User:Eggishorn/businesssigcov

In deletion discussions, the question of how significantly an offered source covers the article subject often comes up, especially when dealing with organizations (including companies, schools, etc.). The crux of many such discussions and disagreements is interpretation of "significant". "Significant" is a context-dependent adjective and there is very important project-level context that is not always kept in mind. Namely that length and volume are not the same as significance. In the case of organizations, in fact, much of the coverage is very routine and therefore not significant.

Any business, organization, or other entity over a certain size will generate some coverage, perhaps even in independent, reliable sources simply because it has the resources to do so. This is routine coverage. The definition of routine coverage I keep in mind is: "Coverage of activities that one would expect the subject to engage in simply as a part of its ordinary business."

To give a concrete example: if General Electric sells India train engines for $79million, it is fundamentally no different than the corner store selling me a pack of gum for $0.79. There may well be coverage of the sale of those locomotives, but that coverage is exactly what you would expect to see because that's what we expect GE to do with the locomotives it makes.

Are there ways such a sale might generate non-routine (i.e., significant) coverage? Certainly. If that sale means GE is replacing all of India's train engines with new ones, or they are the first magnetic-levitation trains in India, or the local Indian locomotive builders stage protests over their lack of work because of the sale, or the Indian Parliament investigates the sale's choice of GE as a vendor, or the United States Federal Trade Commission finds out that GE executives bribed Indian officials to get the sale, or many, many other events that would not be the ordinary expectation for train sales, then the sale and its coverage would be significant.

So if a trade organization holds a conference, or a lobbying firm meets a government official, or a private-equity firm buys a company, or an investment bank helps a company go public, coverage of the conference, meeting, buy, and IPO are all routine because that's what trade organizations, lobbying firms, private-equity firms, and investment banks do. It doesn't matter how many sources cover it or how much time they spend talking about it or how prestigious the sources are.