Manufacturer checks

What it asks

Each manufacturer is found in Wikidata by its name and the names it is also known by. A name alone is not an identity, so a match is only trusted when Wikidata records the company making something and its country agrees with ours. People are never matched, and two items that fit equally well are reported for a person to choose between.

Where we list no website, the finding says whether Wikidata knows one and whether that site answers today. Where both list one on different domains, the finding shows both for review.

A founding year we lack is filled from a confident match. A founding year that disagrees is only ever reviewed, because a company's founding and its current legal entity's are both honest answers and the schema asks for the first.

A company Wikidata records as dissolved but we list as trading is flagged, since the likelier explanation is often a rename or a successor, which a person decides.

A maker Wikidata does not know is not a finding. Its absence from a volunteer database says nothing about our record.

What happens to a finding

• Every run is published here as it happened, failures included, before anyone has looked at it.
• Each run is also kept as a report that lists what was fixed since the run before, what is new and what is still open, so progress is measured finding by finding rather than claimed.
• No check edits the catalogue. A finding goes to a person, who corrects the record by hand and cites what the correction rests on; the next run confirms it.
• A check id is never renamed, so a link to one keeps meaning the same question.