Direct experience with private equity or finance is encouraged but not required to be a member of this project. For a full list of the members, see WikiProject Private Equity participants.
If you are interested in joining WikiProject Private Equity, you can place following userbox on your user page:
Users are welcomed to start working on any of the projects on this page or suggest a new project. Also feel free to invite new members by placing the following invitation on their talk page:
A general stub for private equity and venture capital related articles. Should include stub articles on private equity concepts as well as private equity stubs that have not been categorized into one of the other two stub types.
Tagging articles will help the members of the project focus their efforts on the articles that need special attention and will alert other editors that there are individuals with interest and expertise in this specific area.
Please place this tag,
{{WikiProject Private Equity}}
in the talk page of articles under the scope of this project.
The template will produce this...
This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Private Equity, a collaborative effort to improve the depth of quality and coverage of the private equity and venture capital industry and related topics in Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
This project seeks to collaborate with the following WikiProjects:
The following templates have been created for use in private equity related articles. Please add the appropriate template to each article type
For Private Equity Concepts use: {{Private equity and venture capital}}
Categories for certain large private equity firms may be appropriate to accommodate its portfolio companies
Establishing notability
The coverage of the private equity industry has historically been lacking content and articles on Private Equity Firms have suffered from issues of notability. One of the purposes of this project is to help editors to distinguish notable topics from the noise. In working with the larger Wikipedia community, WikiProject Private Equity should help answer the following questions:
Has this firm or investor completed any notable investments? Criteria can include investment size, notability of the companies acquired/funded. Notable firms tend to receive coverage in major publications when they complete transactions.
Is this an "emerging manager"? Most notable firms should have been in existence for a reasonable period of time or should have a notable predecessor (e.g., CCMP Capital, Terra Firma Capital Partners).
How much capital does this firm / investor manage? This can be a good metric with which to evaluate notability, particularly for leveraged buyout firms (less so for venture capital firms). A good rule of thumb would be that unless there is some other mitigating factor, buyout firms which have raised less than $750 million in their last fund or have less than $1 billion under management are likely going to have difficulty establishing notability.
Does a firm / investor have an institutional investor base? If a firm's capital base is comprised exclusively of high net worth individuals, in addition to likely failing on one of the above factors.
It is also necessary to be aware of the current WP:NCORP guideline, which has recently become considerably more restrictive about which sources are considered usable to show notability. It is possible that some frequently used source in this area will no longer be considered acceptable for this purpose.
Resources
Please use this overview of private equity information sources and bibliography prepared by Harvard Business School professor Joshua Lerner. His advice is that most of the best information consists of primary sources (news articles) related to individual investments made by private equity firms.
Web Resources
AltAssets - free news coverage of the private equity sector
Grabenwarter, Ulrich; Tom Weidig (2005). Exposed to the J Curve: Understanding and Managing Private Equity Fund Investments. London: Euromoney Institutional Investor. ISBN1-84374-149-0.
