User:Czarkoff/essays/Businesses are rarely notable

“ I added Wikipedia is not a newspaper and especially not a tabloid newspaper and that we… attempt to make some sort of judgment about the long term historical notability of something… ” — Jimmy Wales

The article in encyclopedia transmits the unspoken message: the topic of this article made an impact on the worlds' history. While the fact that Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia somehow lowers the bar of the impact we are allowed to note, there still are the limits we still have to respect. In case of business entities these limits are specifically noticeable.

What is so special with businesses that they should receive the special treatment? Many articles about the companies on Wikipedia are somehow bogus and generally shouldn't have been created at all. Some of the most common problems are explained below.

Businesses' notability

Construction of Triremes was a serious business with its own industry leaders. Who were they?

“ All entities move and nothing remains still. ” — Plato

The first and the main question one should answer before judging on notability of business is what is this company notable for? The notability of business can't be inherited from its founders and employees, from its clients and events related with it: all these can be subjects of the separate articles. Same goes for products: if the product of the company is notable, it deserves its own article. The company is only notable, if it is worth notice regardless all of that.

But what can warrant an article about the company then? In one word: impact. The organization can be considered notable only it has made considerable impact at least on the industry of its main topic. The word "impact" should be understood restrictively here: the effect on the industry should be beyond any reasonable doubt. Being the successful business with considerable amount of clients, having thousands of Google hits and other similar methods only prove the businesses' existence.

Common ways of hiding the lack of notability

Awards, investments and revenues

There are two by-products of companies' existence that are frequently mistaken for indications of businesses' notability: the awards, investments and revenues.

The awards generally are the mean of promotion: the active public relations team can easily "win" a fair amount of minor awards even for a completely inactive company. In Wikipedia articles the "Awards" section serves the very important purpose: it spots the promotional articles and topics with no indications of notability with records-breaking low amount of false positives. Specifically the worst cases are the TOP N lists: unless the very fact of being listed makes every such company notable (which is rarely the case), this achievement doesn't say anything about the company's notability.

Same goes for the articles about investments into companies: such reports are routinely used by editors who want to mask the lack of significant coverage of the article's subject in reliable sources. Indeed, the fact that someone put his money into a company may indicate a good business plan, commercial success or even possibility of future notability, but never it has anything to do with the notability of company here and now. The fact that the business is active doesn't make it notable.

The revenues are the yet less viable way to claim notability. The high revenue indicates that the business is (or pretends to be) successful. Still the commercial success doesn't contribute much to the company's notability, as it doesn't demonstrate the company's impact on the industry on its own. Successful or not, if the company indeed influenced the industry, the impact would be reported separately from the company's financial report.

The articles relying on such implications of notability should be speedy deleted per either "G11. Unambiguous advertising or promotion." or "A7. No indication of importance (individuals, animals, organizations, web content)." criteria.

Business with no products

This business works hard to get notable; if yours doesn't, it won't have its article

There is no direct relationship between notability of company and of its products. But red links in place of articles on products of a company hint at lack of company's notability.

The articles on notable company's products may just not be ready yet. Still, the people tend to learn companies' names after they get used to their products, so the fact that nobody wanted to write about this company's products indicates that the impact of the company was not considerable enough.

Business with a notable product

There are many businesses known only for one of their product. Such cases require special treatment: even if the company behind its only notable product received the significant coverage in reliable sources, the actual impact was made by the product, not by the company on its own.

Still, if some verifiable facts about the business entity can be noted, the only place they can land in such case is the article on product. It is not uncommon on Wikipedia to mention some corporate background in the products description, and the redirect from the company's name would both help the interested readers find the information about the business and prevent the advertisers from creating the unwarranted separate articles.

The article can be both on company and product just as much as the Schrödinger's cat can be simultaneously alive and dead.

Note, that such corporate background should be clearly isolated and given the proper weight to avoid the effect described in the following section.

Mixture of company and product

One of the important properties of Wikipedia article is its topic. There can be no article with the topic as general as The Lord of the Ring; instead there are several articles: about the novel, about the 1978 film, about the 2001-2003 film trilogy, about the strategy video game and several other articles.

Same should be true about the products (or services) and similarly named businesses about them: the article should be either about business or about product, so that the main topic would be seen from the first glance.

Though the articles about products may include some corporate background, such information should be isolated and made distinct from the rest of the article. The articles with the lead section mainly devoted to the company and the Features section describing the characteristics of the product should be considered as likely candidates for deletion.

An article about company, its clients and its products

Another ugly concept that can be easily found on Wikipedia is the article about the company, listing all of its notable clients and all of its products (optionally linked to off-site descriptions). Though the first alarming thing one would normally find in such articles is the "Awards" section, the very idea of collecting all of this information in one place can serve the only purpose: to hide the lack of individual notability of each of the collected topics.

Though the idea of listing non-notable products of a company in its article may seem reasonable, such collections are still harmful. The notability of individual topics don't add up; the news media don't collect several events that don't worth notice to publish them once altogether, and Wikipedia also shouldn't.

See also

• The presumption of non-notability for Internet related, computing, and services businesses
• Notability means impact
• Run-of-the-mill