On 8 Dec 2006 at 09:09, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:

Assuming your summary of events is accurate, it seems that the source isn't neutral. That being the case, I'm of the opinion that it might be reliable in some cases, but not in others. For example, I doubt you'd find many objections to using a company's own information page, when looking for the date a company was founded; for more complex or potentially controversial information, however, getting information from third party, neutral sources is probably preferred.

Even such simple things as founding dates could in some cases be subject to spin, manipulation, and debate. A company or organization with a complex history (with mergers, splits, acquisitions, reorganizations, buying the rights to a name from a completely different entity and renaming the parent company accordingly, etc.) can have several different dates that can with some logic be claimed as their "founding date", and an official corporate site will use the one that their marketing flacks think fits their current desired image; if they want to emphasize that they've been around a while they use the earlier of the possible dates, while if they want to claim to be all new and different they use the newer one. However, Wikipedia should never be beholden to the current corporate image as opposed to the true facts.