Wikipedia:Companies, corporations and economic information

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This page is a content guideline for Wikipedia, reflecting how authors of this encyclopedia address certain issues. This guideline is intended to help you improve Wikipedia content. Feel free to update this page as needed, but please use the discussion page to propose major changes.

Articles about companies in Wikipedia are generally fairly shallow. The aim of this Project is to enhance the depth of company descriptions, including the placement of their activities and product developments in context, thereby providing connections between things and their origins that we often forget or overlook. In addition, this Project aims to provide guidelines for "standard minimum information" best included with each company-related article, which has manifested to date in the form of an infobox (see Template section below).

This WikiProject has set up some inclusion guidelines about companies, corporations, products, and services at /Notability and inclusion guidelines.

[edit] Article composition guidelines

This is a draft set of guidelines for best-practice in the composition of articles about companies and corporations.

Articles can be about any type of company: public, private, quasi-governmental. A source of systematic bias in Wikipedia is the greater availability of information on publicly held companies in the United States versus other types and nationalities of companies.

An article should be about a company and its predecessors, the names of which may have changed due to mergers, acquisitions, de-mergers, legal challenges, etc. For public companies in the United States, the authoritative reference for such changes is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The article should be primarily about the history of the surviving company, even though it may have assumed a predecessor's name (for example the article on Bank of America is primarily about Nations Bank with references and links to an article about the legacy BankAmerica).

Larger corporations that have wholly owned subsidiaries can be represented by one or more articles; for instance, such subsidiaries might each warrant separate articles, but they should be clearly connected to the parent company.

Each article should have a section discussing the company's business model, which is intimately tied to how a company is put together and is one of the major factors usually shaping a company's history. It is not uncommon for the business model to change over time, but major changes can entail a change to the corporate identity.

For publicly-held companies, a long term stock history (ideally a total shareholder return line including dividends), possibly shown relative to the industry benchmark appropriate to the company's line of business, would not be out of place.

Management philosophy, vision, and values are also a major element of corporations and their behaviour which often go under-reported during mergers and acquisitions and can provide insight into what actually happened as opposed to what the corporate partners have publicly described as having happened.

Lists in an article of current and former directors and executives of a company are desirable. A corporate governance section may be ideally suited to group this information.

[edit] Templates

Previous material in this section moved to Talk-page

There are three templates that have been created and refined for this Project.

Two templates are in current use, {{Infobox Company}} and {{Navbox Company}}. {{Infobox Company}} is designed to be placed only on the article for the company that it is about, whereas {{Navbox Company}} is designed to be placed on all articles directly related to the company it is about, such as that company's products, assets, and directors. Given these scopes of usage these two templates can both be included on the same main company article. A list of navigational templates based on {{Navbox Company}} is maintained at WikiProject Business and Economics/Navigation templates.