Local economy==, then you'll certainly believe that it'd be "anti-policy" to merge the company, its products, and its founder into a single decent article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:45, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

@Voorts: This has come up frequently at AfDs. Here are a few examples I found: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/LumoPro, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rayark, Inc., and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Geekom.

For Geekom, I provided three reviews of Geekom IT8 Mini PC, one review of Geekom BookFun 11, three reviews of Geekom Mini IT 11, and two reviews of Geekom MiniAir 11 Mini PC. A literal reading of Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies) would be that the company is not notable but several of its products are notable. So there should be no article about the company but it is fine to have articles about a few of its products.

@WhatamIdoing: has provided really good analysis of how editors are currently interpreting the guideline at AfD and how this doesn't make sense. I think the guideline should be modified to allow "treating the notability of the products as the notability of the company that makes them". Editors are discussing something similar for book series at Wikipedia talk:Notability (books)#Should NBOOK cover series or just individual books? (permanent link). Cunard (talk) 08:09, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I think we should workshop some language and then propose an RfC; this is going to need a higher level of consensus than a talk page discussion. voorts (talk/contributions) 17:17, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Forgot to ping, @Cunard and @WhatamIdoing. I'll also add that, regarding WhatamIdoing's point, I don't think people are misreading NCORP, but rather there's a tension between NCORP and WHYN. I have a feeling there will be significant opposes to anything that would allow a company page to be kept in the hypothetical scenario described by WhatamIdoing.

I think that a proposal to add something to the guideline that states that a company page should be kept as a list if there several products meeting WP:LISTN (e.g., being discussed as a group, with some independent coverage of individual products not quite rising to the level of WP:CORPDEPTH for any particular product) would be less controversial, but will still likely run into opposition. I think many people would prefer to evaluate these things on a case-by-case basis rather than have a guideline that might create some inflexibility. voorts (talk/contributions) 17:20, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

@Voorts: I agree that this would need to be RfC-level discussion. Here is a proposed wording inspired by this proposal from the book series discussion: "Sources discussing individual products in a company may be treated as sources on the company for WP:NCORP in creating a company article containing a list of the products." This is rough wording that needs to be workshopped. Cunard (talk) 22:20, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

@Voorts, I don't think there's even any tension between pages here. I think the main problem is that some editors imagine that Bob Business is inherently and irrevocably a separate subject from Big Business, Inc., and that both of these are inherently and irrevocably separate from the blue-green widgets that Bob makes at his business. They don't consider whether Bob plus the business plus the product might make a single valid encyclopedia article.

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ketan Kadam (result: no consensus) is partly an example of this style of thinking. It might help if we talked a bit about article scope. Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies)#If it's not notable could be expanded to say that sometimes an organization does not qualify for a separate article, but a merged article about the organization and its products or its founder is viable.

Long-term, it might be worth adding a "why we have these rules" section. I would expect it to say that we have tight rules because we want articles based on independent sources, and not because we are worried about spammers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:12, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

A belated by perhaps clearer statement:

• An encyclopedia article about a business will normally include information about the business's products and people.
• An encyclopedia article about a businessperson will normally include information about the person's business(es) and products.
• An encyclopedia article about a product will normally include information about the business and people who made it.

Trying to divide these into completely separate subjects is making a mistake. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:40, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

That's a messy example (with several other considerations involved) and this is a fuzzy area in general. IMO trying to write anything explicit here would just make it messier. North8000 (talk) 17:21, 19 April 2024 (UTC)