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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/CLC bio (2nd nomination)

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. MBisanz talk 01:42, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

CLC bio

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CLC bio (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

CLC Bio does not fulfill Wikipedia's notability policy for companies. It is not a listed company; searching in Google news turns up a single (non-press release) reference (as of 19 January 2009). The article itself is pure advertising, telling us nothing useful about the company itself, instead noting how many users they have and how portable and fast the products are, without any attempt to provide precise encyclopedic detail. While I wish them well, Wikipedia is not an appropriate platform for corporate promotion, and hence the article should be deleted. Daen (talk) 06:35, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep. Third party sources here, here. The work they have done is evidently good enough that it is used by the Beijing Genomics Institute, Venter Institute, the University of Copenhagen and involves collaborations with minor companies such as microsoft. Ironholds (talk) 08:01, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • The first "third party source" you link to is explicitly (look at the bottom) sourced to the company's VP. The second is in fact a press release. 160.39.213.152 (talk) 23:37, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • Fair enough, this brings up whether an org with significant enough clout to get its press releases published in BusinessWire is notable; I'd say yes. Ironholds (talk) 06:21, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • In fact, other than the Medicon Valley article, all Ironholds' links are CLC bio sourced press releases. Press releases are specifically mentioned in Wikipedia's notability policy as not constituting a secondary source, and hence not counting as notable coverage. Issuing them is typically done by the company's PR manager or agency, and is absolutely no indication of anything worthwhile (come on, we have all read so many press releases which are simply hot air) Daen (talk) 18:51, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The use of citations here takes judgment, as it is the practice to specify the suppliers of every non-trivial material used. But the information here from other sources is significant. A key factor in notability is market share, so the number of people using a product is a very important factor. DGG (talk) 22:50, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete That they have customers is not the issue here. Wikipedia policy states that "A company, corporation, organization, team, religion, group, product, or service is notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in secondary sources." As has been amply demonstrated by Ironholds, there is way too little non-CLC bio sourced material to make this a credible company for a Wikipedia entry. This company should not be allowed to be unfairly boosted into notability on Wikipedia when much more important and notable Danish pharmaceutical and biotech companies such as Neurosearch, LEO Pharma, Bavarian Nordic, Santaris and Symphogen (to name but a few) have no entries. Daen (talk) 18:51, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    Pointer; just as other stuff exists is not a valid argument, neither is other stuff does not exist. To be blunt if you have a problem with Wikipedia not having articles on some topics, stop moaning and write them. 'Request a new page' is a function, not a directive. Ironholds (talk) 18:55, 20 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • As Daen probably noticed, the one reference he links to in his nomination is not even about this company. With zero independent sources about this company, the content of this article can never be more than a reflection of what the company says about itself, and therefore the article can never be NPOV-compliant. So the page and its history should be hidden from view using the "delete" function until suitable sources emerge. As for Ironholds and DGG's arguments--I don't see why the quality of the company's work, its collaborators, or its market share have anything to do with whether the page should be kept. 160.39.213.152 (talk) 01:13, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, — Aitias // discussion 00:01, 24 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment What makes something notable is importance in its area. For a business, the importance in the area can be presumed to belong to the leading companies, which is business terms is the companies that do most of the business. That's why market share is an objective iindicator. Other companies can be notable also, if there is reliable specific coverage of something positive or negative. DGG (talk) 03:13, 25 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Once again, notability, as defined by Wikipedia's own policies, not by DGG or Ironholds, is nothing to do with market share and everything to do with reliable and independent secondary references of which next to none exist for this company. CLC bio issues many press releases, as do many other companies. As a bioinformatics company, I don't care how many customers they claim to have: until they start to show up in the likes of Nature or the Financial Times, they are not eligible for inclusion in Wikipedia. Interestingly, googling for references to the unstarted Danish biotech and pharma company articles I mention above on the nature.com ___domain vs CLC bio (omitting blog entries for higher quality hits) produces the following results:
Neurosearch 73
LEO Pharma 59
Santaris 53
Bavarian Nordic 52
Symphogen 32
CLC bio 6
The same search against the FT yields the following:
LEO Pharma 1050
Neurosearch 113
Bavarian Nordic 102
Santaris 4
Symphogen 4
CLC bio 1
I also searched for CLC bio in the Oxford Journal of Bioinformatics, the Association for Computing Machinery website and the ACS Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling and found nothing.
Santaris and Symphogen look weak using the FT test, but secondary source support for these companies can be found elsewhere. Meanwhile, the case for including CLC bio in Wikipedia is, in my view, still unsupported by any evidence.
To be fair, a couple of the hits for CLC bio against the Nature journals are for a short review article on metagenomics in Nature (the rest are in general 'methods' and 'about the author' paper/article metadata) but still only comprise a single sentence describing the Workbench and a reference in a table of suppliers. I once again contend that one sentence in one short article in one high-impact journal absolutely does not constitute notability. Daen (talk) 13:01, 25 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • DGG, conceding for the sake of argument that the company is indeed important, it nonetheless appears from Daen's search for sources that the article itself cannot be brought into line with NPOV, Wikipedia's fundamental content policy. One of the problems that I see with the idea that notability=importance, which you seem to be advancing, is that we get articles like these: 160.39.213.152 (talk) 14:29, 25 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I see no NPOV problems, and I hope for many more articles on companies like these. DGG (talk) 14:57, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Why do you persist in believing that this company should be included in Wikipedia, in spite of the unambiguous and extensive Wikipedia notability policy and a significant amount of objective evidence that I have provided demonstrating an almost complete lack of notability, in Wikipedia policy terms? Daen (talk) 16:43, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
NPOV doesn't just mean neutral tone, it means presenting all significant views on a subject. Here, there is only one significant view--the one presented by the company itself. So the POV problem is that the article is totally sourced to the company's website and/or press releases. On your view of NPOV, NPOV would seem not to bar a Wikipedia article about, say, me, if it is totally sourced to my autobiography, as long as the tone is neutral. 160.39.213.152 (talk) 19:19, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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