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Guidelines background

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There have been several AFD nominations for Lists of companies by country over the past couple of years, with valid points made on both sides of the argument. Sometimes this led to the lists deletion, in most cases they were kept. A discussion was started on how to handle these lists over at WikiProject Lists without reaching a consensus. Based upon these outcomes it is obvious that a) these lists are useful for some editors and b) they likely will not be going away. Therefore the purpose of this guideline is to bring all of these lists up to a minimum quality standard that addresses the concerns raised and in doing so hopefully minimizes the need for future AFDs. Debate & discussion here is positively encouraged, just note that the question of whether these lists should stay has been covered many times before! :-) Richc80 (talk) 13:12, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

References

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AFD discussions

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WikiProject Lists discussion

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Clarify please

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Can you provide an example of a "good" company-by-country list, and a "bad" one? Also, I'm a little concerned by the criteria for inclusion having "listed on a major stock exchange", that's going to make the US and UK (or England?) and Hong Kong(?) lists really long and not necessarily informative. Franamax (talk) 21:39, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, thanks for your interest in this proposed guideline!
List of companies of Angola demonstrates most of the concerns I have regarding these lists:
  • No specific inclusion criteria (what makes a company Angolan? Should every company in Angola be listed?)
  • Many redlinks, including for some companies that appear at glance to be unlikely to meet WP:CORP (several hotels listed in H section)
  • Includes Multinational companies without any explanation as to why they are on the list (ChevronTexaco, Coca-Cola)
  • Includes obvious spam (Chavvas Wine & Liquor information)
  • Includes external links to companies websites which could be considered spam (Interjobs)
Better examples are those that appear to have been patrolled & maintained by interested Wikipedians and country or region based WikiProjects, such as List of companies of India, List of companies of Indonesia or List of companies of the United Arab Emirates, but as you will see none of these address all of the concerns above.
Regarding the concern on inclusion criteria, you raise a good point (exactly the reason I wanted feedback!). Any thoughts on a solution? A couple of ideas from me:
  • Each list would specify what stock exchanges are considered acceptable for inclusion, thereby helping to manage list length
  • Being on a stock exchange could be considered a secondary criteria, meaning that the company would also need to satisfy one of the other criteria for inclusion
  • For countries where this would be an issue most likely there will already be a list of companies by stock exchange, so these lists could instead wikilink to those (in the See Also section) and not use this as an inclusion criteria
Thanks again! Richc80 (talk) 22:39, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • First of all, I'd say that if the company is a redlink, it's not notable, so it comes off the list. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection. And if it's promotional or spammy, it's gone. In any other lists I watch, the criteria is a bluelink or (IMO at least) a reliable source showing notability. I don't think a stock listing confers notability of itself, neither does the simple fact of a headquarters location.
  • I only looked at Angola and UAE, but both those are in serious need of trimming. For UAE, why not just provide a link to the stock exchange website? If we're just duplicating information provided elsewhere, we should just link that information - we're only helpful when we add something, like bluelinks or sources.
  • As far as inclusion, how about categories? The individual company article could have Category:Companies listed on the LSE, Category:Companies listed on the TSE. Just throwing that out there.
  • Speaking closer to home, what used to be the VSE and is now the TSX-V (or something like that) is a constant source of scam-stocks and genuine, notable mining and oil-exploration ventures. Canada happens to be a global source of capital for mining ventures, but it doesn't really make sense to me that a convenient source of venture finance is notable on a company-by-company basis in a listing of "companies by Canada". I might be completely wrong there, solely my own opinion.
  • And on a more meta-basis - what does "companies by country" really mean? For instance Shell Oil, which is just plain global, and also is both British and Dutch (still, I think). Or Nortel, whose vast majority of production and sales are offshore of Canada. And where would you place Inco and Alcan, two recently "Canadian" companies taken over by "foreign" entities, still headquartered in Canada, and Inco at least was always majority owned by non-Canadian shareholders?
Just more thoughts. Some of those lists could use some mega-trimming though. Better to wait for more opinions than mine maybe! :) Franamax (talk) 23:19, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I like the spirit of this proposal.

I don't have time today to read the AfD archives you referred to, but I share Franamax's concern. If we say that a company can go on a country list if is notable and *Its shares are listed on a major stock exchange in that country we will have a lot of countries that have no other connection with the UK on the UK list, just because they raise capital on a London exchange. Several are even in the FTSE-100 !

American Depositary Receipts will make the US list almost unmanageable, but could easily be excluded.

Re. Franamax's question about Shell: special cases can still be dealt with as they come up. I don't think there are many. Shell could easily go on both British and Dutch lists, as it was quite definitely headquartered and founded in both countries. A similar approach would also put AstraZeneca in the UK and Sweden (but not in the US, despite it having a massive presence, and significant ADR stockholding.) I guess you could apply similar judgements to Alcan and Inco.

--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:49, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment While I admire the intention, I can't help feeling that this venture is doomed to produce lists of 10,000's of companies that are completely impossible to maintain, and that will always be vulnerable to spamming just about whatever happens. If you want a list of "companies from a country, that are notable enough to have a Wikipedia article" - then that sounds like a category.... If you want to chase down red links, then you want something really, really tightly defined. I'd be a strong fan of "List of companies in stock market index XXXXX" - pretty much by definition companies in an index are notable, so it would be a useful source of red links, yet you know when the list is complete, and indices tend to be updated only every 3 months or so, so the list is easy to maintain. "List of companies quoted on stock exchange YYYY" will produce longer lists, that will probably see 2-3 changes every day, which I'd suggest is on the limits of human maintainability in practice. So perhaps the way to go is for the "List of..." to be a list of lists and appropriate categories, a super-disambiguation page if you will. A link to appropriate categories will be more useful to the average user, and will mean you spend less time on maintenance other than concentrating on getting articles tagged, which needs doing anyway. Maintainability should be high on the criteria for these kinds of lists, and perhaps some thought should be put towards creating list criteria that lend themselves to bot maintenance. PS On the Shell thing, there's not much doubt now since they finally merged the UK and Dutch companies together to form Royal Dutch Shell, a single company with Dutch headquarters but a main listing in London. I'd tend to ignore the listing thing and just focus on where the company has its present headquarters, and where the headquarters of any acquired companies were. FlagSteward (talk) 23:49, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding Lists vs. Categories, as I describe above that has been brought up several times before but in the vast majority of cases has not been enough to see these lists deleted or improved in any way. I do agree though that where possible this list should be trimmed if, for example, there is another list that can be referenced instead. Can you clarify what would be "Criteria that lend themselves to bot maintenance"? - Richc80 (talk) 06:47, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I know the cat thing has been mentioned, but I'd suggest that one reason it's not been thought compelling is the (relatively) small economies involved, which have may be skewed the thinking. It's notable that the only major anglophone economy that's been debated - Britain - got a vote to delete. And we should be thinking about criteria that can stand up to the worst case scenario - List of companies in the USA. Find a solution that works for that, and you'll have criteria that are robust for everything else. I'll start a new thread on that below.
And you might also want to think about something like List of companies in France or List of companies in the Cayman Islands for cases where there may be problems in sourcing WP:ENGLISH sources of data, or in getting hold of any kind of information whatsoever!!! We've got to come up with criteria that can handle all those cases, it won't just be a question of grabbing stuff from SEC filings. I'm not saying it will be hard to do so, just that we need to think about that kind of stuff. And in any case we need to think about why we want to create these lists in the first place - answer that and a lot of other stuff will fall into place.
I think the maintainability thing is crucial - a list which lists Enron and Worldcom isn't much use. OK, those ones may be obvious, but would you know whether Burren Energy still existed for instance? It was bought in a US$3bn deal between two public companies, but barely hit the radar in either of the "home countries" involved. Who or what keeps an eye on that kind of thing - as I say, something as simple as List of companies listed on the LSE would see 2-3 additions and deletions every day. And if you're going for things like sales and assets, I suggest that you only go for things that are listed in {{Infobox Company}} - that way we only have to keep the article infobox up to date, and a bot can scrape the infoboxes to "feed" the list. In turn that may require a bit of tweaking of the infobox template, to allow "clean" presentation of the data to the bot, but that's something that can wait.
What I meant by "criteria that lend themselves to bot maintenance" was eg it's fairly easy to find out a list of companies that are members of a stock market index for instance. And potentially a bot could keep track of additions and deletions to that index. Likewise "Electricity generation companies in the EU that are notable enough to have a Wikipedia article" is pretty easy to keep track of automatically (although we have categories to do that for us....). On the other hand, "Electronics companies in Taiwan turning over US$500m) would be hard to keep track of - first define what an "electronics company" is in the first place, then how do you work out which companies are turning over $500m - many private companies won't publish figures. If you don't know whether your list is complete, I'm not sure how useful it is - see WP:LISTV. Anyway, just some thoughts. FlagSteward (talk) 15:43, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Cooperatives and partnerships

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  • Shall we add a definition of company to the criteria? I don't think we should restrict editors to organizations covered by company or corporation law in any one country. It makes sense to list all kinds of notable businesses, be they cooperatives (The Co-operative Group, Migros), membership associations (Best Western), or partnerships (PricewaterhouseCoopers).

If we go in this direction, it might actually be helpful to call the articles List of businesses in. I can see pitfalls with that, but I think they are manageable.

  • Finally, we should do something to limit the number of wholly-owned subsidiaries in the lists: foreign subsidiaries tend to get significant coverage in their host country, but few have yet justified their own Wikipedia article. I say simply exclude subsidiaries unless they have their own article that could not be reasonably merged with the parent company article.

What do you think? --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:30, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a note to exclude investment companies, and agree that all notable businesses should be included. I'm also up for changing the names of these lists, but am not sure how we would go about that. On subsidiaries, I agree with your comment. If the subsidiary is not notable enough to merit its own article, then it should not be included on the list. - Richc80 (talk) 06:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Assets and revenue

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I would like to see optional sortable columns for assets and revenue (from the last available year, which must be mentioned) added to the template. Makes it easier to find the most notable companies. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:36, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed and added, although the one issue there always is with this type of information is that companies have different financial reporting dates which therefore makes comparisons difficult. Plus not all companies report this information. - Richc80 (talk) 06:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Classification

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I think a list of companies has no point with no classification. We should divide the list to separate tables, one for each sector. Thus it would be searchable and easier to maintain. Sectors might include: Finance, Heavy Industries, FMCG, Agriculture, Foods & Beverages, Energy, Retail, Fashion, Transport, Media, Technology, Real Estate, Construction, Tourism, Pharmaceuticals, Research etc.

Another issue is what are we going to do with holding companies and groups? List all the member companies along/without/below the holding company? Mention membership in the "Notes" field? And, Since many groups include companies that work in completely different fields, how are we going to classify them? Orionist (talk) 16:25, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The initial list of columns included industry, but I have now also listed ICB / GICS information which would cover the sectors you list above. The issue with having separate tables as you describe is that it would only be possible to sort and compare within the sector, making it impossible to easily see something like the top 10 companies in the country by revenue. - Richc80 (talk) 06:53, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Holding companies & groups - if a member company is notable enough for its own article then it would be included in the appropriate list, which may be different from its holding company. Ownership could certainly be mentioned in the Notes field. Each company would be classified according to the criteria, so for example:
  • Holding Company Inc. - Notable, Founded & Headquartered in the US - on list of US companies
  • Member Company A - Notable, Founded in India, headquartered in Brazil - on India & Brazil company lists
  • Member Company B - Notable, Founded & Headquartered in US, majority of revenue generated in the UK - on US & UK company lists
  • Member Company C - Not notable enough for own Wikipedia article - not on any lists
- Richc80 (talk) 07:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

June 1st Update

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Thanks to all for your great feedback! Based upon these I've made the following updates:

  • Changed scope section to Lead In, added more information about what this could contain
  • Removed from the inclusion criteria being on a stock exchange in that country. Added in its place two new criteria.
  • Specified that investment companies should be excluded from the list
  • Added ICB / GICS, Asset & Revenue information to columns on list.

Please add any new comments below this one, and thanks again! - Richc80 (talk) 06:38, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why have lists of companies?

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As I mentioned above, I think it might be helpful to take a step back and work out why we want these lists in the first place. There are entire companies that are devoted to charging (a lot) for information about companies - are we trying to set up Wiki-Bloomberg or Wiki-Morningstar? I don't pretend to have an answer to that question, but in that case we really need to think from the start about things like copyright and database right. Are we primarily doing this as aide-memoires to help us improve Wikipedia by giving us a list of red links to fill in? Or are we starting with the latter, but might move towards the former? Thinking about that big picture should help guide us to the right place. There's been some exotic ideas suggested here - how about Richc80, maintaining a list of your own, to get a feel for what's practical and what isn't? You might start with say a List of companies in the S&P 500 - the S&P 500 article links to a list on the S&P site, so that will get you started, and most of those companies should have a reasonable article already. I think we can agree that those 500 companies would represent only a small fraction of the companies that might be on a List of companies in the USA, and should have some of the best disclosure of their finances of anywhere in the world, so how doable is it to have things like turnover and assets in such an "easy" list? Would that definition of "doable" extend to a List of companies in the Russell 3000, or a List of companies in the CAC 40? I'm not trying to take the mick, I just have a feeling that given the current coverage of corporate life on Wikipedia (let's be blunt, those interested in companies have a lot less free time for Wikipedia than anime fans :-) ), we shouldn't spend much time on company lists other than to point them at relevant categories, or to use them as red link farms to help us identify holes in Wikipedia. If we then want to develop them into sortable lists of revenues etc at a later date, then let's have the option, but it can't possibly be a priority right now. Like I say - why do we want these lists of companies? FlagSteward (talk) 16:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks as always for your feedback. Personally speaking I do not feel that we need to have these lists. I've participated in AFD discussions from the Delete perspective and PRODed a couple of others, so you were interested in going that route I'll be right behind you :-). If they are to stay however I do want them to be more consistent and less open to interpretation/deletion (call it my pet project rather than a real priority). I agree that having these lists be easily maintainable is the goal and like you say should be used to identify holes in Wikipedia and to guide readers to what they are looking for. But it should be noted that the quality of each list varies dramatically. Some are actively maintained by interested country WikiProjects, already provide sortable lists and even include some of the information suggested. I therefore had the extra guidance in there specifically for those groups. Nevertheless, I've now reworded the list section to make it clear these would be "optional" based upon interest in maintaining the info. Hopefully this addresses your concerns.
Richc80 (talk) 19:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
(P.S., I used to work for a financial data collection company and can safely say that we are a long way from competing with them in this list! P.P.S. someone already beat me to the S&P list :-))
Ach, my sincere apologies, I'd only skimmed some of the previous stuff and not paid enough attention to who was saying what, I had the impression that you actually thought these lists were a good idea! ;-/ But it's pretty telling that we can't even keep the S&P 500 list up to date, I noticed at least two red links there. Personally I'd put a bit more emphasis on the fact that these lists are discouraged for reasons X, Y and Z, and encourage people to think about the maintainability of such lists. Perhaps the best way to handle it would not to AfD them, but to subvert them a little bit by setting up lots of "list" articles in anticipation, but more done as disambiguating, list of category type articles, to discourage people spending a lot of time doing actual lists of companies? Speaking for myself, I'd love to spend more time on company articles, unfortunately my wiki-to-do-list is bursting right now - I might have a window next February ;-(( - but it's one of the areas I feel that we're weakest on. I might be able to spare some time before then with my bot to get tagging some articles with the Project banner though. FlagSteward (talk) 18:20, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed clarification of NOT#Directory

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I've started a discussion at Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Can_we_clarify_NOTDIRECTORY.3F to clarify the NOT#Directory policy. I see this is very relevant discussion, so I will place a link there to this page. Please comment there. Thank you. NJGW (talk) 18:09, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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