Wikipedia talk:Notability (organizations and companies)/Archive 4

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Directories

Over in the AFD for the York School, there's a discussion about the validity of using directory entries to establish notability. My essential argument is that directories typically either include everything they can, or charge a fee, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary it can be assumed to be one or the other; given that, they aren't really a good source for establishing notability.

I don't mind speaking in general or in this specific case, but could anyone weigh in and/or give some guidance to applying policy in this sort of situation? SamBC 14:59, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Directories are primary sources and are not secondary sources. They are primary because they are co-temporary with the subject and simply repeat facts. To be secondary, they would have to make comment, analysis, criticism, provide alternative perspectives or otherwise transform the information. As directories are generally primary sources, they do not generally demonstrate wikipedia’s threshold of notability. Where a directory provides information on the basis of a fee paid, it cannot be considered independent and so for this reason additionally it does not demonstrate notability. --SmokeyJoe 06:00, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Companies associated with multiple notable products

What is the status of a company that is the developer, producer, and/or distributor of multiple notable products, but does not itself meet WP:CORP's primary criterion? Such companies may attract multiple incoming wikilinks and may be common search terms due to their association with notable products, but they don't have a clear redirect target. Possible ways to handle these companies that occured to me:

• leave as redlinks until such time as the company meets the primary criterion
• create a place-holder stub with a {{notability}} tag
• remove redlinks

How do other editors suggest dealing with this sort of company? --Muchness 22:26, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

It is often possible to merge the products as sections into an article for he company, with redirects to those sections. But have you some example in mind? DGG (talk) 03:56, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Remove redlinks. As such companies are not in themselves sufficiently notable, they should not ordinarily have their own articles. --SmokeyJoe 05:51, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

This is a situation where Notability gets in the way. If the product articles are short, it may make editorial sense to merge them all with the company. But if the articles are long, or more specifically if they are of widely varying length, or are separately merged with related products, then it may make sense to keep the product articles separate from the company. In this case, the article on the company that makes the products should be separate as well, to avoid duplication of the information in each individual article, regardless of what Notability says. Dhaluza 10:49, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I too would love to hear the specific example or examples. I think a case-by-case approach is superior to a hard and fast rule. UnitedStatesian 13:40, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Me too. This seems like and obscure problem. Can we get some examples? Frequently the inability to establish notability is due to incomplete research, not poor guidelines. --Kevin Murray 17:48, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The specific example that inspired this question was Red Ant Enterprises, a stub I created to fill a redlink that was subsequently (and justifiably, in my opinion) tagged for notability. Red Ant is the sole distributor of a large number of notable games in the Australia and New Zealand markets and is mentioned fairly frequently in gaming-related media ([1]) but has not been the subject of any independent articles that I can locate. While looking for sources to substantiate the company's notability, it occured to me that this situation may not be unique, and I thought I'd get some input from other editors before listing the article at AFD. --Muchness 04:57, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

If the article were to be expanded to contain brief sections for their products, it might show notability very well. DGG (talk) 06:23, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Red Ant Enterprises looks like it is just a distributor. It does not make products, let alone notable products. Why is it the “sole distributor”? Is that a claim of notability? Is it part of an international network connected to the creator of the notable products? In the articles about the individual notable products, is it normal to list distributors for individual countries? Is there any conceivable reason for a reader to follow a link from a game to this distributor except to use the services of the company. If not, then it is spam and the redlink should be deleted. --SmokeyJoe 08:09, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Actively demonstrating non-notability

The guidelines state that articles must demonstrate notability of the subject. Is it possible to achieve the reverse in a dispute - to demonstrate non-notability?

For example, imagine there are a couple of mentions of the website example.com in the online press which are being used to demonstrate notability of the website. Is it legitimate to use statistics from Alexa showing extremely low usage of the website example.com to actively demonstrate non-notability? Will this carry weight in a notability dispute? TreveX^talk 13:20, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

yes, but the example you give have possible problems. If there are evidences of notability, it will trump the statistics-- for example, if there have been published articles about it. And if a site has formerly been important, it might have a very poor alexa rank--or even none, if iti s no longer on the web--and still be important. But if someone just asserts "widely used" without supporting it, page rank is an argument.

similarly, that very few libraries hold a book, as determined on WorldCat, is an argument. But it can be trumped by book reviews in major RSs, or if it is a book in a language you would not expect to find in many American libraries--WorldCat has only very sketchy coverage outside the US. But for minor modern -day religious or political tracts, its an argument, and I have sometimes used it. (I say modern-day because older historical works might have been important, yet now present only in a few research libraries).

For an professor to write articles that almost nobody cites is a demonstration of non-notability--if they are the sort of articles that might be expected to be cited in recent years in places covered by the citation indexes, and if there are no other evidence of notability, such as writing a widely used textbook

So it can be used, but not in a mechanical way--just like everything else, it needs to take account of the actual subject of the article. DGG (talk) 15:21, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

what is a published work ?

Hello, I recently nominated many software articles for deletion, that contained no third party sources, claiming they failed WP:NOTABILITY. Some of the users who contributed to the AfD discussions, gave links to websites, as asserting notability.

Hopefully someone who knows more than me about this can answer my questions.

1. Does software fall under this policy page ? I'm guessing yes as one of the examples is Microsoft Word.
2. Is a web page a published work ?
3. Is it acceptable to give links to an web site selling articles (can't view if you don't buy), is this not a form of spam ? As far as I can see it is not the same with books and newspapers because you can borrow them from the library (for free in most places if you have limited revenue ex:student or unemployed).
4. How can one tell if a third party source is not simply a form of hidden advertising (thus not third party in reality).
5. How can it be that an article on internet is being used to prove the notability of a product, but the website is itself not notable enough to have an article on wikipedia ?
6. Why do wikipedia users have to bow to a company and find third party sources for the product article ? If the company wishing to write about their software on wikipedia, can't be bothered to provide proof of notability, even after having being asked to do so, why not simply delete it ?
7. Why do people count the number of hits on google, when trying to assert notability ? Which part of the policy mentions this ? (this goes especially if a web page is not a published source).
8. If an AfD, with WP:NOTABILITY closes as Keep on the grounds that the article subject is notable, but still nobody adds the third party sources to the article, then what gives ? Is WP:NOTABILITY, in fact not enforced ? Jackaranga 13:19, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

A web page is certainly a published source, and it may or may not be a reliable source. SamBC 13:40, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

1. Yes, software is a product and is covered by this page.
2. Yes, a webpage can be a published source. As Sam notes, however, it may or may not be reliable. The independence of the publication and the reach of the media counts for a lot. CNN's webpage is independent. The company's own webpage is not.
3. Yes, you can provide links to for-fee articles as evidence in an investigation about an article but the other participants in the discussion have a right to weight those citations lower because they can not be independently verified by the average reader. Likewise, you can cite physical books even though most of us don't have the resources of a university library to personally confirm the content. The reputation of the user offering the citation counts for a lot here. Established editors with long and courteous contribution histories tend to be granted the benefit of doubt. Citations by new and/or hostile users tend to be viewed with suspicion.
4. It can be quite difficult to determine if a "third party" source is really independent. There have been a number of media scandals when the relationship was discovered. One indicator is the brand name - which is a proxy for the professionalism of the reporter. Again, we generally assume that CNN is independent. We have a right to be much more skeptical of Joe'sBlog.com. This is why the number of sources is far less important than the quality of the sources. Two independent, highly-reliable sources are enough to qualify under this policy. Ten questionable sources would not.
5. Not sure what you meant with this question. Could you give a specific example?
6. Not sure what you meant here either. If we can't find independent evidence of notability, it get's deleted. The company's wishes don't enter into it at all. By the way, I would not expect a company to provide data to Wikipedia and would be extremely skeptical of any company that did. If they're important/big enough to be covered here, they should have much more important things to do than respond to us. And companies should never be writing about their own products.
7. Google hits are a deeply flawed measure (see WP:GOOGLE for more) but can be a measure of popularity. If used appropriately, the google test can be a datapoint worth considering. In particular, it can document the existence of something. And a lack of google hits can be a reliable negative indicator (that is, high google hits may not prove notability but low google hits about a pop-culture topic may be proof of non-notability). Regardless, google hit counts should never be the only factor considered.
8. It could be that the community decided to give the article a chance. If the article remains unimproved after a reasonable period of time (months at least), it can always be renominated for deletion and the lack of improvement should be a factor considered in the follow-on debate.

Those are my opinions, anyway. Rossami (talk) 18:01, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Rossami for your time and insight, these answers really help. What I meant by #5 was, that it is strange that a page hosted on siteXYZ.com can be a source of notability for an article on software for example, and yet siteXYZ.com is not notable enough to have an article dedicated to it (ie siteXYZ doesn't exist as a wikipedia article). It is strange how a non-notable site, can assert the notability of an article. Jackaranga 21:41, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

A source doesn't have to notable, just reliable. To think of it another way, a solid scholorly book is generally an excellent source, but it is unlikely that there will be a Wikipedia article on the book itself. For the book to be notable, there would have to be other articles (or whatever) written about the book - then you could ask whether the articles about the book were notable - and then off we go down the rabbit-hole.--Kubigula (talk) 22:01, 23 August 2007 (UTC) (p.s. excellent answers, Rossami).

That makes sense, thank you. Jackaranga 18:34, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

WP:CORP is dead?

Can two minor press release republications in mid-size media count as notability verifiers, like here eComXpo? If they do, then WP:CORP is dead. If any company who gets two articles is notable, there is no reason to have this special section: WP:N would do. Thanks!--Cerejota 01:24, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

It would appear that that article has references beyond re-published press releases. I haven't reviewed every single one, but the variety of titles seems to make it unlikely that they're all press releases. SamBC(talk) 03:44, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

If they are press releases, then such sources specifically don't count towards establishing notability.--Kubigula (talk) 03:47, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes clearly excluded. --Kevin Murray 04:26, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

except to the extent that their republication in truly responsible RSs might verify them. The chicago Tribune and the Washington Post may partially base their info on press releases,but they do not rely on them. The other sources in that article however, are useless for showing notability. DGG (talk) 00:57, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Then why is the community insisting on keeping the article? I have been accused of tendentious editing in the DRV for insisting this article doesn't meet verifiable notability per WP:CORP. I take the accusation seriously, however, I do not feel I am being tendentious but defending policy. The article also has a lot of un-sourced material. I have seen companies with more sources get deleted, and the editor admitted to COI (even thought he denies that there is COI if he is unpaid). I am confused, and this is why I ask. I am looking for arguments as to why I should stop trying to remove what I feel is spam. Thanks! --Cerejota 02:05, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

• Spurious accusations of "tendentious editing" are far from uncommon, you should probably just ignore that. The simple answer to your question is that guidelines have exceptions, and apparently the community has decided that this is one. >Radiant< 11:17, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

• Cerejota is misrepresenting the issue here. There is no issue here just whining about a lost AfD and review. I resent him wasting my time with this concoction. --Kevin Murray 02:46, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Why the personal attack that is un-called for? I haven't mis-represented anything: I am asking why the community doesn't consider eComXpo spam. I am trying to make sense of why is that the result not seem to fit policy. What do I misrepresent? Thanks!--Cerejota 04:16, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

There are many more citations at that article than you claim. It's been through AfD and you are being defeated now at the deletion review. Your initial statement above is pure crap and I resent having to spend the time to research through this to discover your deception. The truth is only a personal attack to a flawed personality. --Kevin Murray 04:20, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Even in the initial version, the one that included the press releases, there are exactly two sources that are reliable sources, and only one is directly related to the company. The other are from non-notable "industry portals", and a Microsoft blog. The sources are there, and you haven't done any research or are being disingenuous. I ask you to please apologize for your ongoing personal attacks and incivility. Thanks!--Cerejota 13:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Nope! This conversation is over. Cheers! --Kevin Murray 14:52, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Wow, you launch a bunch of personal attacks, unfounded accusations and then want to slip out like that? Talk about flawed personalites... Thanks!--Cerejota 15:54, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Anyone interested

In working on a specific set of guidelines for charities/non-profits please drop me a note. --BozMo talk 05:55, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

• This has been discussed in detail before at this page. The conclusion was that there is no significant difference to the non-profit status which calls for special treatment in the guidelines. Also the objective of an organization (charity, profit, religous, athletic) is not relevant to its notability. There is no reason to cause further complication and rule creep. --Kevin Murray 15:00, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
• Agreed. Please help refine the guidelines here rather than re-fragmenting the guidelines. We had very serious problems with consistency and reader-confusion when we tried to have separate guidelines for non-profits. Thanks. Rossami (talk) 17:36, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
• Yeah, there is no difference, in the end non-profit corporations are capable of spam, which is why we have WP:CORP. Thanks!--Cerejota 00:41, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
• Agreed, but we should probably be more specific about this, which will make it easier to explain to the spammers. DGG (talk) 05:00, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Okay on fragmentation but boy are you guys ready to assume the worst... someone else complained to me in the first place but I know there was orginally a merger with WP:ORG. In part also there is a US/UK definition problem: for example in the UK "non-for-profit" includes government, local government etc.

BUT I think there is a difference between organisations which sell products and services for whatever reason (profit or non-profit) and organisations which collect money for particular causes not connected to the donor. For example in practice an organisation which collects a few million dollars from the general public will always have some sort of public profile (in local papers at the very least) whereas for a company turnover has no practical relevance at all. Again I know in the US this is massively skewed by religious and other organisations. But at present Wikipedia's coverage of mainstream charities is about where it was on companies when I joined in 2004: dire dire dire. It would be nice to start with any kind of approximate list of which main charities we ought to include and for example when we include by country and when only the whole thing. At present there is no way of doing this. --BozMo talk 07:14, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

agreed about mainstream charities, but in practice the way to go is to put in such articles and defend them successfully. In practice I have often found it difficult to find adequate 3rd party RSs for these. If you can do so, start right in. DGG (talk) 05:56, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Products and services, again

The text of WP:CORP deals with companies as well as their products and services. However, as a user has pointed out to me here, this is not reflected in the introductory sentence. I propose to change it to:

The following is a tool to help determine whether an organization (commercial or otherwise), or any of its offerings, is a valid subject for a Wikipedia article.

Any objections? --B. Wolterding 16:16, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I support but prefer: "The following is a tool to help determine whether an organization (commercial or otherwise), or any of its products and services, are a valid subject for a Wikipedia article." --Kevin Murray 21:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

• Fine for me. I will add this to the guideline. --B. Wolterding 09:15, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Proposal

I have proposed that the notability subguidelines be deprecated with the salient points being merged into the main notability guideline and the remaining subguidelines merged & deprecated to essay status. Please join the centralized discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability#Merge proposal. Vassyana 01:03, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

The discussion has been closed, I'm removing the Merge tag. --Elonka 18:29, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Shopping Centres guidelines outside of WP:CORP?

Are there any specific guidelines for notability for shopping centres outside of those of WP:CORP)? For Afds, I often based it on size, nb of stores and sometimes the popularity or special aspects of it? I had seen sometimes in some discussions that size doesn't give immediate notability,, or that 50-100 or more stores makes it immediately notable.--JForget 18:46, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Just the general WP:N. You might check with Wikipedia:WikiProject_Architecture, since there are folks there who are focused on the buildings-aspect. --Lquilter (talk) 17:08, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Scope terminology too broad

The intro statement "The scope of this guideline covers all groups of people organized together for a purpose" makes this guidleline conflict with other guidelines that cover more narrow topics, such as WP:BAND. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

I added the exception to the text. UnitedStatesian 04:23, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

• I twinkled with the language for writing style and to make the language slightly broader, so that if other projects come up with specific notability criteria for other types of orgs, the new language can accommodate without revision. MUSIC is still expressly mentioned. diff. --Lquilter (talk) 17:12, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Title

Forgive me if this has been brought up before. Since companies are organizations, why are they both mentioned in the title? Seems to me like this should be renamed to Wikipedia:Notability (organizations), where part of the content was before the merge, to avoid redundancy. Picaroon (t) 02:01, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, your thought expresses my original preference when we began the merger or CORP and ORG, but it seems that the word "organization" brings to mind not-for-profit, charities, etc. and many editors thought that this title would add clarity. I think that it is a minor redundancy to a worthy purpose. --Kevin Murray 04:10, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Agree with Kevin Murray -- there's nothing wrong with a minor redundancy that adds clarity so that people understand this guideline applies to all manner of orgs. --Lquilter (talk) 17:03, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

iTunes

I noticed an explosion of references to iTunes store. Lot of album or single pages now state: "This album is available in iTunes mediastore" or something like that (example; example; example; example). Others are clearly and simply built around iTunes references (example). Thought of course I didn't make a full research, it looks like nothing less than a media manipulation. Just image if on every alimentary product page there would a reference like "you can find meat on your local Wal-Mart store" or "you can buy marshmallows on every Wal-Mart retailer". The fact an album was released on iTunes a certain day is not relevant per se, and anyway it could be said as "released on internet that day". Besides, what if someone would write on every song page "you can download it for free on the well know p2p client eMule"? So, I suggest to establish a policy against such notes, who are simply promotional. 82.226.217.121 (talk) 04:18, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I agrere with your position that such phrases are non-encyclopedic and should be removed to improve each article where they are found. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:07, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

• There is already a content guideline against such extraneous non-encyclopedic references: Wikipedia:Spam, and you can shortcut link to it as WP:SPAM when you delete such notes. --Lquilter (talk) 17:05, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Every company written about in a major national newspaper is notable ?

I don't know if it's what was intended, but, having been through this AfD - Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Blogads - it appears that thousands of companies will be classed as notable and therefore eligible for inclusion. Speaking for the UK, just about every company listed on the stock exchange and the major unlisted companies, some 2,000, will at some time have had a couple of articles written about them in national newspapers, giving sufficient depth of coverage. Multiply that for all the other English speaking countries covered by English WP and I imagine that you'll be approaching 20,000 potential articles. Reasonable ? -- John (Daytona2 · Talk · Contribs) 13:16, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Reasonable? Yes, there are over 200,000 biographies of people, and honestly is 20,000 business articles that many compared to 2.5 million articles? If a company (or person, or organization, or website) is mentioned in a national newspaper, then society found them worthy of note. If society finds them worthy of note, then Wikipedia does too. Aboutmovies (talk) 16:28, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, I think it will be notable too. Think of all the ways that companies & businesses affect our lives: They employ individuals who are notable; local or regional businesses may have a significant impact on that economy by employing many people, or engaging in business practices that affect many people; (for that matter, national/intl businesses may have significant impacts on global economy). It's not that every single thing written in a newspaper confers instant notability; as WP:N states, "A short burst of news reports about a topic does not necessarily constitute evidence of long-term notability". But ongoing news coverage of a company over time certainly indicates notability. We have to be extra-rigorous about policing the guidelines because virtually all companies have an obvious interest in promoting their name recognition & products, but the guidelines still apply. --Lquilter (talk) 17:02, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, this is a much neglected area of WP. But a great deal of what is written is trivial PR coverage. X opened a new store, or appointed a new executive--with nothing much further. Local newspapers print it as a matter of record, but it is really just like the birth announcements. so we have to restrict to the well-known selective sources--WSJ, NYT, & similar. And the major magazines, not the ones with trivial features. A trade magazine typically covers everything in the trade, however inconsequential. The real problem is we have too few interested editors qualified to judge what is important, and if you have an interest and expertise in the area, we can certainly use your help. DGG (talk) 08:21, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I tend to agree with John. Indeed they need not be national newspapers. A year ago, I created Cape Catch from an AFC request based on 2 independent reliable sources: 2 local newspapers. I regret doing that, as it seems the company has now disappeared after doing nothing that I would personally consider notable. Indeed, it seems to fall foul of the 'short term burst of news reports' exception in WP:N. Is Cape Catch one of the few exceptions to WP:CORP that never should have been created? Or, are there hundreds of thousands of organizations with non-trivial articles in 2 local papers that get Wikipedia articles? --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 01:26, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

In that case (and in most cases) the problem is not one of local vs. national; instead, the sources in that article are not sufficent to establish the notability of that company. The guideline uses the words "significant coverage"; not the words "a mention". I won't comment on whether the article should or should not have been created, but it should not have been created without siginifcant couverage in sources. UnitedStatesian (talk) 01:45, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I think the problem is in part that of local. there is significant coverage in local newspapers of every locally significant business establishment. It's the way local newspapers survive. DGG (talk) 03:06, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I guess I just don't see that as a problem, given WP:NOTPAPER. The real problem is company articles with NO reliable sources. If every company article cited at least two sources from a local paper that were independent (i.e. not a reprint of a co. PR), and the company actually had significant coverage in those sources (i.e. wasn't just mentioned) we'd have a LOT better encyclopedia. UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:37, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

UnitedStatesian, I am puzzled by your first comment. Cape Catch was the main subject in each of the articles cited, and they were in two different newspapers. WP:CORP says that all newspaper articles are considered significant coverage, unless the mentions are trivial, such as meeting times, shopping hours and directories. My concern is that lots of businesses may have non-trivial coverage, as Cape Catch did. My question is, are may many such non-notable microbusinesses having articles created for them? If so, do we need to tweak WP:CORP to make it clear why such businesses are not suitable for the encyclopedia? --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 15:25, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Not to split hairs too finely, but the first article's subject was on "how young people are making an impact today" a pretty standard local paper fluff peice given to a jr. reporter on a slow news day. Cape Catch was only an expample. The source for the second article was the co's website, so we don't know: was it a full reprint, what was the context, did they change anything (or even make stuff up?) - in short, it failed WP:RS. That said, I do think that the expamples of non-trival coverage do need to be clarified, and I will take a stab at doing so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:36, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Military units

Has there been any discussion regarding special handling of articles about military units? Or is the consensus to just apply the standard notability guidelines for organizations. Sancho 01:21, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I haven't seen specific guidelines for military units, and I just doublechecked the talk archives and didn't find anything "military". Possibly also Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history has thought about this? --Lquilter (talk) 01:34, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

WP:BIO and its predecessor pages have considered military persons but I don't know of any formal discussion of military units. The discussion about personnel concluded that no special rules were appropriate (beyond the explicit conclusion that rank alone was not a reliable indicator). After thinking about it for a few minutes, I can't think of a compelling reason for a special rule for military units. If a unit has figured prominently in some major action and has been the subject of multiple, non-trivial independent coverages, then we have the reliable sources needed to substantiate an article. If the unit has not received such independent attention, no matter what other rule you applied, we still wouldn't have the sources needed to support the encyclopedia article. Major naval vessels generally get articles. Ground combat divisions might if they have a particularly notable history (like the 82nd Airborne). I'm not sure that you'd see much beyond divisions, though. At least in the US Army, units larger than division don't really have a stable independent identity and units smaller than division rarely have sufficient independent history (though there are exceptions). Rossami (talk) 04:45, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Soldiers seem to be very communicative about their experiences. I cant think that any US or UK (or Canadians or Australian) division or regiment will not have a fairly good & easily found historical record--this particular human activity has always been very well documented. From other countries, it may be harder to find them. Below that level, then it would depend. The rule has been that all ships, military or civilian are worth an article. Again, they always do have documentation, sometimes a surprising amount. DGG (talk) 08:16, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

In the UK, you can probably find enough to write about a regiment but in the US the regiment is primarily an odd entity, designed to promote esprit and a slight bit of continuity across assignments but not an actual combat organization. I served, for example, in E Btry, 1st of the 320th Field Artillery Regiment. But there was no regimental commander or staff nor was there any reporting relationship through that channel. Only in the cavalry is it an operational entity.
I'd also be cautious about saying that every ship can support an article. If I remember right, the Military Wikiproject struggled with good rules of thumb for some of the smaller ships. Rossami (talk) 20:18, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

College radio stations?

I've got a running discussion going right now about the notability of a 100-watt radio station in New York state. Almost every college and university in the U.S. has these little 50-100-watt stations, many of them not receivable much off campus (unless they stream online); hey, I was on one myself back around 1973-74. I'm rather dubious about the allegation that they are inherently notable. Comments? --Orange Mike | Talk 15:13, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

All college radio stations are like any giant radio station. They are ALL officially recognized by the FCC. Most importantly in my defense of college radio stations is that most college radio stations broadcast their feeds via the Internet which makes the 100watts meaningless. You can listen on your computer anywhere in the world! See WNYO-FM (which is where this all started) for the appropriate links to the FCC, CNY Media Guide, and the WNYO homepage which displays the Internet link. WNYO-FM is also listed on the CNY Media Guide. If the FCC and CNY Media Guide felt WNYO or other college stations were meaningless than I would agree with OrangeMike. But they recognize us and therefore an encyclopedia like Wikipedia should as well! -FancyMustard (talk) 17:05, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure that there are many notable university radio stations, but having a license and a web page (with or without streaming audio) doesn't seem to establish notability. I suggest using the notability guideline Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies) which gives consideration to an organization that has been the subject of multiple non-trivial, reliable published works. I would not consider a license, station/DJ website or broadcast schedules to be non-trivial. Winning awards from international or larger national organizations such as the European Broadcasting Union or the National Association of Broadcasters should also be a factor, or even Collegiate Broadcasters, Inc. but not an award from local organizations such as the Jaycees. My €0.02 worth.

Why don't you take a trip to northern New York and interview some Oswegoians. Ask them how much WNYO broadcasts of Laker Hockey means to them? Tell them WNYO isn't notable. -FancyMustard (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 00:16, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Should all religious bodies be exempt?

On 18 Feb, user:IZAK added a section here exempting essentially all religious organizations from this section of the policy, arguing that they are not organizations in the above sense and because they are connected to Religion cannot be measured by the above guidelines and need to be assessed by expert editors familiar with each type of religious body concerned, commencing with the Wikiproject of each religion in question. I am not yet ready to make that kind of blanket statement. I think that for the most part, this page does an adequate job of helping editors filter out the encyclopedic from non-encyclopedic even for religious topics.

I certainly do not concede that only the "expert editors" familiar with that particular religion should have sole jurisdiction over determining whether and in what level of detail Wikipedia ought to cover a topic. That smacks of conflict of interest.

Before summarily adding in such a section, I think we need a clearer discussion of what topics ought to and ought not to be included, then determine whether this page, as written works well or not. Rossami (talk) 14:34, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

With no immediate input on the exemption of religious bodies, I second the need for a clearer discussion of topics to include or not to include. I am inclined to think that this guideline needs clarification. As somebody who handles a lot of WP:CSD tags for organizations under A7, I see what seems to me to be clear confusion as to what constitutes notability on companies, not only among tagging editors but among the administrators who are addressing these tags. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 14:39, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I also agree that there is a need for greater clarity. Consensus on some sub-topics, such as schools, has clearly evolved. I second Moonriddengirl's note that there appears to be a range of possible interpretations and applications of the core policy criteria. Although I doubt a blanket exemption for religious organizations is within the permitted range, special criteria analagous to the ones Wikipedia has for schools, pornographic actors, sports figures, and other high-traffic categories would be possible. Best, --Shirahadasha (talk) 14:54, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Religious organizations should not get a free pass. If they are notable they will have coverage in WP:RS, same as anything else. Not every religious group nor every church is notable, same as not every politician or company or building is notable. Allowing every religious organization a free pass would allow for "Bob's Church and Hot Dog Stand" to become an article without any RS, and without any RS you have WP:V issues, sort of like that situation a while back with some guy in England or Scotland with the fake auto-bio. Aboutmovies (talk) 17:28, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I concur with Aboutmovies. Churches are clearly organizations and are included. Vegaswikian (talk) 20:46, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Regardless of personal preference, i dod not see how a blanket exemption is at al likely. It would be more realistic to have guidelines. But i have been working on the guidelines for schools for over a year now, and every time we think we have consensus, it disappears. I am not sure we could do better. There is one particularly dangerous criterion: size, because this tends to prejudice against the smaller religions. It can work fine for hot dog stands, but not here. any suggestions? DGG (talk) 00:12, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Good point about size per se as a criterion. Is there an issue with using the generic WP:N criterion of non-trivial coverage of the subject in multiple non-self-published reliable sources? - Neparis (talk) 05:17, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

But if they are small, are they even notable? For me, if they make the newspaper (a RS) then they are notable, and both large and small groups can and do make the news. Same with schools. Some large schools may not make the news, but a small new charter school with high academic achievement often makes the news, and thus notable. So size is not really the issue, only effective media relations by the organization. And if they are not making the news, who knows about them but the members, and again are they even notable at that point if only members know about the group. Any group that starts to make an impact, and thus notable, will eventually make it into media coverage. But for me, until that happens they are not notable. Aboutmovies (talk) 07:11, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Aboutmovies, are you replying to me? In case you are, just for the record, I was not disagreeing with the idea that media coverage of the subject is a sensible requirement to demonstrate notability. - Neparis (talk) 02:55, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

No Neparis, I was replying to DGG's query regarding size, you just beat me to it. Aboutmovies (talk) 07:28, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Ok, no problem. I re-indented the above just to clarify who replied to whom. Hope that's ok. - Neparis (talk) 01:45, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

What exemptions? Just Notifying Wikiprojects

Hi everyone, thank you for your willingness to discuss this matter. Let me just reproduce again the guidelines for "religious bodies":

"Churches, Mosques, Synagogues, Temples, Holy sites, Category:Religious places (places of worship), Category:Religious buildings, Category:Religious sanctuaries (sanctuaries) are not "organizations" in the above sense and because they are connected to Religion cannot be measured by the above guidelines and need to be assessed by expert editors familiar with each type of religious body concerned, commencing with the Wikiproject of each religion in question."

Firstly few can sit in judgment as to what makes a "religious body" notable or not (not talking about the usual requirements of good sources) so that if a church or synagogue or mosque has a small membership, or may even be defunct, yet it if it has, or had had, a long and recorded history, it cannot be called "not notable" by any standard. Secondly, it is basically impossible to differentiate between a "religious building and sanctuary" and its mission, or conversely, sometimes it is it's mission that makes the sanctuary notable. This is, after all religion we are talking about, and not a franchise to sell coffee drinks. The fact that Starbucks coffee is sold in a building does not make the building into a "sanctuary" of anything, but if a building has housed a religious place or person it often may become an eternal shrine and holy place important to that religion. This should be quite obvious. Thirdly, as for User Rossami (talk · contribs)'s allegations, and others who did not look up what I inserted, I never stated that "sole jurisdiction over determining whether and in what level of detail Wikipedia ought to cover a topic" but this is what I stated there, articles "need to be assessed by expert editors familiar with each type of religious body concerned, commencing with the Wikiproject of each religion in question" which is very different. After all the sum and value of Wikipedia are its editors and nominal experts and writers on topics, and NOT the people who sit around making up rules that could stand in the way of helping Wikipedia grow. Bureaucratic powers should be used to encourage MORE and NOT less editing and contributions. And sure, when the situation calls for it, let's have discussion and votes but not rely solely on veto powers of "shoot on sight" to blow incipient articles out of the water without ever getting input from the experienced editors in Wikiprojects. No-one can claim that all of Wikipedia's editors or admins are experts in everything and the purpose of the individual Wikiperojects is to enable editors with expertise in fields to express themselves and they at least should be called in for "second opnions" at a minimum. Admins MUST resist the temptation of acting haughtily and arrogantly and must realize that they too are editors that must seek consensus from other editors who care and have knowldege about other subjects. Editors at Wikiprojects need not be feared and denigrated (why does Wikipedia encourage and have ethem then, are they "kindergarten playpens"?) and Wikipedia has enough mechanisms to deal with any so-called conflicts of interests if and when they arise. No need to fight ghosts and set up non-existent strawmen. By the way, whose "interests" and what if the "conflict" is not something that can be defined quickly or simply? Fourthly, no-one is suggesting that the religious bodies should get a "free pass" but neither should they be lumped in with categories that they do not match or reflect. It is highly surprising that User Shirahadasha (talk · contribs) can baldly state: "Although I doubt a blanket exemption for religious organizations is within the permitted range, special criteria analagous to the ones Wikipedia has for schools, pornographic actors, sports figures, and other high-traffic categories would be possible" when (a) no "blanket exemption" is being sought nor suggested, (b) yet admits that there is a need for other categories that have "high traffic" and (c) and be so cavalier and downgrading of religious bodies while at the same time elevating on a pedestal "schools, pornographic actors, sports figures". Totally absurd, and most certainly insulting to religions to which the vast majority of the human race belongs. Fifthly, User Aboutmovies (talk · contribs) makes false allegations by saying "Not every religious group nor every church is notable, same as not every politician or company or building is notable. Allowing every religious organization a free pass would allow for 'Bob's Church and Hot Dog Stand' to become an article without any RS" when no-one is suggesting that in any way. Plenty of these kinds of religious quackery get deleted, but at the same time it is very easy for openly atheist or anti-religious editors or admins to just throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater via prods and hasty deletes of key and notable articles when they bump into something like synagogue stubs or brief articles about genuine small churches or mosques that are indeed notable in their own right and they would have found this out only if they had first bothered to contact the active editors at relevant Wikiprojects who know what is junk and what is not because they deal with the topic and are sensitive to it. Often, contacting creators of articles alone is not enough, as they may have left Wikipedia or are away for a long time. My experience at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Judaism is that when any editor has any sort of question about any subject relating to Jews and Judaism, there is always a response and guidance or advice is offered. Usually such Wikiprojects have a number of admins involved as well so that there are more levels of competence involved than just that of the Wikiproject's subject matter. Sixthly, how ridiculous is it to say that "if they make the newspapers they are notable" as does User Aboutmovies (talk · contribs) (religious bodies are not reviewed in newspapers like movies by the way, in case you wish to know, if anything the media is scornful of religion and seizes any opportunity to mock and undermine anything to do with religious life anywhere.) In any case, this is the Internet age now, Wikipedia is a digital medium and there are digital resources available about everything and more coming online every minute. Sure it's nice if a newspaper says something about a synagogue or church, but that is not going to the heart of the matter in any way whatsoever. A church or synagogue may have been in a community for a hundred or two hundred years (longer than the movies or papers that get such "notable" coverage in Wikipedia), and played a critical and central role in the histories of those communities. There are books, essays and personal accounts of these things. As always WP:CITE and WP:V are vital. There are only thirteen million Jews in the world and about half are in the USA, and less Hindus in the USA, so does each synagogue or ashram have to produce Earth-shattering news to be regarded as "notable"? Nope! Because it has nothing to do with the purpose of a synagogue or ashram or its role in Jewish or Hindu life to get into the papers or TV shows. There may have been great religious teachings revealed there. Famous rabbis may have served there. They were maybe the conerstones of that community's rise (and fall). Similarly for all religious bodies. Religion is not commerce and it's not show business it has its own criteria and definitions as does any unique field. By example, rocket science is not the same as soccer, and never shall the twain meet. What makes a scientist and a laboratory notable is not the same as what makes a soccer player or soccer field notable. Does anyone question all the soccer players and teams that are on Wikipedia? Nope! Finally, to repeat, no-one is asking for or stated "exemptions" for anything. On the contrary, the request is being made that Wikipedia must reach DEEPER INTO ITSELF and use its own editors and experts in the fields usually to be found in Wikiprojects and that their views be actively solicited or that a blanket rule be drawn up, that if an article or stub or category or pic or template is brought up for deletion in ANY field, that a notice be placed either on that subject's deletion notice board or on its related Wikiproject and preferably both so that ALL currently active editors who care and KNOW something about each and every subject be allowed to have a say and contribute to what is essentially their area of expertise and provide their professional opinion and input about the intended action to delete -- and that not doing so would a violation of some sort. Sincerely. IZAK (talk) 08:42, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

That's all lot of what comes across as a bit of ownership of any religious article, as if editors need to consult some wikiproject before they do something. WP:NOTE is a guideline all articles should follow, this is simply a subset of that over-arching guideline. If a church is a cornerstone of the community, it will be covered in books as you say. THus there really isn't a notability problem, since books and magazines (online or off) are all WP:RS, and thus pass the guidelines. So all those ones you mentioned would meet notability requirements without any exemption or need to consult anyone. But the caveat, as with every article, it needs to have the sources in the article, not only for notability but for WP:V. As to newspapers, that is simply the easiest way to show notability. Newspapers may not review churches like movies, but I know the local paper has a section every week with church listings and times, plus an article or two about a congregation. The rules as they are allow for the legitimate groups to have articles, while hopefully screening out those that are not legitimate, or are too small to warrant inclusion. Aboutmovies (talk) 09:03, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Aboutmovies: Thank you for responding. But again you jump to an extreme. Please do not state that a religious body's notability comes from its self-published times and schedules in newspapers, it comes across as silly and that is not what we are discussing. Who said anything about "ownership" and why are you so afraid that more not less editors have their say? After all, if it was a subject close to your heart, wouldn't you want to know if someone was about to massacre hundreds of stubs that you care about? I think that there are enough editors around at any time to counter-balance any concerns about violations of WP:OWN. A call for help can always be placed to others at various admin watering holes, such as at WP:ANI and the like. Calling upon an expert is not the same as saying as he owns it, just that you request his input, and by that you also show WP:AGF and WP:CIVIL by not blowing out of the water articles another editor cares about without him knowing. As for newspapers, yes they are useful, but no-one ever got a high school diploma or a university degree by reading or relying upon newspapers, and by now Wikipedia has raised the bar for articles that it preferably expects near college-level term-paper quality and often MA and PhD level research and citations. I go by that mostly and newspapers are just there for fluff and padding. IZAK (talk) 09:26, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Don't be silly, I didn't state that nor did I imply that. Aboutmovies (talk) 09:41, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

So what do you mean then? IZAK (talk) 11:25, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I was responding to your "(religious bodies are not reviewed in newspapers like movies by the way, in case you wish to know..." (emphasis added) Followed by my reference to movies and newspapers: "Newspapers may not review churches like movies, but I know the local paper has a section every week with church listings and times..." (emphasis added). So I was simply replying that though churches are not reviewed quite like movies, there are some similarities, which has little if anything to do with notability. Of course self-published times/info in a newspaper would not confer notability, as that is clearly outlined in this (WP:CORP) and I believe every notability guideline on Wikipedia, since self-published items are not independent of the subject. So this is clear, here is where religious and any other organization (and really anything) gets their notability for Wikipedia: coverage in third party/independent reliable sources that have substantial coverage of the topic. The less substantial the coverage, the more sources you need. Aboutmovies (talk) 21:34, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

If WikiProject members feel that they have something useful to add to a discussion on a topic, it is incumbent upon them to watchlist the page or to take other action to join the conversation. It is not and never has been a requirement for the rest of us to keep track of or notify every WikiProject that might consider themselves relevant.
More than that, there is nothing inherently special about the Religion wikiproject that raises it above the business wikiproject or any of the hundreds of others. We all operate under the same rules and none deserve call-out for special attention. Rossami (talk) 18:54, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Rossami: But that is exactly the problem. And my suggestion at this time is that just as individual creators of articles should be contacted if their work is being nominated for deletion, this guideline needs to be expanded so that the relevant Wikiproject of an article also be informed because very often the usual situation is that while the creators of articles are often not around to respond, but there will always be editors present at all the key Wikiprojects who will be able to respond in a quicker and more timely manner. They will be good judges of the situation and be able to see if a nomination for deletion is too hasty and/or mistaken or if it has merit. They will not have "veto power" but their opinion and input will be invalubale so that good articles or stubs are not deleted in haste. This should not be a problem. Right now, there is tremendous unjustified hostility from some admins especially to all Wikiprojects, with admins assuming that once they get the broom that they are being threatened by active Wikiperojects' intervention. Neither admins nor Wikiprojects own articles. Admins are no better than any editors, indeed they became admins by dint of (presumably) being good editors so that the key element of being on Wikipedia is not to feel "empowered" and have delusions of cyber-grandeur, but to help Wikipedia grow and co-operate with the best editors around and those are most often to be found at Wikiprojects. It is time to raise the respect for, and ask for the involvenmt of, Wikiprojects across the board as it will only help Wikipedia grown and improve and that false fears of "COI" or "OWN" are just strawmen that hinder and hold back the progress of this amazing encyclopedia. IZAK (talk) 09:08, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

What you are asking for is unworkable. Do you even know how many active WikiProjects there are? (I don't.) Do you have any idea how to find the relevant WikiProjects? (I don't.) Can you predict which projects might apply? (I can't.) There are too many WikiProjects sliced too many different ways and with too many different crossing and multi-jurisdictional interests. And, frankly, some of them have been set up by partisans with the specific intent to insert a particular bias into the project.
But even if you assume that every WikiProject is populated by good people with the best of intents, neither admins nor other editors have any usable way to find the people who would consider themselves interested parties. The requirement for interested parties to insert themselves into the process is imperfect but less unworkable than what you're proposing. Rossami (talk) 14:43, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

I think there are about 1000 or more active WikiProjects, if we count all the work groups and the like. Of that number, about 70 are specifically related to religious subject. On that basis, I consider the proposal unworkable. Also, unfortunately, there is a real and pressing concern as to whether the projects, however active they are, haven't perhaps yet tagged an article. Many encounter great difficulty keeping up with all the articles created. On that basis, I tend to think we could, if we followed this proposal, potentially have a case where one project tagged an article perhaps more closely related to another project, determined it was notable on the basis of their own possibly biased criteria, and in effect forced on wikipedia an article primarily about a subject other than themselves, which, possibly, was very much critical, perhaps unreasonably so, of another religion. I don't know how likely that would be, but it is certainly possible, and that I think is more than reason enough to believe that this proposal should not be enacted. John Carter (talk) 18:39, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

The way to find the appropriate wikiproject is with Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory which is a categorized list, or by looking for the banners of the relevant articles. The way to improve any possible narrow-mindedness, unrepresentative nature, or parochialism, is wider participation. DGG (talk) 19:15, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Actually, the directory is significantly outdated. The User:John Carter/Directory is a bit more current, even if it isn't finished yet. John Carter (talk) 18:39, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Rossami, I think you are being too panicky. In contrast, DGG is making sound suggestions that I agree with. What I am saying is that the very well known guidelines that one finds on all the "how to" pages for deletions, that suggest that when an article/category/template/picture etc is nominated for deletion that the creator of that self-same relevant article/category/template/picture should be contacted on his user talk page and there are even well-used templates for that, even for grades of users, such as one finds at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion:

While not required, it is generally considered courteous to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the articles that you are nominating for deletion. Also consider notifying WikiProjects listed on the discussion page. Do not notify bot accounts or people who have made only insignificant 'minor' edits. To find the main contributors, look in the page history or talk page of the article and/or use TDS' Article Contribution Counter. For your convenience, you may use {{subst:AFDWarningNew|Article title}} ~~~~ (for creators who are totally new users), {{subst:AFDWarning|Article title}} ~~~~ (for creators), or {{subst:Adw|Article title}} ~~~~ (for contributors or established users). You can determine the main contributors of the articles by entering the page name at Wikipedia Page History Statistics.

So that all I am saying is that just as "...it is generally considered courteous to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the articles that you are nominating for deletion" that it should also be added that a nominator should place a notification on the Wikiproject/s associated with that article -- since if the nominator is so cock-sure that the article must go, then presumably he will be very well-versed with that subject and know exactly which Wikiproject/s need/s to be informed and how to find it, and if not, he should not be nominating the article/s for deletion in the first place. This will in turn alert editors on Wikiprojects that an article/category/template/picture that may be potentially very important to their subject is about to be shot down -- without their knowledge -- something that would naturally upset them. The converse of your fear is true, that rather than the present state of "shot-in-the-dark" nominations that often appear more like "hatchet jobs" and massacres, as often happens articles in editors' areas of expertise are threatened or eliminated, when Wikipedia should be gaining from the experts as they are alerted and are able to render a maturer judgment that may go beyond the pious invocation of this or that policy guideline when the integrity of a subject as a whole is at stake. I think that Wikiprojects are great and have brought a great sense of community and belonging to editors who share common interests. I do not fear malcontents as there are more than enough policies and measures to control or get rid of them. This is all very simple and should neither frustrate nor complicate anything. Thanks, IZAK (talk) 06:04, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Note: I see that it actually says: "Also consider notifying WikiProjects listed on the discussion page" in the above! Good! It needs to become better known and more ingraine as well. IZAK (talk) 06:08, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

However, you have still refused to acknowledge the likely possibility/probability of the flaws of your proposal. Allow me to raise a hypothetical case. I, as a member of the Church of I Hate Everybody, create an article about an entity within that church, let's say the COIHE Religious Studies Center, which has, as one of its primary activities, active, irrational, unsupported allegations regarding another faith, let's say Judaism. I tag a new article about the Religious Studies Center with the banner for the Church of I Hate Everybody, and only that banner, because I as a member of that church loathe Judaism, even though the majority of the existing content of the article is about the center's antisemitic allegations. The article is also included in only one category, that of the COIHE. By the statements above, there would be no just cause to notify anyone other the the COIHE Project about the deletion, even though others, perhaps members of the Judaism project, were also knowledgable about the subject, because, it being a comparatively new article, they hadn't been made aware of its presence earlier. Let's also go a bit further and say that I, the creator, am actively involved in that church, and that the COIHE project is even, perhaps, a bit of a POV pusher. Now, if the rest of us were to look the article over and say that the one website which is apparently all that can be found of the Religious Studies Center does not necessarily qualify as a reliable source, and consider nominating it for deletion, the members of the COIHE would be, according to this proposal, among the final arbiters of that decision. Gee, I wonder what they'd say. That is the first problem. There is another one.

There are no ways under current policy to limit what WikiProjects can or will be created. There are in fact several projects which get deleted or merged within months of creation because they were actively bad ideas. By allowing the WikiProject which has bannered an article to be specifically notified of the discussion, we would actually be encouraging individuals who would learn of this guideline to create a separate WikiProject for themselves for the purpose of gaming the system by immediately creating a number of articles of at best marginal notability. We already have more than one wikiproject for small religious bodies, including the Church of the Brethren, Thelema, and Iglesia ni Cristo. This proposal would encourage the development of ever more WikiProjects, ever more banners, and ever more work for the people who would have to deal with all of the above when the project becomes inactive after the first year or so. The proposal as it stands does not make any allowances to preclude such activity.

And, while I myself am involved in more projects than I even want to consider, I personally find IZAK's statements about what he feels about WikiProjects to be completely irrelevant to the discussion. I am aware of more than one WikiProject which has, over time, had to be deleted because it was not compliant with existing policies, and I have no reason to think that similar such Projects will not be created in the future. In fact, creation of such a policy as this might actively serve to encourage development of projects which have a definite, if not immediately clear, purpose of trying to circumvent other extant policies or guidelines. Were this proposal to be enacted, it could reasonably lead to the creation of any number of such dubious projects created for the purpose of gaming the system. Until and unless those concerns can be addressed, the proposal could create more problems than it solves, and, frankly, I can't see any way they could be addressed without creation of a more complex number of guidelines and policies, which is itself something we try to avoid doing. John Carter (talk) 16:30, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I think if we simply keep in mind that guidelines have to be exercised with common sense. Notifying key WikiProjects and editors is recommended by the existing guideline, and with good reason. I see no problem with suggesting that people try and follow an existing Wikipedia guideline (although this is quite different from the previous suggestion we had been discussing, which I did not support). Most articles have only one or a very small number of associated WikiProjects. Although the case of WikiProjects inappropriately tagging articles does tend to complicate the process of courtesy notification, this strikes me much more as an argument for asking WikiProjects to use restraint in what they tag to make sure it reflects actual active interest and involvement and prevents courtesy notification from becoming too onerous, not an argument against Wikipedia's general encouragement of courtesy, notification, and discussion among genuinely interested and involved parties. Just as editors know how to identify the author and key editors for individual notification, they can be trusted to use common sense to identify and contact only key WikiProjects. Once again, the fact that WikiProject tagging can potentially be abused is not an argument against existing guidelines supporting courtesy and the consensus process, it's an argument for ensuring that the tagging process is not abused in the future. Best, --Shirahadasha (talk) 17:44, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

For the most part, I agree with the above, that to a degree common sense on the part of the editor nominating an article for deletion should be enough, and that notifying some projects which have bannered an article might be something we would want to encourage. I only see two, potentially significant, pitfalls, which could enter into a few cases. They involve the editors involved actually knowing the subject well enough to know which WikiProjects are relevant, and also knowing which WikiProjects exist.

As stated above, I am still working on a new draft directory. However, I note that even in the past few days since I was last actively working on the new draft directory, several new project pages have been created, and clearly aren't on any directory yet. Also, there is a question, how significant a one I don't know, as to whether an editor acting in good faith trying to figure out which projects to notify doesn't perhaps either know of the directory, or can't figure out from the less than clear text or from the sheer number of potentially related projects listed which one or more are actually relevant, and may even give up in frustration or wind up notifying the wrong project, who, out of peevishness or even acting in good faith, !vote to delete a notable article. To an extent, these problems are unavoidable and probably not easily solved. An obvious example I'm seeing right now happens in several articles relating to Christianity in India. Several of these pages refer to churches which call themselves Orthodox. Unfortunately, those churches are actually Oriental Orthodox, not Eastern Orthodox. So, notifying the Eastern Orthodoxy project in good faith but incomplete knowledge could easily happen, potentially leading to a few inaccurate "delete" !votes based on those who know Eastern Orthodoxy, but not Oriental Orthodoxy, being unable to find any mention of it in Eastern Orthodoxy sources. So, in cases like this, even following the guideline as well as one knows how to do might create unintended problems. So, while I agree it should remain as a guideline, I think it would be a very bad idea to lay too much emphasis on it, as even editors in good faith could make mistakes trying to follow the guideline, and, potentially, create more problems than they solve. John Carter (talk) 18:08, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I imagine there will always be errors and imperfections no matter what we do. One way to help reduce them might be to ask (perhaps through a guideline) that WikiProject tagging mean something -- it should reflect that someone on the WikiProject involved has looked at the article and thought the subject relevant to the project and worth the project's time (which would also make it a kind of implicit keep endorsement). If WikiProjects only tagged articles someone had looked at the problem of inappropriate tagging would be reduced. Any situation where non-experts perform classification and categorization results in errors, but the existence of problem cases doesn't undermine generally good approaches. Nothing's perfect. However, despite the existence of problem tags, in a case where there are only one or two WikiProjects, notifying them as a courtesy as part of a deletion nomination should on average produce a more informed deletion discussion, even though it won't in every case. Best, --Shirahadasha (talk) 19:23, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

One disadvantage to doing that is that it might slow down the number of articles which even get tagged, let alone read. However, I could see it easily be the case that we might try to create a guideline that autoassessment based on the presence of a stub template no longer take place at all, barring perhaps "copying" existing assessments already on talk pages. That way, in the event an article is "tagged" with a banner, it will appear as an unassessed article, and will, hopefully, at some point get some editor involved with that project to look it over to see how good it is, and at the same time whether it should be kept. Having tried to place banners on articles by hand myself for some time, it can be and often is a rather frustrating task to find that probably at least half the time, when dealing with established projects, you're going to find the page already tagged, in effect wasting half your time involved on pointless review. That may get worse for projects as time goes on. But, if we were to remove automatic assessment based on presence of stub templates, the "newly tagged" articles would appear as unassessed class, and that would hopefully, eventually, get someone to actually look at the article. John Carter (talk) 21:04, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Can I get a witness some feedback?

In what is starting to seem more like harrassment than a truth-seeking discussion, an editor at Church of Divine Science is asserting that this institution is not notable. Rather than making the case here, could you all take a look at the article?

Also, is there a method for resolving these disputes? Thanks, Madman (talk) 13:34, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

The "method for resolving these disputes" is citing sources that establish that the topic meets the criteria laid out in WP:ORG -- criteria that you have ignored to date. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk 13:52, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

DoubleJay Creative

Hi. I've been trying to create a page for DJC, an important production company in the city of Knoxville (with satellite offices in LA). DJC created the first purely digitally edited short, was recently nominated for an Emmy, has received a variety of awards in the industry and has received plenty of press coverage. Yet my article was speedily deleted, and when I inquired as to what I should change to make it acceptable, the admin was less than helpful. I have reviewed the notoriety guidelines and believe that the page fulfills them (and I could add more if it could be undeleted). There are pages for other similar companies (see: AC Entertainment) which are significantly less elaborate and which cite significantly less references. Since nobody will tell me what to change, I'm going to post what I have here in hopes that somebody will tell me what to change in order to get undeleted, or else just undelete me. (I'm new here, I'm trying to learn!) Dingstersdie (talk) 18:21, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

DoubleJay Creative is a visual media production company founded by Larsen Jay in 2005. DJC specializes in television specials, commercials, documentary, educational & corporate films supported by a dynamic web and graphic design department. DoubleJay Creative draws on comprehensive production facilities, an international creative staff and the latest technologies to meet clients' visual needs. Larsen’s first film, Pinmonkeys, was the first film ever to be entirely shot and edited digitally. Larsen's wife Adrian Jay joined the company in 2006, beginning in production but now heading up the development team. DJC has a satellite office in L.A.

One major project that DJC completed was "Bijou Theatre: The Gem of the South," which was funded in part by the city. Knoxville's historic [Bijou Theatre] re-opened after extensive renovations in June 2006. DoubleJay Creative partnered with [AC Entertainment] to produce the celebration that included the production of a documentary retracing the history of this local landmark. The film premiered before a live audience and was simulcast on the local NBC affiliate, WBIR TV10. It won a Silver Telly Award, the award organization's highest honor, and was honored with a nomination for a regional Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

"[Producer Dominic] Moore is gathering as much detail about the pre-Bijou Lamar House as about the theater itself; he’s turned up a few details not widely known, for example, that former presidential candidate John C. Breckinridge gave an incendiary secessionist speech there in 1861. Moore also looked into the 1877 visit of President Rutherford B. Hayes, and was impressed that, when he called the Hayes Presidential Library in Ohio, they already seemed to know all about the visit. “They said, ‘Oh, yeah, he was in Knoxville then.’” Through them he found some of Hayes’ own rapturous descriptions of the East Tennessee countryside, and the first documented photo of Hayes’ speech there—useful, because it’s needed to replace a long misattributed photo of a political rally historians had assumed was a photo of the Hayes visit."

— Jack Neely, http://www.metropulse.com/articles/2006/16_19/cover_story.shtml

DoubleJay Creative won a Silver Telly in 2007 at the 28th annual Telly Awards for "Welcome to Union College." The Silver Telly is the highest honor awarded. They were also winners of 2007's 37th Annual Creativity Awards. DJC was awarded an Aegis Award in 2006 for "Bijou Theatre: The Gem of the South" and a Davey Award in the same year for the Bijou's event program.

In 2006 Larsen authored a book, "What If Cows Could..." which was illustrated by Laurie Faust. It was co-published by DoubleJay Creative in cooperation with Bear Hug Books (an imprint of MidAmerica Publishing Corporation), and MidAmerica publishing donates a portion of the proceeds from all sales to the Save My Shelter Fund. The Fund was developed to help animal shelters nationwide promote community education, animal rescue and care and provide money to aid adoption programs that find loving homes for needy animals.

DoubleJay Creative has been an active force in Knoxville's urban development. In 2005 DJC was the driving force behind bringing back Knoxville's Holidays on Ice, a skating rink on Market Square which had been closed for a decade. In 2007 a non-profit organization, Center City Events [2], was founded to administrate the day-to-day workings of the rink. DJC has also been involved in philanthropy: the annual Joy of Music School fundraiser raises significant amounts of money for this local non-profit.

External links

• Center City Events

Two non-notable organizations

Does anyone else think that Senang Hati Foundation and Smile Foundation of Bali are non-notable? Those articles are basically advertising, and the references and external links are also just advertising for the organizations. The only article that links to Senang Hati Foundation is Tampaksiring, which was also written by the same author, and the only article that links to Smile Foundation of Bali is Cleft lip and palate, in which the same author added a link in the "See also" section.[3]. Ideascomes (talk) 20:19, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

A quote from the Senang Hati Foundation article: "Senang Hati Foundation was begun in 2001 by an Australian man who is himself disabled. He and a small number of friends went into villages…" I think the author of the article is either the founder or one of his friends. Ideascomes (talk) 20:24, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Fads: unorganized organizations

The guideline is for a "company, corporation, organization, team, religion, group, product, or service." In these modern times, a "group" doesn't have to be organized by traditional means to consider itself a "group". I'm thinking here of online communities of bloggers & forums. People really do feel themselves as involved members of a group, tho their real identities, ages, addresses etc. may be unknown to each other and no one can say how many people are involved. (We are, in fact, such a community of involved, often anonymous, editors in an online community.)

Now, these involved people will consider their cause notable. They devote a large part of their lives to it. How to convince them that it isn't notable in the encyclopaedic sense?

Case in point: in my opinion, polyphasic sleeping means sleeping at least two, probably more, episodes each day/night. (Bi-phasic sleeping is a good nights sleep + a siesta; poly should probably mean more than two.) Infants, some old people, many animals and perhaps some pre-industrial societies do it. These last 5 years the term has been "taken over" by online communities who even call themselves "poly phasers," written as two words, and they have a specific purpose for their activity. Their article Everyman sleep schedule has been deleted; it's now a redirect. Their article Uberman's sleep schedule is presently up for deletion. They've pretty much hijacked the article Polyphasic sleep, which concerns me. I can't see that this new fad is at all notable by Wikipedia's standards. How should one tackle that, and is this type of "group" included in this guide? --Hordaland (talk) 03:09, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Scanning the examples you gave, I think the page you want is Wikipedia:No original research. Wikipedia:Reliable sources may also be useful to make clear that blog entries and primary sources can not support a stand-alone article. And from your description, the process already seems to be working the way that it's supposed to. All topics must meet Wikipedia's generally accepted inclusion criteria and comply with Wikipedia's sourcing standards in order to be covered in the encyclopedia.
Your specific question, though, was whether this page could help. I don't think so. It's pretty narrowly focused on the standards that are appropriate to a group of people organized as a single entity. (And because such entities are often commercial entities, we stuck the standards for their products here.) WP:CORP might help provide guidance on the Cleveland polyphaser club or the SleepAide 3000 but it's not really designed to give guidance on general topics like polyphasic sleep. Rossami (talk) 03:52, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Local notability

Schools, businesses, neighborhoods and neighborhood associations, youth organizations, service clubs, churches, and the like routinely receive coverage in local media. Over time, this can technically meet WP:V. However, if it is only locally notable and there is zero or nearly zero coverage outside of the local area, is it encyclopedic?

For example, a small-town newspaper may cover the happenings of every civic organization, church, and school in town every week, but those entities are probably no more or less notable than similar entities in big cities, which may get only sporadic or no significant media coverage. Is Smallville Elementary School or Brownie Troop 101 any more notable than Metropolis Public School 15 or its Cub Scout Pack, just because the Talon covers its local school and youth organizations every week and The Daily Planet doesn't?

Of course, LuthorCorp is notable in its own right. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:52, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually I think all the notability guidelines (not just this one) cover this by using the words "significant coverage." The newspaper coverage of small-town "happenings" does not, even when aggregated over months or years, rise to the level of significant coverage, in my opinion. Now if there were reliably sourced books published on Smallville Elementary School, and those books were independent of the subject, and contained the school's history, those would rise to the level of significant coverage and could support a verifiable WP article.

Is this a strictly hypothetical problem, or an actual one you can illustrate with real examples? UnitedStatesian (talk) 06:34, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I discussed this earlier in relation to local microbusinesses. I think there should be some real examples of this in the Afd and Prod case histories before we concern ourselves with writing a guideline. In the meantime local community organisations and microbusiness with an assertion of significant coverage should go to WP:PROD then WP:AFD. After all, guidelines reflect practice, not the other way around, and if we unilaterally write a guideline, the cadet corps where Neil Armstrong got his pilots license(*) might get speedied, and a newcomer might be bitten.

* - made up example

--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 10:22, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Good points about checking PROD and AfD histories and guidelines reflecting established practice. By the way, many small communities have local historical societies or chambers of commerce who commission "local interest" books to use as fund-raisers or publicity. The mention of a business or other entity in what amounts to a novelty-press low-print-run book doesn't necessarily constitute significant coverage, especially for books printed in the digital age. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 14:02, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it's important not to confuse notability, which attempts to reflect the amount of reliable coverage a topic has received, with questions of the topic's value or importance. "Significant coverage" refers only to the amount of information available on that topic. It's certainly been argued that local papers are not necessarily sufficiently reliable sources and that particular ones aren't, but so long as the paper is accepted as a reliable source, if it has an article that describes a topic in depth the article is "significant coverage" regardless of how important one thinks the paper may be. "Notability" refers to the degree to which a topic is covered by reliable sources. Importance is a different matter. There have been many proposals to have a set of "encyclopedicness" criteria which address whether a topic is deemed worthy of inclusion on various grounds other than its coverage by reliable sources, and WP:NOT, while an essay and not policy, contains some criteria that many follow. However, so far there has been no consensus to have such criteria. If such criteria are desired, I would suggest reviving discussion on "encyclopedicness" and directly proposing it, including a proposal that if sources are only local the topic isn't encyclopedic and shouldn't be included on that ground (and perhaps various other value judgments that have been proposed over the years and which have had some support). Similarly, if one honestly believes that local papers have problematic reliability, WT:Reliable sources would be the place for a proposal to exclude them or give them only limited use. Such proposals, however, have nothing to do with notability. Best, --Shirahadasha (talk) 16:43, 29 April 2008 (UTC).

section break-Local notability

The only practical meaning of notability is "suitability for the encyclopedia." This includes a number of aspects, one of which at least is importance--though this does not help all that much, because we then must ask importance for whom, and this is where the problems about local institutions arise. The General notability provision is meaningless in practice, because it can be adjusted to mean anything one likes by tinkering with the definition of reliable sources and significant coverage. WP:NOT, by the way, isn't an essay, but policy-- go look at the page. The provisions there are in fact the really effective policies in terms of what actually gets included in the encyclopedia. It's a weird way to go about it. As far as I am concerned , the best thing to do with the concept of general notability is to scrap it entirely a meaningless and unhelpful,and to consider what we want to do for particular sorts of topics.

The appropriate thing to discuss here is not how we want to tinker with the vague rules, but rather, what we want to include, and why. Once we decide that, we can write the rules that accommodate it. The rules are not handed down to us by a legislative authority--we make them ourselves. There are some basic policies we must accept to work here--the key one for our purposes is WP:Verifiability, that we can only put in material for which there is a source we consider sufficiently reliable for the purpose, and that certainly includes much of the content of local newspapers. (the concept of reliable sources for notability is something different--those are sources we trust as proving notability, and that means whatever we want it to; if we want to cut back on local content, we define it as not including local newspapers; if we want to be inclusive, we include it. This is different from whether the content in them is sufficiently trustworthy to support article content.)

The proposed general rule above about being known outside of the community makes intuitive sense. But how do you define local community? The other towns in the country, or nationwide? the sort of thing which is important to everyone is a small city is not important to everyone in London; on the other hand, things in London are sometimes considered so important that they are known nationwide even they are only local.

How do we then agree on what we want to do? I doubt we can actually agree. I could write a good argument for including everything from the neighborhood level up--it will be important to at least some people, and there is no reason not to be as comprehensive as possible. I could also say the opposite--this is not going to be the only information source in the world, and there remains a role for local websites and local wikis. (I have my own preference, of course, which, semi-seriously, is a rule which will define the things in my own city that I know and care about as notable. I justify it by saying I live there because everything that happens there is interesting and important. ). I think we will need to compromise. My suggestion is to try to find a compromise which is at least stable and predictable. its absurd to argue about individual fire departments and high schools at AfD--we should decide once and for all about these sort of things.DGG (talk) 18:26, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

DGG, that is an excellent essay on the core problem. We should probably copy this discussion somewhere other than just WP:CORP because it applies more widely.
My own take on the problem is expressed in terms of critical mass. We have known problems across the project with vandalism and with unconfirmed and sometimes deliberately false information. For topics which are well-known or which can be easily referenced, it's not that hard for the community to keep the content of article factual. For topics which are too obscure, however, we are often unable to attract the necessary critical mass of informed and interested editors who will monitor the article and keep it free from subtle vandalism such as false "updates". We also need that critical mass to ensure that we have enough different points of view watching the page to ensure that the presentation of content is balanced and neutral. WP:V and WP:NPOV are essential but unless there are enough independent editors collaborating on the page to make sure that the page complies, the existence of those policies alone are not sufficient.
London bridge is extraordinarily well-known. Many people watch that page and verify changes made to it. Quantum chromodynamics is a highly specialized field but the contents are well-covered in external sources which lots of people can access. Even if I don't know much about the topic, I can verify whether a change is consistent with facts published by others. My local breadshop, on the other hand, may have a few writeups but they're not going to be in sources that are readily available to others nor will there be others with the implicit knowledge necessary to know whether my description is fair.
The notability criteria are an attempt to find that threshold where we can be reasonably confident that the article will be maintained over time. (In my opinion, this explains why AFD participants tend to be more lenient with high-quality pages - the users creating the page have already demonstrated a commitment to the page and are more likely to maintain it.)
As you say, there is no easy way to set that threshold. Personally, I think that very little about my own city is notable enough for an encyclopedia but that may be because I've lived lots of places and know that it's not nearly as unique as the "natives" think.
I remember one editor who tried to come up with some quantitative analysis. There are lots of ways to poke holes in this analysis but I think it had some useful insights. His analysis went something like this:

• We have roughly 7 million registered users and 1500 admins working on almost 13 million pages (2.4 million of which are articles) in the English language Wikipedia.
• There are roughly 400 million native english speakers in the world and possibly the same number with English as a second language strong enough that they would participate in the project.
• That means that we might have about 1 percent of the population participating in the project in some fashion. That's probably an overly-optimistic number, though, since the 7 million includes known sockpuppets, blocked vandals and users who created an account, made a single edit and never came back or forgot their password and created a new account. (This is offset to some degree by anonymous contributors.) More conservatively, we might estimate that we have 0.1% of the population working on the project.
• Of those, only a fraction will be interested enough in the topic to actually track it. I don't have statistics to back this up but based on some comments over at Meta, I'll guess that the average user has 10 pages watchlisted and that admins average closer 200-400. Let's guess that for any given topic, 1% of editors will want to work on it. (That's absurdly high given that there are 2.4M articles but let's go with it for now.)
• That implies that for a community of 200,000 people, we have about 200 Wikipedians and 2 of them will work on any given local-interest page. If the community of people with knowledge on the topic is smaller than that, the page only has a single opinion guiding it. The risks of bad articles because of bias, conflict of interest or neglect are high.

Again, there are holes in this analysis that you could drive a truck through. But I found it useful to explain to myself why thresholds are helpful in the first place. To me, the concept of "notability" is an experiment in the effort to find a useful proxy for "maintainability". Rossami (talk) 21:40, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Hong Kong Legends

Is the Hong Kong Legends article notable enough? Should it be nominated for deletion? Sorry I'm not familiar with wikipedia policy here. --59.101.230.47 (talk) 01:05, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

• Yes it is notable. The company operated for 8 years, releasing over 70 titles, and was basically the foremost company releasing Hong Kong films in the UK. I appreciate you are a new user, but please read up on the relevant Wikipedia policies and what the templates actually mean before slapping the likes of "notability", "advertisement" and "wikify" on articles. Gram123 (talk) 15:42, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Political Parties..?

With two current AFD discussions ongoing - Money Reform Party and Spectre (political party) - I have done some looking around to find if Wiki has any detailed discussions or policy on political parties. I note that general WP:N policy says failed candidates are almost always not notable (although Catherine Taylor-Dawson is certainly a special case) but nothing specifically on political parties. In the case of the two above, the former has stood in just one UK by-election getting less than 5% of the vote; the latter has never stood in any elections at all in the 2 years of its existance. If possible could someone direct me to existing party political policy discussions, or is this an area in need of greater attention? I note that my request for discussion at the fledging WikiProject Political Parties has not yet recived much attention Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Political_Parties doktorb _words^deeds 15:12, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Interesting. Unless someone else uncovers a prior consensus, I personally think we should let the current AfD discussions set the precedent. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 15:26, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

There have been a number of other AFD decisions on political parties but I don't remember it coming up enough that anyone ever felt the need to codify the findings into a single guideline. I can't remember any as small as the cases Doktorbuk describes and several that were marginally larger but were not kept or were cut back to very small stubs.
In general, I would expect a national political party getting significant independent and substantive news coverage (that is, news coverage that covers the party and their issues in depth, not merely the novelty of a fringe party) will probably qualify for inclusion. A party that has never stood for an election at all, though, seems unlikely to meet our standards. Rossami (talk) 17:18, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Some minor political parties' AfDs are heavily influenced by partisans who favor keeping or deleting the party on political rather than Wikipedia-related grounds. Bear that in mind as you do the research. In effect, some AfDers are using WP:ILIKEIT and WP:IDONTLIKEIT as justification to keep or delete. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:31, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I think that existence -> notability for parties depends in part on how hard it is to be recognized. If you have to get signatures from 10% of a large electorate to form a party, well, that's a notable achievement in and of itself. On the other hand if all you have to do is pay a small filing fee, then existence itself is clearly not notable. I would say that if a party effected the outcome of at least one election, either by winning a seat or spoiling another party's chances in a national or other major election, then they are notable. Even if they didn't do that, if they effected change in some other way, such as getting national parties to adopt their goals or, in the case of gadfly parties, causing the government to make it harder to form parties or otherwise prevent future gadfly parties, then they are notable. If they had no impact on history besides being on the ballot and getting token news coverage, they are not notable. Those which received significant news coverage but who didn't impact the election and had no lasting influence are borderline cases and would make good AfD discussions. In countries that allow independent candidates, I would apply the same criteria to them if they are not otherwise notable. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:31, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to all for your replies. I will try and deal with what you have said...

1. On the issue of "existance -> notability", the issue with UK parties of any size is the requirement to register on the Electoral Commission's register of political parties. Just because they are registered does not make them notable, just as a football club is not notable just because they play somewhere in the football league. As you say, if they effected change, they are notable, but there will be elements of subjectivity and objectivity in equal measures when dealing with, say, whether the Official Monster Raving Loony Party are actually notable within the context of current Wiki policy. For the record, I believe they are notable...
2. On the issue of electoral history, I would certainly include any party which has, or has had, any electoral success at a national or regional level. However this would include Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern, but sadly not include Idle Toad, who have had elected members for years on the third tier of UK politics. This is where things get tricky, I'd say we have to word very carefully any policy on electoral history.
3. The point about news coverage is of course very important. The current Miss Great Britain stood at a recent parliamentary by-election, but all coverage was about who she was rather than what she stood for. You can bet your bottom euro-cent that there will be similar coverage of candidates like this, and many supporters will assume Wiki is a surrogate blog for their campaign.

I think the point about the current AfD disucssions is fair. Let us see how they go, and then maybe we can decide on the best way to go?

doktorb _words^deeds 18:56, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Basically, we need a floor below which notability is not achieved based on being a political party, i.e. if you don't make the floor and are not otherwise notable then you aren't notable. We also need a ceiling above which you are without question notable as a political party assuming verifiable references exist to support the claim. Anything in between will be on a case-by-case basis and the decisions of these individual cases will serve as precedent for raising the floor and lowering the ceiling. For now, I'd recommend individual-case discussions for political parties which are only locally significant, political parties which, while not influencing any individual election have been around so long that they can't be completely ignored, and any political party which is getting more than routine press even if it is not winning or effecting change. I would put spoof and other political parties whose notability is outside of politics in a separate category. For example, even if it had never won a race, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party might qualify for notability as a cultural entity inspired by Monty Python's Flying Circus rather than as a political party. To put it another way: An article may fail WP:N_POLITICALPARTY and still still meet WP:N but the burden of proof is on the article.

One more thing on the floor and ceiling: These must allow for local variances. What is "clearly notable" in one country might be "you've got to be kidding me, notable? Hah!" in another. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 19:36, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I thank you for your considered response. Whilst having a look around, I note that Pride in Paisley Party has been prod'd and is likely to disappear soon. The point you make about the Monster Raving Loony party has been on my mind since I thought about this whole process. Basically they are a fairly notable, and historic group in the UK (indeed, they thought of pet passports before anyone else, heh) so they would be safe regardless, I guess now. But this is viewed by a UK based political anorak and I ain't sure formimg a "culture test" will be easy given the world-wide audience of Wiki. The "floor and ceiling" approach is very interesting, maybe one of us can start with some rough ideas on a sandbox type page to move from here? doktorb _words^deeds 23:28, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I removed the PROD and put it up for a full AfD. The comments of editors, particularly those not already following this discussion, may help us define a good guideline. I would expect this to be a SNOW or nearly so but the comments may be helpful. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 00:03, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Tightening this up

I changed the wording of the chief notability guideline from saying simply coverage to significant coverage, to track the wording of the general notability guideline. I also recast a sentence that seemed slightly awkward to me. I hope these aren't controversial edits.

I've been thinking about ways to tighten this up further. Business tends to generate a lot of paper generally. There are dozens of trade journals out there that you never heard of. Publicity and advertising businesses seem to generate a sub-industry to congratulate each other and bestow various awards on each other's campaigns.

Not sure exactly how I'd want to phrase it, but I think that businesses should have to prove some measure of notability among the general public, as opposed to claims of notability within their industry. Mention in trade publications circulated within a particular industry in which a business participates should not confer notability; mention in general circulation business publications like Business Week or The Wall Street Journal should be the standard. Likewise, awards and recognitions handed out by industry groups should not confer notability, unless these awards are noticed by general interest or widely circulated business publications, either.

The same should be true of new management theories and philosophies. Business, like school-teaching, really isn't an academic subject, so the professors and journals that discuss them in academic settings tend to hide behind the wall of bad prose. Proposed management theories from academic settings should require some measure of general circulation among non-academic publications, and at least rise to the level of management fads, before becoming notable enough. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 15:23, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly agree. Also, one might think of better specifying the range of relevant sources for notability of products. There are many journals and online resources out there who routinely review (test, evaluate) new products or models, particularly in the area of consumer electronics. Still these products are usually superseded and forgotten after a short while; I don't think that single products of this kind typically make an encyclopedic topic. --B. Wolterding (talk) 15:34, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I proposed a tightening to restrict the use of local papers (above) but after discussion and further investigation, I came to the conclusion that the current guideline is working quite well, and it is not worth negotiating a change until problems arise. Tightening could increase systemic bias. As a counterexample, when I wrote Kagome Co., Ltd., while convinced it is notable, I was not able to establish notability using the guideline, as I don't read Japanese. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 17:33, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

i agree with Hrothulf. It is already difficult enough to get coverage of significant companies sand similar organisations. Trade journals are the major sources of information in many fields--obviously, there is a difference between an article and reprinted public relations, but the major publication rely for their circulation on being considered worth reading by those in the area, which will only take place if what they cover is thought important. Limiting business coverage to the WSJ is like limiting coverage of porn actors to Variety.

As for products, being notable for a short while is enough. The continued interest in writing articles about superseded business and consumer products demonstrates the importance of Wikipedia in this respect.

to limit coverage of management theories to what is actually practiced in business is like limiting the coverage of biology to those things actually used in medicine, or of political science to practical politics. The practical business world is one thing, the academic study of management is another. they each have their quite separate standards and practitioners, although just like biology & medicine, they influence each other eventually. DGG (talk) 02:54, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

My own interest about things in the world is much closer to that of Smerdis than that of Hrothulf, but that does not mean i want the deletion of things that don't matter much to me. For one thing, the next thing you know, the business types will want to get rid of the theologians. (smile). DGG (talk) 03:19, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

My main concern is to have a more clearly worded rejoinder to the claims sometimes submitted that "Sure, our ad agency is notable! One of our campaigns won a bronze medal at the 2002 Greater Metropolitan Bollocks Advertising Industry awards banquet. There's two sentences about our award in Bollocks in Advertising, the local trade paper. That's a whole paragraph by current standards of journalism, from a third party source, and it's all about us!" This sort of thing may meet notability guidelines as currently written; it may be too trivial, but that's a judgment call.

Generally, I do feel that consumer businesses that market tangible products directly to the public might be notable almost per se. Businesses that make hard goods in factories generally should get a break in favor of retention.

But articles about businesses that involve the Internet, services to other businesses, consultancies, or publicity almost always seem to have multiple problems:
- They seem to have difficulty describing what they do in English.
- Conflict of interest is a larger problem here than elsewhere.
- I presume this kind of business to be aware of the fact that Google likes Wikipedia. I suspect them of search engine manipulation, especially if that sort of thing is what they do for a living.

I would probably be happiest with some kind of language that makes these admitted prejudices explicit. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 14:04, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

New article

Hello,

my mentor gave me the advise to go here and ask you for help. I just wrote an article about a company and would like to make sure that it meets the criteria for notability as I don't want it to be removed again after being published. On the german site it's already online. UNfortunately the references are all in German, although the company is internationally operating but it's a Austrian company. Please look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nisse149 and give me your feedback! Thank you very much!!! 27.6.2008 --Nisse149 (talk) 07:45, 27 June 2008 (UTC)Nisse 149

Bus company article discussion

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Transport/Bus articles. MickMacNee (talk) 15:53, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Guideline clarification

An issue arose on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Spencer Roloson Winery regarding WP:CORP. Here we have an organization that "has been the subject of significant coverage" in a reliable independent secondary source. Basically, one issue of a wine magazine contained a profile article of this small start-up winery.

By the "letter of the law" this seems to qualify under WP:CORP. However, that same wine magazine profiles wineries all the time, it's their job. And the magazine article written on this particular winery is practically boilerplate, saying nothing notable about it. As I wrote in the AfD discussion, you could search-and-replace the organization name with another in the same business, make a few minor changes to fit, and the magazine article could be about any of hundreds of non-notable organizations like the subject.

I fail to see how that makes an organization notable in the spirit of the WP:CORP guideline. ~Amatulić (talk) 03:46, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, one article in a trade magazine would not qualify under either the spirit or the letter of this guideline. The criterion specifically says sources. We had a long debate when this page was created about whether a single source could be sufficient and concluded that it would be so rare that you would pretty much have to invoke WP:IAR. The other concern in your example is the degree of independence that can be expected of a trade magazine. In general, they are not considered to be sufficiently independent of the subject since they tend to be highly dependent on the covered companies for advertising and other support. Rossami (talk) 05:15, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that explanation. It's always good to know the history behind these guidelines. ~Amatulić (talk) 21:13, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Proposed notability guideline on political parties

There is a proposal for a new notability guideline: Wikipedia:Notability (political parties). Warofdreams talk 15:13, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Latest changes: trying to avoid an edit war

User:DanielPenfield made changes to the product section; I reverted, thinking it made sense to have a discusion here first. He reverted my revert, citing Wikipedia:Editing_policy#Boldness in his edit summary (which I think applies only to articles, not to policies or guidelines). Not wanting to get into an edit war, I not going to remove his changes a second time, and am starting the discussion here. As far as the content of his edit, he misquotes the A7 speedy deletion policy, which does not apply to products or services. I think there are other issues; anyone else want to weigh in? UnitedStatesian (talk) 20:37, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

As written, CSD A7 "does not apply to products or services", yet numerous people have proposed (only to be shot down), the extension to these types of things to quench the ever-increasing "why can't I promote my product with a sham article" behavior. To wit:

• Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_18#A7_for_non-notable_products
• Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_29#A7_for_products.3F
• Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_24#Add_non-notable_software_products_to_A7
• Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_28#products
• etc., etc., etc.

Consider the sham article ZCubes--no notability required, Wikipedia is MY FREE ADVERTISING PLATFORM!!!:

• This "article" does not establish the notability of the product--free advertising for my obscure product!!!
• This "article" appears to be a thinly-veiled advertisement for the product--let me tell you all about its features!!! Here's my website, too: ZCubes#External links!!! Have your credit card ready!!!
• This "article" was created using the Wikipedia:Single-purpose account User:Millerclarissa and extensively edited using a series of single-purpose accounts (Special:Contributions/TOReilly, Special:Contributions/PeteDevries, Special:Contributions/RayFrench, Special:Contributions/LNRyan, Special:Contributions/SarkowA, Special:Contributions/ScottmaA, Special:Contributions/MeghaABS) during a three-week period spanning December 2007 through January 2008 in an attempt to conceal Wikipedia:Conflict of interest.
• The "references" are mostly product reviews from non-notable e-zines or blogs. One "reference" doesn't mention the ZCubes product at all. One "reference" comes from a Wikipedia:Spam blacklisted website. None of the "references" can be reasonably construed as "reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" as required by WP:RS--Great--now I can use blacklisted buyers' guides as "reliable sources"--mo' money, mo' money, MO' MONEY!!!

"Reference" number	Hyperlink	Assessment
1	http://www.web2weblog.com/50226711/productivity_with_a_z.php	Product review in some non-notable guy's blog
2	http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zcubes_trying_to_do_it_all.php	Product review in Wikipedia:Spam blacklisted e-zine readwriteweb
3	http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9708551-2.html	Two-sentence mention in article that is really about Web 2.0 Expo conference
4	http://profy.com/2006/12/23/zcubes-portal	Product review article in non-notable e-zine that admits it doesn't contain original content, just rehashes of Wikipedia:Spam_blacklisted e-zine product review (readwriteweb) and non-notable guy's blog entry http://rexdixon.wordpress.com/2006/12/15/zcubes/
5	http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/09/office_generati.php	Product review in some non-notable guy's blog
6	http://www.cis.lagcc.cuny.edu/newmediaday2.html	Laguardia community college "New Media Technology Day" featuring a ZCubes executive as a special guest, contains photos with captions, but nothing citable, in particular no mention of ZCubes, the product (only ZCubes, Inc., the company in identifying the executive's employer)
7	http://altsearchengines.com/2007/11/11/the-top-5-web-applications-i-want-for-christmas/	Seven-sentence promotional placement in non-notable buyer's guide

-- DanielPenfield (talk) 20:56, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

And guess what, the article has been prodded, and will probably be gone in five days. I agree with your views completely; look at all the red links in:User:UnitedStatesian#Prods_and_A7_Speedys_I_Started.2C_since_I_started_keeping_track. What I disagree with is your process. Running roughshod over an established guideline like this one or a policy like WP:CSD is not how WP works. Why did you revert my revert without discussion? UnitedStatesian (talk) 21:04, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I prodded it. It might be gone in five days, or, more likely, one of the sockpuppet accounts of its creator will whine that "a product do not need to be notable to have its own advertisement article on Wikipedia. You have effectively hamstrung me. And that's before it gets to an admin who subscribes to the "only new users add articles to Wikipedia, therefore we should accept any new articles even if it's obvious that they're free advertising" view. -- DanielPenfield (talk) 21:19, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Dan, I looked at Zero Cube. WP:N is perfectly adequate to deal with this kind of article. I see it just on the edge but failing because no one source is compelling as independent or with sufficient editorial oversight. I don't see the harm of an article on this product if it is noticed and credible information beyond blog quality can be produced. As to the links section, those get pretty spammy in almost any subject. I'll join the AfD. --Kevin Murray (talk) 18:36, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

• US is right. Dan was bold and then reverted, now he should discuss his proposed change to the guideline. It is Bold, Revert, Discuss, not bold revert, revert! --Kevin Murray (talk) 02:21, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
• I saw the change yesterday and probably should have reverted it myself. The problem is the order in which the change to policy must be made. Products are not currently covered under WP:CSD A7. Perhaps they should be - I generally agree with the sentiments that Daniel expresses about advertising abuse - but that must be discussed and decided at WT:CSD first. WP:CSD is a policy page and takes precedence over WP:CORP which is an inclusion guideline.
  Once the CSD criterion has been amended (and the change sticks), then we can change the page here. So let's move this debate over to WT:CSD and see if the community is willing to amend A7. Rossami (talk) 17:23, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

As noted above, the "community" is not willing to amend A7, because they all want to be able to write articles about their hometown garage rock band's latest CD (which would constitute a non-notable product):

• Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_18#A7_for_non-notable_products
• Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_29#A7_for_products.3F
• Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_24#Add_non-notable_software_products_to_A7
• Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_28#products
• etc., etc., etc.

-- DanielPenfield (talk) 17:50, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

• If Dan is right and the community has spoken, then why push rope up hill? --Kevin Murray (talk) 18:21, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

• Nice work, shunt all the work off on me, just like a true MBA: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ZCubes&diff=next&oldid=230472047 -- DanielPenfield (talk) 19:17, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

• Dan, there is no need for your snotty tone here or at my talk page, impuning both my integrity and education. Personally I now question your motivations as your user page brags about the creation of numerous non-notable biographies including unreferenced articles about your relatives. What axe are you grinding here with your attacks on products and MBAs? --Kevin Murray (talk) 19:28, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

• Your edit not only nullifies work I put into stating why this advertisment should be removed from Wikipedia, it also screams "Kevin Murray cannot be bothered to read more than the first few characters of any article or section."
• If you were truly "educated", you'd know how to spell "impugn".
• If you were truly "educated", you wouldn't be so naïve as to believe that everyone's account name must be his name in real life.
• All of the biographies I've written are properly sourced and are of notable individuals, per the Wikipedia policy rather than the "Kevin Murray has never heard of them, so they must be non-notable" policy.
• None of the biographies I've written are of relatives. I have no notable relatives. My name in real life is not the same as my account name.
• Here's the axe I have to grind: Wikipedia is full of people, who, if the task at hand requires more than a click or two, torpedo it. Kevin Murray is free to wipe out the request to delete the advertisement while at the same time Kevin Murray is under no obligation to lift a finger to do anything more. Kevin Murray is free to re-cast the task of SPAM removal as "an attack on products".

-- DanielPenfield (talk) 19:57, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh my I am unworthy. I'll seek some online self-help and see if i can salvage my self-worth. Cheers! GFY. --Kevin Murray (talk) 20:15, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Products notable - Company non-notable

I am certain this topic has come up before, but I can't seem to find it in the archives associated with this page, unfortunately. It is not uncommon for a small (or new) company's flagship product to receive significant press but the company itself only receive incidental coverage in articles about that product. An oft used argument at AfD is that "notability is not inherited", which I agree with in general; this works well when such a company has only a single notable product (discuss company in product article, not unlike WP:BLP1E). However, as in the case of 9th Level Games, companies with notable products can be problematic in that the 'merge company to notable product' does not work unless one applies 'merge company to each notable product' ... which is one solution. An alternative solution is to wave the notion that notability is not inherited and specifically apply it to companies with multiple notable products. A third solution might be to ensure that a section on the company is included in an appropriate aggregation or list-type article. Thoughts on precedents as to how to deal with this 'notable products - company without demonstrable notability' issue? Thanks --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:01, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

There is a fourth solution: don't have any unsourced section on or discussion of the company at all. This would seem to be what is consistent with WP's core verifiabilty policy, and the basis for WP:NOTINHERITED. There is no reason we have to link every word in an article, and this is true for linking to the non-notable company in the notable product's article. UnitedStatesian (talk) 01:25, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

If there is only one product, and the product is more recognizable than the company, then merging the company info to the product is certainly reasonable. If there are multiple products, then it may be more reasonable to merge and redirect the products to the company, if that would aviod redundancy. It's hard to imagine a company that has multiple notable products that is not at least minimally notable itself. Dhaluza (talk) 11:54, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Public Companies

It is my opinion that every publicly traded company in any stock exchange of the world, with a market capitalization of at least $100 million or currency equivalent, deserves at least a stub. I think it's enough to meet notability requirements. What do you think? --Itemirus^{Talk Page} 16:54, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Have to STRONGLY disagree. Any moving away from the "significant coverage in secondary sources" standard will lead to stubs that violate Wikipedia's core verifiability policy. Does having more unreferenced, unverifiable stubs really make WP a better encyclopedia, or does it push Wikipedia to be a directory of >$100 million public companies, in violation of WP:NOT#DIR, another core policy?

All that said, I do think there is a high, high percentage (>99%?) of the companies that meet your $100 million market cap threshold for which the "significant coverage in secondary sources" standard could be met. Why dilute standards of the encyclopedia for the inclusion, as stubs, of an additional less than 1%? UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:15, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Concur with UnitedStatesian - at the moment we rely on the "significant coverage" principle, and I don't consider this proposed guideline to be necessary. PhilKnight (talk) 18:04, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

This has been proposed a number of times before. As have measures based on headcount, customer base, revenues, etc. Any hard numerical standard is just too easy to game. Market capitalization, for example - do you count the average market cap over the past 5 years? would closing over $100 M on a single day qualify? what if they're used in a pump-and-dump scam and only cross that magic threshold based on the price paid for a single trade - does that count? And how to you apply that standard to stocks traded on a non-US exchange where you have problems both with currency conversion and even with the definition of "publicly traded"?
These problems are in addition to those few exceptions (UnitedStatesian's 1%) that will meet the numerical threshold but where we can find no independent reliable sources from which to base the article. Encyclopedia's are, by definition, tertiary sources. Until we have someone else's work to synopsize, we are better off without the article. Rossami (talk) 18:37, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Generally this is true but these companies will meet the criteria of WP:N anyway, so why be redundant. WP:N forces the authors to cite sources, which improves our credibility. I once believed in planting stubs and watching them grow, but I was being lazy. Now I spend a bit of time upfront and launch more substantial articles to everyone's benefit. Sadly when we come up with subject specific exception for greater inclusion, they are misunderstood and twisted to be a standard for exclusion, i.e., "It's not publicly traded therefore it is not notable." Please learn how to use and conform to WP:N in your articles and we will all be happier. I will sincerely help you anytime that you need help launching a meaningful article. Cheers! --Kevin Murray (talk) 18:47, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Well of course this concept has to be improved - average market cap past 5 yrs could be a good start; it could be made $200 million or whatever, but the point i was making is: shall we make a list of worldwide notable companies and see what's missing from the encyclopedia or we wait and see what comes around? i mean, i am quite new to this project, i know that WP is not a directory but a directory of companies could be a good starting point to get an idea of what to do. For example some constituents of the RTS Index like Mosenergo do not have a WP entry; yet they are without doubt notable, big companies from a huge emerging market. Same goes for Votorantim, a big brasilian company that sells paper products worldwide and is a constituent of the Bovespa index. --Itemirus^{Talk Page} 19:33, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Well that is different: I thought you were proposing changing the notability guideline. Yes, definitely, I would create the list of big, notable companies that don't have articles at Wikipedia:Requested articles/Business and Economics/Businesses and Organizations, and start working thought the list by creating well referenced articles on them. UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:40, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

To be honest that list looks like a mess to me - it's hard to tell what is what and what are the priorities - there is a request for the Blackbushe Sunday Market and this is just one i randomly picked up... - are we getting to the point where, besides patrolling 24/7 to keep the main space clean, there's the need to clean up project discussion pages and to do lists as well? - imho it would be better to create a semi protected side list for publicly traded companies that are constituents of the major world indexes to start with, and once that's cleared, i.e. once we have at least a stub for each entry, we move down to mid size companies and so on. If we don't apply a top-down approach to this project it will end up being unmanageable like the requested articles list. (No surprise it is all red)--Itemirus^{Talk Page} 20:16, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

A prioritized list sounds like a good idea. Like Kevin Murray, I am no longer a fan of stub creation; but such a list would also be helpful for those of us who prefer to take a new article beyond a stub immediately. I would suggest ranking non-listed companies by revenue (turnover) too, because that is the type of article I prefer to work on (cooperatives, private equity, joint ventures, defunct, state-owned and so on) and there seems to be a systemic bias in favour of listed companies, because analysts and the business press cover them. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 02:15, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

We actually tried lists like you are proposing. Believe it or not, the "requested article" subpages are what we went to because they were less bad than what we'd been doing before. The lists of companies also ended up almost all redlinked and stayed that way. And while they sat around, they accumulated an amazing volume of very subtle vandalism (such as the insertion of a fictitious company alleged to be in a foreign country or "updates" to annual revenues - very hard vandalism to detect in a long list with only a few people watchlisting it). The lists became so unreliable that we threw them out because, even in their redlinked state, readers were at risk of treating them as valid lists. Once they were moved out of the articlespace, the vandalism fell off - but that isolation created it's own problems. The only lists that worked were ones that were both extraordinarily well-known and very short. The DJIA is a good example. The List of S&P 500 companies is on the border of maintainability in my opinion. (We do have other lists of companies but for the most part, I wish we didn't because I don't think we do a good enough job maintaining them to protect the project's reputation. But even those all have a definitive source - the stock listing. Attempts to cover all companies exposes us to too much volatility as companies merge, rename themselves, go bankrupt, etc. We need a source against which we can regularly compare the list.)
I won't disagree that the current alpha-sorting of the page is probably unhelpful. Normally, it's the job of a WikiProject to sort and set priorities on a given topic. Unfortunately, the Business and Economics wikiproject sort of fell apart a while ago. If you want to put some time and effort into organizing and prioritizing the list and revitalizing the WikiProject, that would be great.
The other point I would caution against, though, is an expectation that just because you create a prioritized list that anyone else will follow it. Wikipedia volunteers write about whatever grabs their attention and motivation at the moment. We write about what we know, not what we're assigned. Our coverage expands in fits and starts with lots of gaps in the meantime but we trust that eventually we will get the coverage we want. It's frustrating but, surprisingly, it works... Rossami (talk) 02:49, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

If someone wants to write articles or improve them, then try this list of stubs. Or you could look at this list of high priority articles, most of which need work. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vegaswikian (talk • contribs)

More below at #Public companies continued. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 10:57, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I personally agree that companies listed on a major stock exchange (e.g. NYSE, NASDAQ as US-centric examples) should be assumed to be notable. I don't see the need for additional numerical criteria and share the concern above about gaming the system or arbitrariness. However, my view is not universally shared. There has been considerable discussion of this (see archives of this page) with the following consensus, at least by my interpretation

• The controlling criterion is one of independent sources and verifiability
• By and large, companies listed on a major stock exchange will easily satisfy that criterion, since they will usually be amply discussed in the press, be covered by independent analysis, etc.
• There has been considerable resistance to stating as policy that publically traded and/or listed companies are notable, since the feeling was that it is unnecessary, and might in some cases (hypothetical, as far as I can tell) confer notability on a company where our primary goal of verifiability may not be meetable.

I personally think that the last point is a strawman argument. As a result, there is the altogether too frequent situation that stubs on clearly notable public companies are put up for deletion or speedied, because no more "traditional" sources have been provided by the writer, and some user passing by suspects non-notability or spam. I propose the following addition to the notability guideline for discussion, one which I think represents consensus.

There has been considerable discussion over time whether publically traded corporations, or at least publically traded corporations listed on major stock exchanges, are inherently notable. Consensus has been that notability is not automatic in this case; however, sufficient independent sources usually exist for such commpanies. Examples include independent press coverage, analyst reports, and profiles by companies such as Hoover's (a commercial source). Accordingly, article authors should make sure to seek out such coverage and add references to such articles to properly establish notability. Editors coming across an article on such a company without such references are encouraged to do a check (or request others to do such a check) prior to nominating for deletion.

Discussion please? Martinp (talk) 00:09, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Support Martinp has made a sound proposal - i suggest creating a special tag to mark stubs for public companies in order to avoid speedy deletion where possible.--Itemirus^{Talk Page} 13:39, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

That was a very clear summation. I disagree about the "strawman" comment but will agree that it is a concern that is very rarely actualized. The only problem I have with your long paragraph is that does not appear to add anything to the page that's not already here. Instruction creep is a problem to be avoided whenever possible. Rossami (talk) 01:34, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

• Comment Perhaps some examples might help? Could you identify a few companies that meet the proposed criterion but not the current one? That would give some ability to assess whether the current criteria are appropriate in these cases or not. I am also having a hard time visualizing companies that would be covered by the proposal but not by standard criteria. --Shirahadasha (talk) 06:02, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

(answer to both Shirahadasha and Rossami) Agree that instruction creep should be avoided. However, I have personally seen this issue come up in deletion discussion on Oceaneering International, Arch Coal, Jones Lang LaSalle, Casella Waste Systems. While in some of those cases there were other issues as well, in each case some version of the article mentioned the company was listed (in some cases identifying the sticker) but did not directly reference conventional press or other independent coverage. Deletion nominators or AFD/DRV participants jumped into the discussion assuming the company was non-notable, and it took some heat and light to straighten things out. We eventually correctly kept and expanded those articles, but the process could have been a lot better and the lack of clarity about what are the conditions was a hindrance. The fact that Itemirus brings it up above, and that some nature of discussion on this topic is in every one of the archives of this page, suggests it is a FAQ. That's why I think instruction creep is warranted.

More directly, to Shirahadasha's point, I think my proposed text is not an actual change in the criterion, i.e. the conclusions we would reach using it would be the same we (eventually) reach now. The goal of the addition would be to clarify current consensus in an easily accessible place, and to encourage both article creators and potential deletion nominators to seek out broader references to include in such articles rather than wrangle about whether or not such a company is notable. Martinp (talk) 13:05, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

That's a fair point about this being a frequently-asked-question. If you can improve the existing wording, be bold. Stylistically, I'd rather see an improvement to the existing wording than the addition of a whole new paragraph but I'd like to see what you have in mind. Rossami (talk) 13:48, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Rossami, I looked but don't see where it would make sense as a brief wording edit. I propose to add my paragraph (or an improved version) as 3.2.2 Public Companies on the page. I'll wait a day to see if anyone else joins into this discussion, then do it. I like being bold, but on a page of this sort that has happily been this way for weeks or months, I'll try to see if there is (more) consensus first. Martinp (talk) 14:30, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

There appears to be little dissent, so I am putting it in. Others of course feel free to edit, it seems I will be off-wiki for a few days. Martinp (talk) 01:33, 28 August 2008 (UTC)