From: Luna lunasantin@gmail.com

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.

Just being argumentative here... on the whole you're right but even in such simple matters some degree of skepticism is advisable. When the source is the company's own website, it's not a bad idea to use qualified phrasing like "XYZ gives its founding year as so-and-so" rather than "XYZ was founded in so-and-so."

A good example is the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, which claims "Established 1895" and claims to be "The oldest movie company in America:" http://www.biographcompany.com/about_us_home.html . Our article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ American_Mutoscope_and_Biograph_Company , gives a more complete view of what turns out to be a "complex and potentially controversial" story.

_University_ founding dates are tricky, because they are or were traditionally an important point of prestige and govern the order of march in academic processions. The University of Bologna gets to march ahead of Oxford, for example. Therefore, universities are strongly motivated to make a case for the earliest possible date, however tenuous. An egregious example of this is the University of Pennsylvania, which tries to have it both ways. Penn rather likes the founding narrative that gives it a nonsectarian origin, closely associated with Benjamin Franklin and his "Proposals for the Education of Youth in Pensilvania." Unfortunately, that leads a founding date of 1749, making it three years younger than Princeton. So, in 1899, Penn officially adopted a position that identifies its origins, rather tenuously, with a firebrand proto-Methodist George Whitefield. To prove the truth of this narrative, they added a statue of Whitefield on campus to accompany the various statues of Franklin. This enabled them to claim a founding date of 1740, beating Princeton.

William and Mary was founded in 1693, closed in 1882, then re-opened in 1888. Did that break the chain or not? Is the institution that opened in 1888 really "the same" one that closed?

Corporate spinmeisters are quite fond of concocting warm and fuzzy "origins" tales, and other stories that confirm the company's preferred view of disputes involving lawsuits, patents, priorities, and the like. Parker Brothers (Hasbro)'s website tells the story (http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/default.cfm?page=history) of how Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania invented the game in 1934. From their website, one would never guess that anything "complex or potentially controversial" about the matter. Fortunately, our article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_%28game%29 , does not rely solely on Hasbro as its source.

Trust, but verify.