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How to create a great company article

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Revision as of 22:27, 22 December 2010 by Ray (talk | contribs)

Here in ICANNWiki we are trying to bring ICANN related companies, such as Registrars, Registries and other related entities from all over the world together by creating an interlinked encylopedia. Whether you represent one of these companies or simply interested in writing something, you are more than welcome to create a company article.

In this article, we will be using MelbourneIT as an example to describe the process of creating an informative company article.

Getting Started

Before you start, please read the basic guideline Getting Started where the Neutral Point of View (NPOV), and other general guidelines are discussed.

Collect information

Our aim is to create an informative article for each company, with proper references where possible. We will be performing some through internet search to achieve this. You can use any search engine, but in this example we will use Google.

  • To create an article for MelbourneIT, we will be searching for information from three angles. We will perform a basic search, keyword specific search and chronological searches.
  • A basic search is when you simply search with the company name such as "MelbourneIT". This search will of course return the official website/s of the company and other pages mostly containing the basic information such as a overview or profile for the company.

We will use these information as the base of our article.

Filling the Company Infobox

We can start by using this information to fill the Company Infobox.

  • For example, you can collect the logo from the official website. Currently icannwiki only supports .jpg/.jpeg formats so if the find is in any other format (such as .gif in this case) , you can use any simple image converter such as Windows Paint or Adobe Photoshop to convert the format.
  • Most of the information needed for the info box, for example, type, industry, founded, purchase, ownership, headquarters, country, products, revenue, website etc you can find from the basic search results.
  • From the MelbourneIT’s official website, pages like "About Us", "History", and "Company Overview" can give us these information. Its always better if we can use sources other than the official websites to collect these information so websites that keep company profiles such as CrunchBase or Yahoo! Finance are of great help too.
  • For some companies, you may not find a profile page with all the information, in that case you can do a keyword specific search. For example, if you can not find when a company was founded from its official website or other sources when you search with only the company name, you can include the keyword "founded" or "established" with the search. Example of these searches can be "MelbourneIT was founded" or "MelbourneIT" was established" etc.
  • Do remember to properly refer the sources of the information in the content. You can either do it in the inside the infobox or in the introduction part of the content because the introduction is basically an explanation of the facts given in the info box with some additional information.

Introduction of the company

In the first part of the article you simply give an introduction of the company such as the kind of company it is, the kind of services it provides, information on the establishment of the company, its headquarters, and employees, any other statistics and if there is anything else you would like to mention about the company. There is no set rule, you can write about whatever you think is appropriate.

History

The topic that comes next is the history of the company. This part of the article mainly covers all the landmarks of the company, from its establishment to the current time.

  • Some of the companies, such as MelbourneIT, has a "History" page with detailed chronological information included in their official websites. We can use these information to create the history part keeping two thing in mind. First, do not copy or paste anything, create your own content based on the information. Secondly, try to include as many references as possible. In most of the cases the companies only uses important newsworthy landmarks. So chances are, you can find a lot of references of these information in the internet.
  • Lets take the first fact for example. It said, in 1996, the University of Melbourne create MelbourneIT. By simply searching with "1996 University of Melbourne MelbourneIT" we can find a viable reference to support that fact. For most of the cases, the history part of the official website will try to summarize every event and by searching for references you can find detailed information on each event which can help you write more information on the company. In this case, this link has helped to write a whole topic on how MelbourneIT entered the domain registration business.
  • In this way, you can chronologically arrange all important landmarks, events or any other information in the history part with proper references. You may not find references to all of the points mentioned in the history page, you may not even need to cover all of the points in the first place. Just keep an NPOV policy and include whatever you find necessary.
  • For some companies, you may not find an organized history page. In that case, you can perform a chronological search starting from the foundation year of the company to the current. For example, MelbourneIT was founded in 1996 and if there is no pre-arranged history information, we could do a search like "MelbourneIT 1996", "MelbourneIT 1997", and "MelbourneIT 1998" to the current year "MelbourneIT 2010". It may sound like a lot of work, but for most of the companies, you will only find information on some of the years. In this way, you are simply making sure that you are not missing any important information or events.

Products and Services, Awards and other contents

After the history part of the content, you can cover the products and services provided by the company.

  • You can collect the information from the companies website, but careful about how your are interpreting them. As opposed to the company descriptions, you are not trying to sale these services. Cover the basic and keep the description as neutral as possible.
  • Another part of the content can be the awards and recognitions. As with the case of history, sometimes the companies will have a separate "Award" page. Just search with the award name and year and you can find a reference to go with it.
  • If there is no award page, you can search with the company name with the key word awards, for example "MelbourneIT Awards".
  • Its also possible to find very little or alsmot no information on awards oe even history for some of the companies. Its also possible to find some more information such as any special news like the acquisitions, patents, any controversial news or simply anything that you feel does not belong in the previous categories or should be in a separate topic. You have a different topic for this information. For example, MelbourneIT has a separate part about how the company entered in the domain registration business.

And feel free to browse through the already completed artciles for more ideas.

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