Wikipedia talk:Companies, corporations and economic information

Project beginnings
moved from main page and replaced there with a more formal introductory statement

The articles on companies on wikipedia seems to be fairly shallow. I think that is an interesting use of wikipedia to actually describe the companies we are dependent on for so many of the things we use in our lives. People do have very strong feelings about things they buy. But we often fail to connect those things to the companies, and then the people, that bring them into the world.

For example, I added a little note to the Pepsi page in which I referenced that it was an SIC 2080 company, as classified upon its incorporation in the United States. This then led to a list of US SIC 2080 companies.

It seems that there can be a standard bunch of information, such as the boxes that go with some other types of pages, that would show an entity's ownership, employees, geographical reach and other important information. I am not an economist, but I believe it is important to document these market forces.

Does anyone have ideas about good ways to do this? RayKiddy 06:40, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm redirecting WikiProject Companies here, but is there any reason this is not a WikiProject? Tuf-Kat 06:17, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Article composition guidelines
The current guidelines for content seem too limited. They are confined to the kinds of categories of most interest to a business person or investor and not to a general audience. There is no coverage on the social significance of a corporation or its relations to consumers, employees, the communities in which it is located, and the governments of those places.

I would like to propose a set of categories for content that address that kind of information. These can perhaps be grouped under just a few major category headings (input here is what I am hoping for), but the following is a more comprehensive list:


 * Political Influence and Affiliations
 * lists of PACs, levels of contributions in recent election cycles, associations with polititians and groups or parties (advisory positions), major governmental subsidies or contracts, sponsered legislaiton or legislation that effects the company, etc.


 * Environmental Record
 * green policies or environmental disasters, treatment of animals, etc.


 * Human Rights Record
 * episodes of violations or contributions to, fair trade, etc.


 * Litigation
 * involment in IP cases, labor, disputes with other entities, anti-trust, etc., tort, consumer protection


 * employee relations
 * employee participation in management decisions, conflict and grievance resolution, trade unions and collective bargaining, compensation,

number of employees, work conditions, work locations, healthcare, pensions, contracts, outsourcing, discrimination, domestic partnership policies, etc.


 * Corporate Governence
 * should include compensation


 * Competition
 * list compeditors, anti-trust, unfair competition


 * Complaints and controversies abuses scandals
 * I am uncertain about these sorts of categories. On the one hand, they give a place for things which exist discoursively, as accusations against a company which have a real place in the media (whether eventually proved to be true or not), but on the other, it can be a way to marginalize actual events which are part of the history of a corporation. The Bhopal disaster, for example, is part of Union Carbide's history as a company and not simply a "controversy".

--BradB 19:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Trying to reignite this discussion in Project companies talk. I think some proper content guidelines would help make developing articles related to companies a lot more painless. --Icerat (talk) 12:16, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Template
moved from main page

From now on, use Template:Corpbox. Instructions are described on Template:Corpbox. Guanaco 02:43, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I didn't know this existed. I based the Template:Infobox_Company template on the universities template which I think is better organized. Still needs work though. Adraeus 03:13, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Table style, colour, and content
section moved from main page


 * I suggest creating a template html table. We already do something similiar for battles - see Battle of Cisterna. I think at the very least, it should list the official name, stock symbol, yearly revinues, # of employees, owners (or major shareholders). ?Raul654 06:53, Feb 1, 2004 (UTC)

By the way, I do not intend this to be US-centric. I would be interested in how other standards, for instance, relate to the SIC identification scheme. RayKiddy 08:17, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If you guys are interested in standarizing company articles, you could make a Wikiproject of it. Wikiproject Companies. Poor Yorick


 * I think that I am. I probably have to create a link in the WikiProjects page to do this. I wanted to see what kind of discussion occurred. RayKiddy 03:47, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly whay you have in mind, but here is a chart you can play around with. mydogategodshat 08:57, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

See also List of companies more stuff in this line'

<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>


 * Here's one that uses the new (prefered) wikipedia style of tables. It's a lot easier to edit, and a lot less obtrustive. &rarr;Raul654 13:05, Feb 1, 2004 (UTC)

<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR> The first one matches the style used in the scientific pages. We may or may not want to be consistent with them. I have not researched it in detail but I think animals are using red (see platypus or grouse), chemicals are using yellow (see calcium carbonate), and plants are using green (see ginkgo). Rocks and minerals are using all different styles and colours. mydogategodshat 19:30, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * Plants are already using the same light green as the above templates. I recommend switching, though the amount of duplication found at Taxobox is rather depressing, so maybe it doesn't matter after all. Tuf-Kat 08:19, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

Table maintenance
section moved from main page

My only misgiving about this project is the amount of ongoing maintenance it will entail. Much of the info will only last for a year (such as annual revenue, dividend, number of employees, capitalization, controlling interests). We have articles on hundreds of companies. Do we really want the nonstop maintenance of updating these things? mydogategodshat 19:50, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

In my table (the 2nd one), I consciously tried to avoid year-to-year stats (the only one I included was revineues). Even then, I was only looking for approximate values. &rarr;Raul654 22:16, Feb 1, 2004 (UTC)


 * I think you'll find that revenue, number of employees, controlling interests, and current CEO will have to be updated at least every year. Controlling interests much more often, since controlling blocks shift with every new alliance or aquisition.


 * The only constants are ticker symbol and HQ location. mydogategodshat 23:30, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If we chose to limit the fields to constants (no table maintenance), what could we put in them other than ticker symbol and location? mydogategodshat 10:28, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It probably makes sense to go with the simpler form of the tables. It is easier to make sense out of the data when one looks at it in source. As far as maintenance, we should have the year the data represents. The data need only be an estimate. Also, it definitely makes sense to have a bot that keeps track of this data. There are many sources to pull it from and put it into a database. Then, a bot can handle updating the wikipedia table. The information in the table can be kept standard, so that it can be safely edited by a bot. RayKiddy 03:47, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Regarding what style and colour of table to use, we might be wize to see what conclusion, if any, comes out of the discussion going on here. mydogategodshat 08:02, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ok, as I see it, there's basically three types of information:
 * 1) Stuff that (almost) never changes: Name, stock symbol, HQ, incoperated in
 * 2) Stuff that changes once in a while: CEO, controlling interest (if any)
 * 3) Stuff that changes often: Revenue, number of employees

I suggest our template include all three (we can approximate the stuff that changes often), and "updated", the year that the information is relavent to.

As to the color, how about 44FF44? &rarr;Raul654 22:08, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>

I like the idea of a bot gathering the data and doing the maintenance. I didn't realize that could be done reliably. However, I do not like the idea of using approximations. What you are calling approximations, I would call misinformation. When a fact or statistic is stated on an encyclopedia, people expect it to be true. How are we going to calculate these "approximations"? I would much rather see an empty field than an incorrect one. mydogategodshat 06:16, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * Well, I think you misunderstand. When someone says Microsoft has 55,000 employees, I'll bet you that Microsoft has *around* 55,000 employees, but not exactly 55,000 employees. &rarr;Raul654 06:21, Feb 6, 2004 (UTC)


 * Number of employees are usually published once a year in a companies annual report. That would be accurate enough for me. My problem is inserting approximations where we don't have a good source.


 * By the way, I like the bright green colour. Does it bother anybody that a very similar colour (I think it is 80ff80) is already being used? (See Taxobox) mydogategodshat 06:28, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * As for style, I still prefer a box similar to the ones already in use. I feel the one we have selected has too much white space and is too hard to read. This is just my personal opinion, but when I look down the page with the examples of all the boxes here), ours is by far the ugliest! mydogategodshat 06:56, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * OK, the "numbers" infobox is uglier than ours. mydogategodshat

Has development stopped on this? I mean, yeah, you have a good draft, but neither of the mentioned company pages - IBM or Pepsi - have any form of the table on it. Can it be seen in practice on any company page? Also, I note that while the SIC code was present in the first draft, it's missing from the latter two, without comment. And, finally - stock code is mentioned, but not the stock exchange the code is on; is that relevant? Is this the proper place to put these comments? --Golbez 08:13, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Article guide (original text)
this section has undergone revision on the Main page and this is the original text

This is what I propose be a guide for articles about corporations:


 * The article should be about the company and its predecesor names which it may have changed due to mergers and aquisitions (as defined by the SEC). It may include also the only information in wikipedia about certain aquired companies, or those may have seperate articles. For example, the article about Bank of America is the wrong way of doing it, it focuses on the old bankamerica which was taken over by nationsbank. If thats going to be the place where wikipedia is going to talk about the legacy bankamerica, it is misleading for it not to be the place where nationsbank is talked about. The article about Citigroup is right, as it talks about its ascent from commercial credit, and links to aquired companies.


 * The articles should have a section discussing the business model for a company, which intimately tied to how a company is put together and one of the major factors usually shaping a companies history.


 * A long term stock history (ideally a total shareholder return line including dividends), possibly shown relative to the s&p, would not be out of place.


 * Management philosophy, vision, and values is also a major element of coporations and their behaviour which often go under the radar of normal mergers and aquisitions. For example the Apple aquiring of NeXT can argueably be called a "next taking over apple merger" as a large amount of NeXT's management were put in charge of apple. So its potentially very important to identify things like this when discussing the history of companies.

Major project page revisions
I was looking about for some definitive input into the company infobox(es) that I have both used and seen used and found that this Project didn't exactly provide the consensus input that I was looking for, unfortunately. Rather than just defining my own guidelines, though, I thought it best to try and breath some new life into this Project by conducting a major revision to the Project page in an attempt to convert it from a discussion page to a guidelines page. I'm hoping that this will encourage a few of the people who have been involved to take a renewed look at the Project.

Going forward, I would suggest addition of a "participants" section to the Main page in addition to the "Guidelines" and "Templates" section. I myself am already participating in two other Projects and would prefer merely to benefit from the fruits of your labors than to spread myself thinner. My present interest is confined to a) stub enhancement and b) companies in the pharmaceutical industry.

Regards, Courtland 17:05, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)

Proposal: Deletion of
I think that a single company information infobox should be sufficient for this Project, but I certainly didn't want to list the template for deletion myself without bringing up the matter here for discussion. What are your thoughts on this? Should the two templates be distinguished by scope of use, or should they be merged in their content, or should some other thing take place?

Regards, Courtland 17:12, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)

Product listings
What are your thoughts on the addition of lists of products (or services) to company articles? At present, I'm looking at the on-line listing of products by pharmaceutical companies and adding those to certain company articles. As an example see AstraZeneca. I've started using a stereotyped text insert that runs like "The following is a list of key products as found on <insert website/source here>, <insert date of information or date of information retrieval here>." Should this type of text insert be templated? I'd suggest not for now, but to keep this in mind for future consideration.

Thanks for the input. Courtland 21:03, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)

Your thoughts on Infobox?
Could interested parties please take a look at the current debate on Template talk:Infobox Company and weigh in with your opinions? --Goodoldpolonius2 14:14, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Votes for deletion/Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth, P.A.
This deletion listing may be of interest. There seems to be some opinion that this item on a law firm doesn't belong on Wikipedia, although the company has numerous Fortune 500 clients and is at the top of the IP prosecution field in its country. I cannot fathom quite why opposition to the article, Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth, P.A., is so strong. I cannot make sense of some of the opposition, which seems to be extremely strong. The company would seem to me to be unquestionably notable, a small firm with blue chip clients and several thousand patents filed in just over ten years of existence. The discussion on deletion will run for at least five days, ending after 2nd June, then a decision will be taken on whether the article should be deleted. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 16:37, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
 * The opposition is strong because it would open the gates to many more minor law firms having their article on wikipedia. --Edcolins 09:32, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
 * And? Chadlupkes 23:00, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia would become nothing more than a business directory. --Edcolins 14:24, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Proposed guideline: conflict of interest
I have a concern that a conflict of interest arises when Wikipedia editor writes about a company he or she works for. I proposed a guideline for how to deal with this situation: Conflict of interest. Please take a look and let us know what you think. --Yannick 03:30, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree this is very important. i have the feeling that many contributers to corporate pages are employees or PR firm employees hired by the company in question. Disclosure of this situation is the minimum that we should expect. It may be that certain types of information could usefully be provided by a company or its advocates, but it must be thouroughly checked for POV and bias. There should definitely be a policy to this effect. BradB 18:39, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Sparsity of documentation
One under-mentioned problem is how little of corporate history gets written down. Sure, the buying and selling of controlling stakeholdings is recorded somewhere, but a lot of this is quite meaningless. Far more important events occur which do not get documented, though everyone connected with the company knows about them. My previous employer was NC Graphics. It's necessary to dig into some very obscure references to find citations for the events I can report. Even then I have to leave a lot of stuff out because it's not written down in any document which I can disclose.

The information doesn't have to be confidential not to make it. Business tends to live in the present. History is not important to them, and just gets forgotten without a care.

This represents a challenge, not a conflict of interest -- I don't care about this company one way or another, beyond curiosity value; I just happen to know the story. Like many company wiki pages, it's been graced with the following banner:

Well, it ain't going to get expanded, not if we stick within the wikipedia guidelines. I can just write stuff down without citations, or blog an article containing the company history and cite that. But ultimately putting these expand-this stub links everywhere when it's impossible to make it good enough has got to be unhelpful.Goatchurch 10:02, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Help with IonIdea article
I found this article on VfD the other day. I'm posting here in case case someone with more business knowledge/interest would like to improve it. &mdash; Bcat (talk | email) 00:01, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hi there, I have added some more information to the IonIdea article. Please tell me if its ok, I have left the stub on their for now, not knowing whether that information is good enough. GL3N 19:01 [GMT]

Looks good. I've removed the stub notice. (Sorry for taking so long to reply, I forgot that I left a comment here.) — Bcat (talk | email) 03:21, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Improvement Drive
The following business topics are currently nominated on This week's improvement drive: Subsidy, Developing countries' debt, Grameen Bank and Spice trade.You can support these articles with your vote if you want them to be improved!--Fenice 11:25, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Categories
I'm thinking about creating some catergories:


 * Category:Family companies - examples: Wal-Mart, News Corporation
 * Category:Christian companies - examples: Chick-fil-A, Alaska Airlines, Salem Communications, LifeWay Christian Resources, Cloud Ten Pictures

What do you think, are these categories useful? Edward 23:19:52, 2005-08-01 (UTC)


 * To answer my own question, I found Category:Family business and created Category:Christian companies. Edward 15:34:13, 2005-08-06 (UTC)

Deletion list
Hi folks,

I just wanted to let you know about a list of votes for deletion on articles related to business. You can find the list here: WikiProject Deletion sorting/Business. Note that this includes sublists of businesses and businesspeople for deletion.

Since you're interested in improving Wikipedia's coverage of business-related topics, you might want to monitor this list.

If you find the list useful, please also help to maintain it by adding new items and archiving old ones. Thanks!

Cheers,

-- Visviva 16:04, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

PS New members are needed and welcome at WikiProject Deletion sorting. Hope to see you there!

Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 project
Hi, I'm a member of the Version_1.0_Editorial_Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing using these criteria, and we are looking for A-Class and good B-Class articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Can you recommend any suitable company articles? I would expect WP 1.0 when it comes out to have a lot of company articles, as your topic is pretty important. Please post your suggestions here. Thanks a lot! Walkerma 21:09, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Corporate Governance
I'm in the process of going through and adding sections on Corporation pages for Corporate Governance, and building basic pages for the various Directors. I've started with the DJIA. Chadlupkes 23:07, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Naming convention for Companies and Businesses
I just wanted to draw attention and comment to on a draft poll to determine naming convention for companies and businesses. I have looked around a number of places and have only seen comments to the effect of "we should have a convention" or "do we have a convention" on how to name a XXX company. This has either the effect of drawing a few uninterested comments or a stirring up a heated debate. In either case the net result is generally zero. Your comments to help clarify this poll and later corresponding vote would be greatly appreciated. --Reflex Reaction (talk)&bull; 16:01, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Naming conventions (companies)/poll
Voting has begun and will continue until March 5. Please resolve this lagging issue. --Reflex Reaction (talk)&bull; 22:36, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Coverage (Genetic Engineering News Sept 15, 2005 Company Index)
A brief survey of the Company Index to the September 15, 2005 issue of the biotechnology trade magazine Genetic Engineering News shows that of the ~190 names listed in the index, 31 are associated with separate articles in Wikipedia as of March 3, 2006, or ~16%. I didn't specifically keep track of how many were mentioned in lists, but memory of the hits suggests that would about double the hit rate to around 30%. I thought this statistic might be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Regards, User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 16:02, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Award
Perhaps someone would like to go and support an award for this wikiproject on the award proposal page? The idea is about to be archived.--evrik 17:41, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Stablepedia
Beginning cross-post.
 * See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. If you wish to comment, please comment there. ★ MESSED  ROCKER ★  00:04, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

''End cross-post. Please do not comment more in this section.''

Proposed WikiProject - Companies
I'm interested in setting up what could be a sub-project or task force of Wikiproject Business and Economics and would be focused on improving the consistency & quality of articles on Companies, taking these guidelines as its starting point. Please take a look at my blurb for this idea on the Wikiproject proposal page and sign up there if you are interested so that I know I'm not the only one. Cheers! Richc80 04:08, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Economic Information
When it comes to providing the economic information, what should be used? I feel that annual net income & annual revenues would be appropriate, preferably sourced from the annual report filed with the SEC, but I have come across some editors that feel it should be quarterly adjusted net income and revenues, sometimes based on a 'preliminary' press release. Is there any consensus on this? I base my own views on the fact that all the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average use annual data (unless an editor has recently changed it to quarterly). This also prevents frequent maintenance (yearly is reasonable, IMHO), and allows fair, apples-to-apples comparisons between companies.--Scottr76 22:38, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Is it a style guideline?
See discussion (if any) at WT:WikiProject Companies. This page had an older template for. I'm fine with this being a style guideline if it's going to get regular maintenance and input. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:49, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Working on some additional ideas for a style guideline in Project companies talk. As much input as possible appreciated! --Icerat (talk) 02:02, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Timelines
I was wondering if there were any style guidelines for detailed timelines such as this one in NIIT. This seems overly detailed to me, and some of this seems like overt advertisement (e.g., "1999: Achieved the status of best training partner in Asia" with no citation). Are there good examples of timelines in other articles I could review for comparison? WeisheitSuchen (talk) 12:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)


 * You can adapt Graphical timeline, as done at RISC OS development graphical timeline. While in this case it relates to software development, I don't see why it couldn't also be used for company histories. --Trevj (talk) 10:46, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Financials
Do we want to provide financial data? This type of information could be very useful - and is already provided in part in some articles. If we do want to provide this type of information, it would be most useful if we did so using an infobox for formatting. Thoughts? Rklawton (talk) 02:15, 12 January 2012 (UTC)