The "About" page on a mid-sized law firm's website states, correctly, that the firm was founded in 1987, that it has four partners, and that its offices sit in a converted warehouse in Providence. All three facts can go straight into the firm's Wikipedia article, cited to the firm's own site. The sentence two lines further down — "recognized as the region's most trusted immigration practice" — cannot, no matter how carefully the citation is formatted.
Wikipedia's verifiability policy treats a company's own website, a person's own social media account, and a government agency's own filings the same way: as self-published sources, barred by default from supporting anything beyond their author's own opinion. WP:ABOUTSELF carves out a narrow exception. A subject may cite itself to describe itself — but only when five conditions hold at the same time, not when any one of them does.
The material cannot be unduly self-serving or an exceptional claim; a founding date clears that bar, a superlative about market position does not. It cannot make a claim about a third party; the firm's own page can describe the firm's own history, not a competitor's or a former partner's conduct. It cannot concern an event unrelated to the source itself; a five-year-old press release doesn't support a sentence about this year's management. Nothing about who wrote it or when can be in reasonable doubt; an archived page with a verifiable date counts, a screenshot forwarded through three inboxes does not. And the article as a whole cannot rest mainly on sources like it — a self-published page can anchor one fact inside an article built mostly on independent coverage; it cannot carry the article by itself.
Run the law firm's claims back through those five conditions and the split holds exactly where instinct would place it. Founding year, partner count, office address: unremarkable facts nobody disputes, none of them self-serving, none of them about anyone else. "Most trusted practice in the region": a comparative ranking with no named source behind it, which is precisely the kind of statement the guideline flags as too self-serving to stand on the subject's own word.
Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves...so long as the material is neither unduly self-serving nor an exceptional claim, does not involve claims about third parties, and the article is not based primarily on such sources.
None of this reaches notability, which a subject's own output can never establish, however factual and however carefully cited. An article built entirely from a company's filings, website, and social accounts can contain not one disputed sentence and still face a deletion nomination, because notability asks whether independent sources took notice — and a subject writing about itself cannot, by definition, independently notice itself.
What WP:ABOUTSELF actually buys an editor is narrower than most people expect: a fast, uncontroversial way to source the handful of plain facts a biography or company article needs — a founding date, a headquarters, a job title — without hunting down a newspaper mention for each one. It was never built to carry a reputation, and treating five narrow conditions as though they could is usually what turns a thin article into a deletion debate.
