Item — HN Reader

Speaking as someone who edits frequently, the "social structure of capitalism" argument is a bad way to put it, but the general point that employees/leadership aren't reliable sources is true.

Virtually every company has a direct financial incentive to prevent negative information about them from spreading widely and to add positive information of dubious relevance.

The way Wikipedia deals with this is the policy commonly abbreviated as WP:ABOUTSELF [1], which allows to cite companies for information about themselves in the following situations.

> Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities, without the self-published source requirement that they are established experts in the field, so long as:

>> The material is neither unduly self-serving nor an exceptional claim; >> It does not involve claims about third parties; >> It does not involve claims about events not directly related to the source; >> There is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity; and >> The article is not based primarily on such sources.

If you want to "begin to argue with someone who holds an opinion like this", the first step is probably to clarify what the policy really is. Personally, I think this is a fair compromise between a maximalist approach (anything influenced by capitalism = bad) and the idea that companies are 100% authoritative on their own history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...

1 comments

It's interesting to me that no specific mention is made in [1] of Company X material released by Company X to the stock exchange that lists them.

In the case of minerals and energy listing specifically there are steep penalties for releasing information known to be false and for not correcting information by a following release at the earliest oppotunity.

Annual reports, quarterlies, board positions, major share holdings, assets, new grounds, technical report summaries, reserve|resource estimates etc are all "self published" but can be assumed to be accurate and backed by third party accountants, third party assessors, etc if pressed.

In my opinion, that kind of material would fall under that rule, but I can't find enough discussions to tell you if they should be treated as especially reliable. The closest thing to a discussion on stock exchange filings was in 2012 on SEC filings (which also have legal penalties for dishonesty) where editors made the points you did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

The Western Australian company that built and sold

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

to Standard&Poor used multiple sources: state government land titles from around the world, public information released to stock exchanges, and others.

The billions of dollars in market cap is what tends to make reputable stock market release information in minerals and energy especially reliable - where there's suspicion of fraud money flows to investigation, then litigation, etc.

Very little that cannot be backed by third party independant experts is posted, very few actual errors are posted, of those errors the majority are corrected in a timely manner.

Factually (in those capital intensive domains, by my experience) the information is easily more reliable than that published in general run of the mill newspapers.

Consolidating all that raw information into GIS database's that link layered companies, board members, physical plots of land etc. makes for a service that investors and industry members were and still are willing to pay well for.

Putting spin on facts and attempts at misdirection of course happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_One_controversy is an interesting example of where political and media spin in the US news cycle got entirely out of hand and at no point ever particularly addressed the essentially dull reasons for a POTUS to speak and endorse the transfer of Kazakhstan shares.

All of that dust in the air was far removed from facts about companies, shares, resources, etc released by the exchanges.