Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of founders 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. Seraphimblade Talk to me 11:42, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

List of founders of companies of the United States

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

For this list to be anywhere near complete it would have to be huge. See WP:SALAT. Iamoctopus (talk) 10:55, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment The creation of this list appears to be a reaction to the de-population of and subsequent proposal to merge Category:Founders of companies of the United States with another category (ongoing merge discussion here). As a single list, this is completely unwieldy and impractical. To give an idea, there are well over 1000 entries in Category:American company founders (defined as American people who have founded companies), the vast majority of whom will have founded companies in the US. Plus, there may be foreign nationals who have founded US companies, although the laws concerning that are quite restrictive. Ditto for American citizens founding foreign companies. As it is, the list in its initial state was basically useless to the reader, since it didn't even mention what US company (or companies) the person had founded. I've added some of this information to a few entries to see whether such a list could become viable. In the process, I found that some of the companies founded were not at at all notable, and the notability of the "founder" rested on something else entirely, e.g. as a politician. The entries in it are still so few and essentially random that they give a completely skewed and misleading view of the topic. Minimally, a list like this would also need to be broken down into sections, e.g. by sector, and ultimately forked. It is also extremely difficult to maintain given the ever-increasing number of biographies of company founders. If the CfD discussion decides to keep Category:Founders of companies of the United States, then this list should be deleted in favour of the category, unless its creator actually puts some work into making it more focused, informative, and useful than the category. Voceditenore (talk) 14:38, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. Voceditenore (talk) 15:35, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Businesspeople-related deletion discussions. Voceditenore (talk) 15:38, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. Voceditenore (talk) 15:39, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 15:54, 28 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete as not particularly encyclopedic list with not much value to the reader, anybody interested in founders would either look up the company or individual rather than a long random list which has a very large scope. MilborneOne (talk) 19:09, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete. Per WP:SALAT, "[l]ists that are too general or too broad in scope have little value". A list that includes every founder of every company in the United States would be far too broad and expansive to be of any value and likely violates WP:INDISCRIMINATE as well. Furthermore, this list also violates WP:LSC's requirement that selection criteria "should be unambiguous, objective, and supported by reliable sources". This list has no clearly discernible standards for distinguishing between "founders" and other individuals who may have participated in the formation of a company in some ancillary way. Individuals often describe themselves as "founders" in press releases for self-serving purposes, when in reality they made minimal contributions to the founding of a company. Even if this list were limited to "notable founders" or "notable companies", the determination of who counts as "notable" will be an inherently subjective endeavor. Finally, Wikipedia is not a repository of "loosely associated topics such as (but not limited to) quotations, aphorisms, or persons" (see WP:NOTDIRECTORY (emphasis added)). This list is nothing more than an indiscriminate repository of names of individuals loosely connected by the fact that they all claim to have founded a company. For the aforementioned reasons, I respectfully believe deletion is appropriate. -- Notecardforfree (talk) 20:21, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete - Interesting subject perhaps but also perhaps too wide of an article subject. SwisterTwister   talk  06:26, 29 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Question/Keep How is this list different than dozens of similar lists on wikipedia? See for example: List of Indian film actors. Ottawahitech (talk) 01:30, 30 December 2015 (UTC)please ping me
 * I think it is obvious that the topic of this list satisfies LISTN. The topic of the list isn't nearly broad enough for SALAT to be an issue, assuming it is confined to notable founders of notable companies. We have lists with hundreds of thousands of entries, never mind a mere one thousand. The list is not random, it is alphabetical. The arguments about 'maintainability' are nonsense. If we can maintain five million articles, we can maintain this list. Since this list now identifies the company founded, it is a significant improvement on the category, which does not provide that information and is therefore much harder to use (think NOTDUP). The fact the list needs expansion is irrelevant (IMPERFECT and PRESERVE). I think an alphabetical index of articles is useful, and we have plenty of other such indexes. James500 (talk) 12:30, 30 December 2015 (UTC) INDISCRIMINATE is also irrelevant as this list meets none of its criteria. James500 (talk) 18:05, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
 * is the above a keep !vote? LibStar (talk) 14:16, 30 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Weak Delete - Very weak delete. Not opposed to Userfying to preserve the work done so far. There are more founders than companies (given they're often co-founded), and we don't probably shouldn't have a List of companies in the United States because it would be is much too broad to be useful (and unnecessary given we already have lists for every state). There's an argument that the list would actually be shorter because companies are more likely to be notable than their founders, and we would logically limit the list to notable founders, but it's still a huge group. Ideally, list articles about businesses would be more than a bulleted list of company names and go into more detail, including, perhaps, the founder, which would in any event remove the need for this separate list. The question to me is how much work it would be to make this not a useless miniscule, indiscriminate sampling of founders -- and the answer is too much. So weak delete without prejudice to creation of lists with narrower criteria. &mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  \\ 15:00, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
 * RIGHT ON! — it is a real shame we do not have a List_of_companies_of_the_United_States since it has been viewed 65,981 times in the last 90 days by readers of Wikipedia. If we did have such a list we should delete it promptly because we don’t want to be lumbered with maintaining things just because the public wants them. Ottawahitech (talk) 15:55, 30 December 2015 (UTC)please ping me
 * Ha. Well, "RIGHT ON" is kind of obnoxious, but that's a pretty glaring oversight on my part, indeed. I assumed given List of companies of the United States by state (and the many state-specific lists), that we wouldn't have such a crazy broad article. My mistake. Regarding "we should delete it promptly because we don’t want to be lumbered with maintaining things just because the public wants them" -- so because "the public wants them" is reason for having an article? "List of companies", if it were to be for all companies in the world rather than a redirect, would probably get even more pageviews. So would "List of hottest butts" and "Places to buy weed in [state]". That something gets pageviews does not make it encyclopedic. So of course we don't want to be lumbered with maintaining things just because the public wants them. Anyway, this AfD isn't about that list. Consider my WP:OTHERSTUFFDOESNTEXIST trumped by WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, but that I was wrong about the existence of my example doesn't change the substance of the point. &mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  \\ 16:25, 30 December 2015 (UTC)


 * From: WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS: . Ottawahitech (talk) 23:07, 31 December 2015 (UTC)please ping me
 * I don't know what you intend by this, but it seems like there's an irony here. In response to the paragraphs I wrote, which obviously are not "simply referring to the essay by name, and nothing else", you seem to be doing just that -- not by "simply referring" but by simply transcribing, and nothing else. In my second comment, I did connect both of our comments (not just yours) to that essay, half-jokingly (because in part of my own comment I made such an argument, but you pointed out that I did exist -- hence canceling out or something...maybe not so amusing after all), and even then didn't "simply refer to this essay by name, and nothing else." &mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  \\ 00:10, 1 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Sorry for muddying the waters. I was referring to my Question Ottawahitech (talk) 17:02, 1 January 2016 (UTC)please ping me


 * Delete- overly broad in scope, hopelessly unmaintainable. Fails WP:SALAT. Reyk  YO!  15:41, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete Too broad in scope, will become unmanageable and may become a target of spam. Mrfrobinson (talk) 19:30, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete Far too broad without significant further qualification. — swpb T 20:54, 31 December 2015 (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.