User:Ian.thomson/Company

1. Go to your user page (User:) and fill out the following template there: 2. Consider that if your company really was notable, you wouldn't need to write the article. Remember that articles are owned by the Wikipedia community as a whole, not the article subject or the article author. If your company do not want other people to write about it, then starting an article is a bad idea. 3. Make sure the company's notability is attested by discussions of it in several reliable independent sources. 4. Gather as many professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources about the company you can find. Also, while search engine results are not sources, they are where you can find sources. Just remember that they need to be professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources. Press releases are not independent and so are useless -- don't waste your time with them. 5. Focus on just the ones that are not dependent upon nor affiliated with the company, but still specifically about the company and providing in-depth coverage (not passing mentions). If you do not have at least three such sources, the company is not yet notable and trying to write an article at this point will only fail. 6. Summarize those sources you kept after step 5, adding citations at the end of them. You'll want to do this in a program with little/no formatting, like Microsoft Notepad or Notepad++, and not in something like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer. Make sure this summary is just bare statement of facts, phrased in a way that even the company's competitors can agree with. 7. Combine overlapping summaries where possible (without arriving at new statements that no individual source supports), repeating citations as needed. 8. Paraphrase the whole thing just to be extra sure you've avoided any copyright violations or plagiarism. ''Do not copy and paste text from any source. Even if you have permission to use that text, other people on this site do not.'' 9. Use the Article wizard to post this draft and wait for approval. 10a. If the article is accepted, never edit it again. Instead, make edit requests on the article's talk page. 10b. If the article is rejected, there will be aa reason given. Read it carefully and closely. If there are links in the reason, open them and read those pages.