[WikiEN-l] Notability on the skfields

[Todd Allen]

Nick Wilkins wrote:
> On 5/14/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On 5/15/07, Philippe Beaudette <philippebeaudette at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> I believe that horse has pretty much left the barn, hasn't it?  We've
>>>       
>> got companies all over the wiki.
>>
>> If anything, we have a massive shortage of company-related articles.
>> According to Geoffrey Kohs (of WikiBiz fame), the large majority of
>> Fortune 500 companies don't even have Wikipedia articles.
>>
>> Many people seem to be biased against articles on for-profit
>> businesses. That's the real POV we should be trying to correct.
>>     
>
>
>
> I find the "large majority" idea quite improbable, so I just went through
> and checked numbers 401-500 of the 2007 Fortune 500 list.  In only 3 cases
> could I not find an article about the company at all - Reliance Steel, Liz
> Claiborne Inc. (redirects to a biography of Liz Claiborne), and Aleris
> International.  There were quite a few that were quite short (I counted 19
> very short articles, by a totally subjective measure).
>
> Note that we have the article [[Fortune 1000]], which shows blue links for
> all 500 on the 2006 list but is somewhat unreliable for this metric since a
> number of the company names actually point to common words rather than
> articles about the company.  But it does show pretty conclusively that we do
> heavily cover the (American) Fortune 500 companies.
>
> -- Jonel
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>   
I don't see any tremendous bias against for-profit businesses, but since
that's an area in which we're extremely likely to get spam (and much of
it is of the subtle PR whitewash type rather than the blatant "BUY OUR
STUFF TODAY!" variety), it's something we -should- monitor very
carefully. It's not just for-profits, either, I've certainly seen
nonprofits do their share of spamming. ("Donate to Good Cause Charity
today!" is just as much spam as "Buy a Brand X Widget today!" is!)

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