User:Noyster/Rewritten NORG guideline

Primary criteria
A company, corporation, organization, group, product, or service is notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.

This criteria, generally, follows the general notability guideline with a stronger emphasis on quality of the sources to prevent gaming of the rules by marketing and public relations professionals. The guideline, among other things, is meant to address some of the common issues with abusing Wikipedia for advertising and promotion. As such, the guideline establishes generally higher requirements for sources that are used to establish notability than for sources that are allowed as acceptable references within an article.

How to apply the criteria
The primary criteria has five components that must be evaluated separately and independently to determine if it is met:
 * 1) significant coverage in
 * 2) independent,
 * 3) multiple,
 * 4) reliable,
 * 5) secondary sources.

Note that an individual source must meet all four criteria to be counted towards notability. I.e. each source needs to be significant, independent, reliable, and secondary. Then, there must be a multiple of such qualifying sources. If the suitability of a source is in doubt, it is better to exercise caution and to exclude the source for the purposes of establishing notability.

For example, a draft article on Acme Inc. cites four sources: a single-sentence mention in an article by The New York Times when pointing out a missing feature in a rival's product when compared to the product by Acme, an extensive company profile in Forbes blog by a non-staff contributor, a blog post from a tech enthusiast who has provided a review of the product, and a court filing by a competitor alleging patent infringement. Analysis: Therefore, the article does not have a single source that could be used to establish the notability of the company, let alone multiple sources. The analysis can be summarized in the following table:
 * The New York Times is reliable, independent, and secondary – but not significant (a single-sentence mention in an article about another company).
 * The profile in Forbes blog is significant and secondary – but not independent or reliable (most of such posts are company-sponsored or based on company's marketing materials).
 * The blog post is significant and secondary – but not independent (blog posts are often sponsored; thus without evidence otherwise, editors should exercise caution and exclude the source) and not reliable (self-published sources are generally not reliable).
 * The court filing is significant, independent, and reliable – but not secondary (court filings are primary sources).

Significant coverage
The depth of coverage of the subject by the source must be considered. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject is not sufficient to establish notability. Deep or significant coverage provides an overview, description, commentary, survey, study, discussion, analysis, or evaluation of the product, company, or organization. Such coverage provides an organization with a level of attention that extends well beyond brief mentions and routine announcements, and makes it possible to write more than a very brief, incomplete stub about the organization.

Quantity does not determine significance. It is the quality of the content that governs. A collection of multiple trivial sources do not become significant. Views, hits, likes, shares, etc. have no bearing on establishing whether the coverage is significant. Similarly, arbitrary statistics and numbers (such as number of employees, amount of revenue or raised capital, age of the company, etc.) do not make the coverage significant. For the coverage to be significant, the sources must describe and discuss in some depth the treatment of the employees or major changes in leadership instead of just listing the fact that the corporation employs 500 people or mentioning that John Smith was appointed as the new CEO. Further, the significance is not determined by the reputation of the source. For example, a 400-word article in The Village Voice is a lot more significant than a single-sentence mention in The New York Times. However, the reputation of the source does help to determine whether the source is reliable and independent.

Further, sources are not transferable or attributable between related parties. Therefore, for example, an article on a product recall or a biography of a CEO is a significant coverage for the Wikipedia article on the product or the CEO, but not a significant coverage on the company (unless the article or biography devotes significant attention to the company itself).

Examples of trivial coverage
Examples of trivial coverage that do not count toward meeting the significant coverage requirement:
 * simple listings or compilations, such as:
 * of telephone numbers, addresses, directions, event times, shopping hours,
 * of office locations, branches, franchises, or subsidiaries,
 * of employees, officers, directors, owners, or shareholders (see above for ),
 * of product or service offerings,
 * of product instruction manuals, specifications, or certifications,
 * of patents, copyrights, clinical trials, or lawsuits,
 * of event schedules or results (such as theater performance schedule, score table of a sporting event, listing of award recipients),
 * of statistical data,
 * standard notices, brief announcements, and routine coverage, such as:
 * of changes in share or bond prices,
 * of quarterly or annual financial results and earning forecasts,
 * of the opening or closing of local branches, franchises, or shops,
 * of a product or a product line launch, sale, change, or discontinuance,
 * of the participation in industry events, such as trade fairs or panel discussions,
 * of the shareholders' meetings or other corporate events,
 * of the hiring, promotion, or departure of personnel,
 * of the expansions, acquisitions, mergers, sale, or closure of the business,
 * of a capital transaction, such as raised capital,
 * brief or passing mentions, such as:
 * of non-notable awards received by the organization, its people, or products,
 * of sponsorship of events, non-profit organizations, or volunteer work,
 * in quotations from an organization's personnel as story sources,
 * as an example of a type of company or product being discussed (e.g. "In response to the protests, various companies, such as Acme Inc, have pledged to address working conditions in their factories")
 * inclusion in lists of similar organizations, particularly in "best of", "top 100", "fastest growing" or similar lists,
 * inclusion in collections that have indiscriminate inclusion criteria (i.e. attempt to include every existing item instead of selecting the best, most notable examples), such as databases, archives, directories, dictionaries, bibliographies, certain almanacs,
 * coverage of purely local events, incidents, controversies (see also below),
 * presentations, speeches, lectures, etc. given by organization's personnel,
 * other listings and mentions not accompanied by commentary, survey, study, discussion, analysis, or evaluation of the product, company, or organization.

The examples above are not meant to be exhaustive.

See for a full discussion on what reviews of restaurants, events, and products qualify as significant coverage.

Examples of substantial coverage
Examples of substantial coverage that would generally be sufficient to meet the requirement:
 * A news article discussing a prolonged controversy regarding a corporate merger,
 * A scholarly article, a book passage, or ongoing media coverage focusing on a product or organization,
 * A documentary film exploring environmental impact of the corporation's facilities or products,
 * An encyclopedia entry giving an overview of the history of an organization,
 * A report by a consumer watchdog organizations on the safety of a specific product,
 * An extensive how-to guide written by people wholly independent of the company or product (e.g. For Dummies).

Audience
The source's audience must also be considered. Evidence of significant coverage by international or national, or at least regional, media is a strong indication of notability. On the other hand, attention solely from local media, or media of limited interest and circulation, is not an indication of notability; at least one regional, statewide, provincial, national, or international source is necessary.

Illegal conduct
It is possible that an organization that is not itself generally notable will have a number of significant sources discussing its (alleged) illegal conduct. Sources which primarily discuss purely such conduct shall not be used to establish an organization's notability per this guideline. However, the organization may still be notable, in whole or in part due to such sources, under different guidelines, e.g., WP:CRIME.

Independent sources
A primary test of notability is whether unrelated people with no vested interest in the subject have actually considered the company, corporation, product or service notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial, non-routine works that focus upon it. Self-promotion and product placement are not routes to qualifying for an encyclopedia article. There are two types of independence to consider when evaluating sources:
 * Independence of the author (or functional independence): the author must be unrelated to the company, organization, or product. Related persons include organization's personnel, owners, investors, (sub)contractors, vendors, distributors, suppliers, other business partners and associates, customers, competitors, sponsors and sponsorees (including astroturfing), and other parties that have something, financially or otherwise, to gain or lose.
 * Independence of the content (or intellectual independence): the content must not be produced by interested parties. Too often a related party produces a narrative that is then copied, regurgitated, and published in whole or in part by independent parties (as exemplified by churnalism). Independent content, in order to count towards establishing notability, must include original and independent opinion, analysis, investigation, and fact checking that are clearly attributable to a source unaffiliated to the subject.

Trade publications must be used with great care. While feature stories from leading trade magazines may be used where independence is clear, there is a presumption against the use of coverage in trade magazines to establish notability as businesses frequently make use of these publications to increase their visibility.

If source's independence is of any doubt, it is better to exercise caution and exclude it from determining quality sources for the purposes of establishing notability. If contested, consensus on the use of sources can be sought at the Reliable sources/Noticeboard.

Once notability is established, primary sources and self-published sources may be used with appropriate care to verify some of the article's content. See Autobiography for the verifiability and neutrality problems that affect material where the subject of the article itself is the source of the material.

Examples of dependent coverage
Examples of dependent coverage that is not sufficient to establish notability:
 * press releases, press kits, or similar public relations materials
 * any material which is substantially based on such press releases even if published by independent sources (churnalism),
 * advertising and marketing materials by, about, or on behalf of the organization,
 * including pieces like "case studies" or "success stories" by Chambers of Commerce, business incubators, consulting firms, etc.
 * any paid or sponsored articles, posts, and other publications,
 * including pieces by non-staff "contributors" to Forbes, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com, TechCrunch, Medium.com, and other publications that accept public contributions and that do not provide meaningful editorial oversight of the submitted content,
 * self-published materials, including vanity press,
 * patents, whether pending or granted,
 * any material written or published, including websites, by the organization, its members, or sources closely associated with it, directly or indirectly,
 * other works in which the company, corporation, organization, or group talks about itself—whether published by itself, or re-printed by other people (for example, self-submitted biographies to Who's Who).

Multiple sources
A single significant independent source is almost never sufficient for demonstrating the notability of an organization.

"Source" on Wikipedia can refer to the work itself, the author of the work, and/or the publisher of the work. For notability purposes, sources must be unrelated to each other to be "multiple". A story from a single news organization (such as AP) reprinted in multiple newspapers (say, in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel) is still one source (one newspaper article). If multiple journalists at multiple newspapers separately and independently write about the same subject, then each of these unrelated articles should be considered separate sources, even if they are writing about the same event or "story". A series of articles by the same journalist is still treated as one source (one person). The appearance of different articles in the same newspaper is still one source (one publisher). Similarly, a series of books by the same author is one source.

The existence of multiple significant independent sources needs to be demonstrated. Hypothetical sources (e.g. "the company is big/old/important so there must be more sources, I just don't have/can't find them") do not count towards the notability requirement.

The word "multiple" is not a set number and depends on the type of organization or product. Editors should recognize certain biases, such as recentism (greater availability of recent sources) when assessing historical companies or systemic bias (greater availability of English and Western sources) when discussing organizations in the developing world. Therefore, for example, a Bangladeshi women's rights organization from the 1960s might establish notability with just one or two quality sources, while the same is not true for a tech start-up in a major U.S. metropolitan area.

Reliable sources
Reliable sources, generally, are third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. The best sources have a professional structure in place for checking or analyzing facts, legal issues, evidence, and arguments. The greater the degree of scrutiny given to these issues, the more reliable the source. Questionable sources are those that have a poor reputation for checking the facts, lack meaningful editorial oversight, or have an apparent conflict of interest. Self-published sources are generally not accepted as reliable sources. For a full discussion on what is and what is not a reliable source, see Identifying reliable sources.

Product reviews
Product, event, and restaurant reviews (i.e. where author describes personal opinions and experiences) must be handled with great care and diligence. Some types of reviews have a longer history and established traditions (e.g. restaurants, wine, books, movies), while other (e.g. new tech gadgets, travel blogs) are newer and more prone to manipulation by marketing and public relations personnel. Like any other source, reviews must meet the primary criteria to be counted towards the notability requirement:
 * 1) Be significant: brief and routine reviews (including Zagat) do not qualify. Significant reviews are where the author has personally experienced or tested the product and describes their experiences in some depth, provides broader context, and draws comparisons with other products. Reviews that narrowly focus on a particular product or function without broader context (e.g. review of a particular meal without description of the restaurant as a whole) do not count as significant sources. Reviews that are too generic or vague to make the determination whether the author had personal experience with the reviewed product are not to be counted as significant sources. Further, the reviews must be published outside of purely local or narrow (highly specialized) interest publications (see also ). For example, a review of a local harvest festival in a local newspaper or a book review in a newsletter by a city's library would not qualify as significant coverage.
 * 2) Be independent: many reviews are not independent and are, in fact, a type of advertisement and product placement. Sponsored reviews include reviews where the reviewed product is provided free of charge to the author. Often, sponsored nature of a review is not disclosed and not immediately apparent. In particular, a strong indication of a sponsored or other relationship is a review that is excessively positive or negative. Therefore, editors should use reviews only from sources with well established reputation for independence and objectivity. Further, reviews that simply regurgitate someone else's opinion are also not independent sources unless enough original work was put in to produce a meta review (e.g. review aggregators). If the suitability of a source is in doubt, it is better to exercise caution and to exclude the source for the purposes of establishing notability. Once notability is established, not independent reviews may be used to verify some non-controversial facts in the article (e.g. number of employees, number of tables in a restaurant, product models).
 * 3) Be reliable: the reviews must be published in reliable sources that provide editorial oversight and strive to maintain objectivity. Self-published reviews (e.g. most blogs) do not qualify.