Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of companies of the United States


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. A redirect can be created editorially if desired.  Sandstein  10:51, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

List of companies of the United States

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Actually proposing that this page be Redirected to Category:Companies of the United States, but because that change would result in removal of a lot of bytes, thought it best to bring it here for discussion.

The current list is really two: 1) a short (and out of date) list of the top 5 by revenue, which information can also be found in List of largest employers in the United States, Fortune Global 500 and the articles for the five linked companies; and 2) a minimally discriminate list of about 1,900 US companies, broken out between active and defunct, arranged alphabetically within each and with minimal additional information beyond the list entries. While limited to notable companies, i.e. those having WP articles, (a good thing), the main body of this list adds almost nothing to the category I propose to be the target (no sortable table, supplemental information, etc). And this has to be balanced against: 1) the huge number of notable companies with WP articles that are arbitrarily not in the list and in theory should be added, and 2) until the robots take over, the massive amount of editor time that would be required to maintain this list going forward, just to remove non-notable entries and to duplicate information as it is added within the tree of the proposed category. This proposal is consistent with how we treat over 200 other "List of" (or pseudo-"List of") pages that would otherwise be similarly unmanageable, such as List of living people, which is of course a redirect to Category:Living people. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. ...William, is the complaint department really on the roof? 15:09, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. ...William, is the complaint department really on the roof? 15:09, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. ...William, is the complaint department really on the roof? 15:19, 30 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Comment/background: Man, I swear I've had that exact line of thought in my head every time I've touched that article. There's a long background here, including two prior AFDs that should probably be noted:
 * A similar AFD on List of Japanese companies occured in June 2007, with similar observations. The article was kept as the list built out additional information. Only tangential here since this one really is just a flat alphabetical list.
 * A very large AFD for all "companies of..." occurred in July 2007. This was closed as "keep", but with many observations on the general poor state of the lists and the redundancy.
 * I generally became aware of this series of lists through anti-spam activities - many of these articles were simple link directories. The lists were cleaned up, and at this point all but one of the 177 lists have "must have an article" as inclusion criteria (I wasn't able to get consensus quickly on List of companies of Iran and moved on to other articles). I later noticed introducing a more robust format for the lists, and I've since updated 166 of the lists to that format, including sortable tables with data that does not require much maintenance - incorporation date, headquarters, sector, etc. I did not update this list, however, for exactly the reasons outlined above. It's just too much, and this list is currently only a fraction of what could be on it. It also seems redundant with the large number of state lists, and the list at List of companies of the United States by state.  Maybe one option would be to redirect to the state list and update those articles to a better format?  Kuru   (talk)  17:29, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Natg 19 (talk) 01:44, 7 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Redirect to Category:Companies of the United States or delete: overly inclusive criteria to be remotely useful. --K.e.coffman (talk) 03:20, 7 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete. A complete list would be far too long to be practical or useful. Plus you'd have to update it constantly for new and defunct ones. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:53, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Redirect as above or Delete as this article is guaranteed to be always out of date and the category is a far better way to find the information.  HighKing++ 19:10, 11 December 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.