Talk:Jaguar Land Rover/Archives/2012

Public limited company

User rangoon11 seems to be engaged in an edit war having incorrectly reverted a contribution added by Gsingh which changed "PLC" to "plc". In the United Kingdom it is customary to put "plc" in lower case. Even in the URL given by rangoon11 in his/her edit summary - http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/about/gbhtml/gp1.shtml - Chapter 6 clearly states "If your company is a public company its name must end with 'public limited company' or 'p.l.c.'. ", as does the Companies Act 2006 (link). The same lower case convention is used on the Wikipedia article Public limited company. Whatever Jaguar chooses to show in its company documentation, it is irrelevant because accepted practice is to use lower case. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia concerned with verifiable facts, not marketing affectations. --Biker Biker (talk) 15:02, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Firstly, the stable version of the article used the - correct - format PLC. My having reverted the -incorrect - change, discussion should then have taken place here. Instead you have been attempting to impose the change through edit warring (I have no idea why you wish to waste time on such a trivial and inconsequential detail, particularly when you are wholly wrong, but anyhow).

It is not customary in the United Kingdom to put plc in lower case, it is up to each company to choose whether their name is officially written plc, p.l.c., PLC or Plc. Looking at the official documentation of major UK companies this is very clear. For example, the BP annual report and accounts uses p.l.c. ([1]. The Vodafone annual report and accounts uses Plc ([2]) The Barclays annual report and accounts uses PLC ([3]).

When you speak of accepted practice therefore, which accepted practice are you referring to? Not that of the UK's largest companies. And not Wikipedia's, becuase the articles of the above companies reflect the position which I have just described. Rangoon11 (talk) 15:35, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Although Rangoon11 you are correct in saying that Jaguar Land Rover advertises as PLC and not plc. But Wikipedia clearly states that we do not take into account what is used by the company as a trademark, we are to use the standard English form which is plc. All the examples you have given showing otherwise are wrong, you could help Wikipedia out by changing them if you wish. The term to be used is the lowercase p.l.c or public limited company. Quite frankly we don't care what the company advertises themselves as. See the discussion on NVIDIA, it shows a precedent. Read up on WP:TM, and no Wikipedia is not a democracy. WP:NOT#DEM Gsingh (talk) 21:06, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

It is not a question of trademarks or advertising, Jaguar Land Rover is not a customer-facing name and does no advertising (and even if it did, it almost certainly would not include 'PLC', companies never do in trademarks etc). You are confusing the 'official' name with the form of name used by a company in a trademark or other advertising/marketing communications. It is correct that where a company's official name is not all upper case, but it markets itself using upper case, a general convention in WP is that the standard case is used (e.g. NVIDIA). That is not the case here. The name at the top of the infobox should be the 'official' name of the company, including the correct use of cases. Hence eBay, BAE Systems, QBE Insurance, CNP Assurances, JCDecaux and many others.

The 'official' name of Jaguar Land Rover is 'Jaguar Land Rover PLC', not 'Jaguar Land Rover p.l.c.', 'Jaguar Land Rover public limited company' or 'Jaguar Land Rover plc'. That is the name as it will appear on the company's official documents - not customer facing, since it is not a customer facing name.

You show a further confusion by stating that 'the term to be used is the lowercase p.l.c or public limited company'. Pre the coming into force of the 2006 Companies Act a company may actually have specifically registered itself at Companies House as 'p.l.c.', e.g. BP ([4]), or without full stops, as with Jaguar Land Rover, and to use 'p.l.c.' for Jaguar Land Rover would be as incorrect as using none for BP.

Another confusion is with the legal name. In an English law sense 'jaguar land rover public limited company' will have the same legal meaning as Jaguar Land Rover PLC, since no other company will be capable of registering any name with any combination of upper/lower case of its name (just like 'BP Public Limited Company' would to every possible practical purpose have an identical legal meaning to 'BP p.l.c.', even though BP is explicitly registered as 'p.l.c.'). The point in the 2006 Companies Act referred to above would only have applied to companies registered at Companies House after the date on which that section of the Act came into force, nothing in the Act changed the names of any existing company. Rangoon11 (talk) 21:32, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

I looked at the evidence and my thought is that rangoon11 is behaving in a tentenditious way, very bad indeed. Mr Singh and Mr Biker are correct, but it would be ideal to follow the requirement to add guidance to the wiki project so pointless and lame edit wars like this do not get fuelled in such a childish manner. Leave it in the legally correct form of plc and stop warring. --82.132.215.214 (talk) 13:41, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

It's more than a little curious than an IP with a grand total of one edit should be watching the editing history of this page, and feel so strongly about the above to post a personal attack on this page. I think that the barrel has now been well and truly scraped.Rangoon11 (talk) 13:52, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Attempt to impose changes through edit warring by Biker Biker

Deeply tedious and disappoiniting behaviour by Biker Biker, who appears, despite having a high number of article edits, to still completely fail to understand that WP operates by consensus and discussion, not by edit warring. Rangoon11 (talk) 19:09, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Two users have changed the article to use "plc". It is you who is edit warring by continually changing it to "PLC" without any sort of credible reasoning. Let's wait and see what others think. --Biker Biker (talk) 19:19, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Consensus is established through discussion on the article Talk page, not through edit warring in the article space, and (1) the discussion above only involves two editors - and you have failed to even reply to my post, and (2) has only been running a very short period of time. Until consensus for change has been established here, the article should reflect the position pre the reversion. In the meantime I have sought the input of Dormskirk and Gr1st, both very experienced editors on UK companies. Rangoon11 (talk) 19:26, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

I would not claim to be an expert on company law but I would personally normally accept whatever is on the Certificate of Incorporation of the company concerned. I assume that in the case it is 'PLC'. I hope this helps. Best wishes Dormskirk (talk) 22:18, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Largely ambivalent about this I'm afraid. We obviously don't yet have a Wikipedia-wide consensus on which form is preferred - probably the majority of articles use plc but plenty use the uppercase. You could invoke MOS:TM which says that that a company's own formatting preferences should be ignored in favour of "standard" English usage. But when The Wall Street Journal uses "PLC", Bloomberg uses "Plc" and the BBC uses "plc"... Gr1st (talk) 19:57, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

That's what I thought. Rangoon11 has already changed it back without discussion and I don't have time to deal with this, I'm a little busy with working on fixing up the Punjab government articles. How does one add input to help develop an official wikipedia policy? Who do we bring it up with? Gsingh (talk) 02:08, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

List of directors

People are only listed on Wikipedia if they are notable. None of the board of directors are notable and therefore listing them here is pointless. --Biker Biker (talk) 14:24, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

No, individuals only have a WP article about them if they are notable. When listing things like "notable alumni" of a university it is also usually expected, although not obligatory, that they have their own WP article because the individuals are being selected from a much larger group for the subjective reason of being "notable".

However details of the senior management of a notable company within the article of the said company is standard (if not universal) across company articles and provides information on a significant feature of the notable topic (which is the company). There is no subjective process involved as the individuals hold a formal title. Rangoon11 (talk) 14:35, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

With respect that's rubbish. There are few if any company articles that have lists of non-notable directors. --Biker Biker (talk) 14:43, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Try Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Nokia, Siemens, Verizon Communications, Bank of America and IBM. I would be happy for the information to be presented in prose rather than a table however. Rangoon11 (talk) 14:51, 4 October 2012 (UTC)