Wikipedia:WikiProject Retailing/Company page structure

Very rough draft

Something to consider, see Wikipedia:Criticism. This essay suggests to blow out the entire Criticism section altogether, and placing criticisms elsewhere. For example, criticisms of Wal-Mart do not belong in the article on Wal-Mart, but in the articles on Wal-Mart-critical groups and concepts (such as Wake Up Wal-Mart, predatory pricing, etc.).

Wackymacs (t c) suggests that we should use Microsoft as a template for this; it is a featured article about a corporation after all. It has the following document structure. I have omitted some redundant crap.

==History==

===1975–1985: The founding of Microsoft===
...
===2005–2006: The road to Vista===

==Product divisions==

===Microsoft Platform Products and Services Divisions===
...

==Business culture==

==User culture==

==Corporate affairs==

===Corporate structure===

===Stock===

===Diversity===

===Logos and slogans===

==Criticism==

===Corporate===

===Technical===

==Microsoft.com==

==See also==

==References and footnotes==

==External links==

And now, here is my take:

History

history of company's predecessors
history of company itself

Subsidiaries

list of subsidiaries, could also be represented by one or more article
if a subsidiary can be explained in multiple paragraphs, then could have its own article or section

Notable subsidiary #1

details
these could possibly have its own articles

Notable subsidiary #2

"........."

etc.

Corporate affairs

Corporate structure

directors
executives

Stock

stock history (such as IPO day, etc)

Logos and slogans: Self explanatory

Criticism

of course NPOV
should include criticism to the business model
should also include the company's responses to criticism

See also

anything that is obviously not directly about the company (such as Wal-Mart in popular culture) should go in its own article and be linked here

Notes and references

list of everything used in the article
using Cite of course, could also class="references-small" (remove 10 December 2010) the thing

Further reading (and/or External links)

material that is not used in the article

Article composition guidelines (from Wikipedia:Companies, corporations and economic information)

This is a draft set of guidelines for best-practice in the composition of articles about companies and corporations.

Articles can be about any type of company: public, private, quasi-governmental. A source of systematic bias in Wikipedia is the greater availability of information on publicly held companies in the United States versus other types and nationalities of companies.

An article should be about a company and its predecessors, the names of which may have changed due to mergers, acquisitions, de-mergers, legal challenges, etc. For public companies in the United States, the authoritative reference for such changes is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The article should be primarily about the history of the surviving company, even though it may have assumed a predecessor's name (for example the article on Bank of America is primarily about Nations Bank with references and links to an article about the legacy BankAmerica).

Larger corporations that have wholly owned subsidiaries can be represented by one or more articles; for instance, such subsidiaries might each warrant separate articles, but they should be clearly connected to the parent company.

Each article should have a section discussing the company's business model, which is intimately tied to how a company is put together and is one of the major factors usually shaping a company's history. It is not uncommon for the business model to change over time, but major changes can entail a change to the corporate identity.

For publicly held companies, a long term stock history (ideally a total shareholder return line including dividends), possibly shown relative to the industry benchmark appropriate to the company's line of business, would not be out of place.

Management philosophy, vision, and values are also a major element of corporations and their behaviour which often go under-reported during mergers and acquisitions and can provide insight into what actually happened as opposed to what the corporate partners have publicly described as having happened.

Lists in an article of current and former directors and executives of a company are desirable. A corporate governance section may be ideally suited to group this information.