User:Pigman/boilerplate

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Rosencomet, linkspam, and sources

Rosencomet (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) has inserted numerous mentions of Starwood Festival or Association for Consciousness Exploration (ACE) into articles, a clear violation of WP:COI. Rosencomet is reasonably believed to be Jeff Rosenbaum, who "...is the conceiver and a founder of ACE, the Chameleon Club, the Starwood Festival, and the WinterStar Symposium, and is both the primary event organizer and product manufacturer for ACE." (from the ACE website) He is also the executive director of ACE[1] and he handles public relations/communications aspects of the organization. (see paragraph #4 here.) I view his insertion of links/references to this related group of articles in many other articles (sometimes multiple instances in the same article) to be promotional in nature and linkspam. While not all of these links to Starwood, WinterStar Symposium, ACE or Jeff Rosenbaum are linkspam, a large percentage of them seem to be to me. When I find such links or references to be unsupported or inappropriate within the context of any particular article, I am removing them. Also, some specific citations/sources added by Rosencomet are wholly inadequate per WP:V and WP:RS and I will remove these as well. Pigman☿ 06:17, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Rosencomet (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) has inserted references, citations, bibliographical info, and/or other sources to this article. My experience is that such information/citations must be double-checked because Rosencomet is prone to reference padding. This means books he adds to references may literally only mention the subject of the article once in passing without any information of substance. In other words, a "reference" in the text. I find the majority of his sources are wholly inadequate per WP:V and WP:RS. And, yes, the problems with this have been explained to him a number of times to little effect. Pigman☿

[edit] Work into general advert posting

There are a few problems with the article you wrote which is why I deleted it. I was fairly sure it could not be salvaged from these faults, and existed only as a form of advertising, whether you intended it to be or not.

1) The sources and footnotes were insufficient to support the article. YouTube is not considered a reliable source. Out of all the footnotes you supplied, none of them was about the company itself. Wikipedia requires independent secondary sources to substantiate the information in the article and they should be verifiable. The sources you supplied talked about organic food, not the company Organicgirl.

2) The tone of the article was not encyclopedic. Your use of the phrase "copy strategy" above indicates you don't quite understand the goals of Wikipedia or the writing style needed for a neutral point of view. Your basic text was full of promotional phrasing and positive spin.

3) While looking to other articles as examples can be helpful, before that you need to learn the core policies of Wikipedia. The most important are:

  1. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not summarizes what Wikipedia is, and what it is not.
  2. Wikipedia:Neutral point of view Wikipedia's core approach, neutral unbiased article writing.
  3. Wikipedia:No original research what is, and is not, valid information.
  4. Wikipedia:Verifiability what counts as a verifiable source and how a source can be verified.
  5. Wikipedia:Citing sources sources should be cited, and the manner of doing so.

Just because other similar articles exist on Wikipedia, this doesn't mean they are good examples of Wikipedia policy in action. What I (and others) are judging is how in line this particular article is with WP policy.

While your contributions are welcome, I strongly suggest you read the policies I linked above. If you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them on my talk page. Cheers, Pigmanwhat?/trail 19:35, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Some guidelines

The strongest help I can give you is tell you to read the five numbered items above. One thing you may not be clear on is not every company is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article. There are guidelines on this at Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies). Notability is difficult pin down which is why Wikipedia guidelines on it are only guidelines, not firm policy. However, what is important is that there be published sources about the company. An article in Business Week or the Wall Street Journal or any established newspaper will contain independent information about the company. "Independent" in this instance means from outside the company's control. Press releases don't count. This is what is meant when Wikipedia talks about verifiable and reliable sources. There are exceptions but, for example, MySpace and Yahoo Groups are not generally considered reliable sources. They are sometimes used in articles about, say, musical groups but they shouldn't be used as a source of WP article content. YouTube is even less reliable as a source. Like MySpace, anyone can post there. There is no evaluation of the information or its credibility.

Also, you should be aware that the sourcing bar on commercial entities, like companies and stores and even chain stores, is higher than other types of articles. Many, many people want to use Wikipedia as a form of advertising. Wikipedia has one of the highest profile sites on the internet. An article guarantees wide viewing and highly placed hits on searches. So there is a great deal of caution about including companies without documentation. I note that a google search I just did showed an Organicgirl hit on your Wikipedia userpage about 8th down from the top of over 18 thousand hits. It looks like you had the article on your userpage before you created the page for it.

So it's not just a matter of finding "the company information valid if I provide a newspaper article". The sources need to be reliable as well and support the information put on Wikipedia. For example, your sources in the Organicgirl article were mostly about organic food. None of them were about Organicgirl, the company. Look around Wikipedia and you'll probably find articles about organic food with some sources like some of the ones you supplied and that's appropriate. Your article was about Organicgirl and the sources should focus on Organicgirl, not other items.

One of the most important policies on Wikipedia is neutral point of view. For the most part the adjectives you used were not neutral. Calling something "special" or "unique" in advertising copy is normal; on Wikipedia, even if you were to prove the words were used in sources, such words are considered inaccurate, undescriptive and puffery. As a marketing major, you are probably encouraged to use happy and energetic descriptors. Wikipedia prefers descriptors which are non-emotional and which don't embody a specific POV.

I'm sure you could find plenty of article examples on Wikipedia that contradict what I'm telling you but using that as an argument for allowing the article you started to remain will not gain traction with most experienced editors on Wikipedia.

For example, you mentioned the Whole Foods Market article. I'm not going to look at it so what I'm saying is blind, just what I'm guessing. I believe Whole Foods is a publicly traded company whose stock has done very well. I'd be surprised if there were less than 6 reliable sources in the article from major publications. Like almost any company article on WP, I expect there is some puffery and overly positive words, but the majority will probably conform to the standards of WP I've described above. Let me look now. Not bad. If you look at the sources, you will see a few come from the corporation itself (the CEO's blog, annual reports) but the overwhelming majority come from places like the Austin American Statesman, Bloomberg and CNNMoney. These are good sources. Notice also that all the sources are directly about Whole Foods Market, its actions, its financial situation.

Perhaps this is a little more than you wanted and I'm not entirely sure I've answered your questions, but I guess I wanted to make sure you understood WP policies guide our judgments here. Please notice that several people came at the article from different directions but they mostly came to similar conclusions. No one called us to the article. (well, the speedy delete tag brought me to the article to evaluate whether it met the criteria so that's not entirely true.) If you have more questions, I'd be happy to answer them, probably at much less length than this post. ;-) Pigmanwhat?/trail 01:32, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why I deleted 75 stories

Although you said you were going to add more to the article, there was nothing in the article that suggested notability by Wikipedia's WP:MUSIC or WP:BAND criteria. A Google search on the band name and the guitarist turned up only a MySpace page. I considered it very unlikely you would be able to supply reliable sources for the content of the article, making it original research. And your Wikipedia username suggests you might be a member of the band which also puts your contribution into conflict of interest territory. If you want to contribute to Wikipedia, I strongly suggest you look at the wikilinks I've included here as well as the ones in the welcome message at the top of this talk page. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them on my talk page. Pigmanwhat?/trail 23:14, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why I deleted your article

OK, I won't/can't really tell you everything you need to know about Wikipedia (WP). It's a big place with lots of nooks and crannies. Click on the links in the text below to see a much fuller explanation of the points I'm making.

While anyone can start an article on WP, there is no guarantee that it will stay on WP. There are all kinds of criteria for whether a person, sports team, event, etc. is able to support an article, not the least being having verifiable and reliable sources supporting the content. Sports teams below the professional, semi-professional or college level are generally not suitable for WP articles. This isn't universal but it's a fair rule of thumb.

The article you started, Vernon Tigers Junior Lacrosse Club, was tagged for speedy deletion with a reason of A7: "An article about a real person, organization (band, club, company, etc.), or web content that does not indicate why its subject is important or significant." While of course every team and person is important and significant to someone, in encyclopedic terms WP editors have to decide what is "notable" and decide where to draw the lines on inclusion. Unfortunately, a Junior level Lacrosse club isn't really at such a level that it would be considered for inclusion. One reason is that finding verifiable and reliable sources to support the info in the article is very difficult to find. You may know the info in the article was true and accurate but other WP editors have no way of factchecking it. WP is, above all, an encyclopedia. While there are certainly plenty of inaccuracies on WP, we try our best to verify info by sourcing it to newspapers, books, magazines, etc.

Any WP editor can tag and nominate an article for Speedy Deletion, giving a very specific criterion as to why the article should be deleted. Only an admin (like me) has the ability to actually delete it. I looked at the article and agreed with the nominator. If you look at the speedy deletion criteria, the reasons are very specific and limited. I can't just delete any article I don't like; I'm bound by those reasons and limited to only those reasons to delete an article without consulting other Wikipedians. Part of this is also because I'm an experienced Wikipedian, familiar with the policies of WP. It's probably no consolation but if I hadn't deleted your article, another admin would undoubtedly have done so with pretty much the same reasoning. It's highly unlikely the article would have stayed on WP very long. Sorry.

Hope I haven't overwhelmed you with all this. I realize WP is a strange place, full of policies, guidelines, rules, etc. that aren't at all obvious to the newcomer. Much of it probably seems like gibberish and too complex to easily understand. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me. Cheers, Pigman☿ 03:35, 23 April 2008 (UTC)