The is nothing wrong with a company starting its own page if so long as it is not their “own ‘vanity’ wiki page” but abides by the site’s rules, style etc (ie reads like an encyclopaedia, not a press release), and if of course the company is some-how of note.

What is of note is highly subjective (have to stop using that word). For example, railways is one of a few things Wikipedia is citied as been too focused, because of this a medium sided company making some type of locomotive part may feature, at the same time other people may say a far larger company which effects far more people should not be included for one reason or another.

Too may people look at Wikipedia as an old-style limited encyclopaedia, while it’s really more like one of those old Irish surveys of every little detail of Dublin to small villages.

A possible down side of creating pages is you might have negative things recorded sooner rather then later. Looking out for negative non-encyclopaedia entries may be something companies will have to look at anyway.

On a side note I created a Wikipedia entry of a company a few weeks ago (it links to stuff they apparently don’t like, but I was being at least fairly neutral). It was only created a few weeks ago, and now ranks sixth in a Google search of the company’s full name.

This is of interest to this topic, there’s loads of Irish companies listed on the site that aren’t listed here… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irish_companies

In one sense I understand wiki-p don’t want their dbase full of spam, but in another, who are they (especially since they’re an open and very large community) to decide what is knowledge and what is not?