Talk:Sentry Insurance/Archives/2013

Untitled

I undid an edit by 24.74.117.193 with: Be aware that Sentry has a history of not paying property claims. In Feb 2007, a car dealership burned down in Clover, SC. Neighboring businesses were damaged by the fire, all of which were capture on local TV cameras. Sentry's response is that since they cannot find who is responsible for the fire, any damaged companies are on their own relative to making repairs. '

I think a criticism section might be valid, but it should cite documented problems that people have had with the company. This entry just sounds like someone's personal gripe. It is not appropriate for an encyclopedia. For the record I am not an employee or a policyholder of this company.HornColumbia 03:36, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Assets and shareholder surplus

This numbers mention in the article appear to differ from those that are on this page, however, no date is given for those numbers. Thoughts? --Hypertext (talk) 21:35, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Its Sentry Insurance, any of the numbers Sentry puts out are suspect especially reserves. -AK —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.185.189.122 (talk) 20:27, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Anonymous editor conflict of interest

The IP address range 157.248.0.0 - 157.248.255.255 is assigned to Sentry Insurance company. ARIN Whois. The editor 157.248.5.3 (talk · contribs) has contributed to this page. Many of his edits have already been reverted as inappropriate. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 17:41, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Recent edits

There seems to be number of back and forth changes on this page lately. I haven't worked on this page in a while, so I think I can be a referee here. I edited the page back to a version I can live with. I've included a justification of these changes below. Let's discuss these here as needed.

- I added back the AM Best rating All insurance companies (and other firms in the financial industries) are rated by outside rating firms such as Standard and Poors or, for most insurers, AM Best. Their ratings measures an insurance companies' ability to pay claims is a good piece of information to include in Wikipedia. If you go to the AM Best page and click on "What links here", you'll see this is common for insurance pages to cite AM Best.

- I added back the list of subsidiaries, but moved them to the infobox: Insurance companies typically have subsidiaries. See State Farm Insurance for an example of how other insurance company pages on Wikipedia handle this. Also, if you look at, "What links here", you'll see that the names of many of these companies are redirected here. In this way we don't need numerous pages for what is essentially the same company. They might have been removed for citation issues, but a better way to handle this would be to use the {{citation needed}} tag. See Wikipedia:Citation needed for details.

- External Links

A company's web sit is a valid external link. From there I think we can also assume that a subsidiary's official web site is valid. I added these back, but took out the link text that wasn't Neutral point of view. See Wikipedia:External links and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view.

- References

Most of the facts here seem to come from the company website. It would be nice to have a more varied source of refs, but, hey, this is still a stub. I added back the general ref that points the company's "about us" page and added a citation for the AM Best fact.

That's all OK, except for the external links. This article is about Sentry Insurance, not all of the other companies. If they have an article, then their links can go there. Articles are not linkfarms and should not contain more links than necessary. TNXMan 02:33, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

• I removed the Parker Centennial Assurance link as it was a bad URL. I don't think three links is a "link farm". See my comments above. All the subsidiary names redirect to this page. Please read Wikipedia:External links. Also I reverted Tnxman307's removal of the general reference. Please discuss here first if you think it is not appropriate. Let's try to reach a consensus.HornColumbia (talk) 03:27, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
• Also, here is the relevant External links entry:

Minimize the number of links

If the subject of the article has more than one official website, then more than one link may be appropriate. However, Wikipedia does not provide a comprehensive web directory to every official website. Wikipedia does not attempt to document or provide links to every part of the subject's web presence or provide readers with a handy list of all social networking sites. Complete directories lead to clutter and to placing undue emphasis on what the subject says.

More than one official link should be provided only when the additional links provide the reader with unique content and are not prominently linked from other official websites. For example, if the main page of the official website for an author contains a link to the author's blog and Twitter feed, then it is not appropriate to provide links to all three. Instead, provide only the main page of the official website in this situation. In other situations, it may be appropriate to provide more than one link, such as when a business has one website for the corporate headquarters and another for consumer information. Choose the minimum number of links that provides readers with the maximum amount of information. Links that provide consistent information are strongly preferred to social networking and communication services where the content changes rapidly and may not comply with this guideline at any given moment in time.

HornColumbia (talk) 03:27, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

• I see part of my recent edit has already been rolled back again without any discussion. I have to admit that I'm a little annoyed by other editors quickness to roll back my edits and failure to discuss. That said, it's kinda a moot point. I put my bitterness and anger aside and took another look at the links in question. Yeah, they are kinda crap links... HornColumbia (talk) 03:59, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Adding subsidairies back in "Insurance companies typically have subsidiaries. See State Farm Insurance for an example of how other insurance company pages on Wikipedia handle this." —Preceding unsigned comment added by Blancour (talk • contribs) 19:21, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

• Wow. I'm not sure what to say here. I made an attempt the other day to cut down on the back and forth edits, but this obviously met with total failure. I thought the subsidiaries worked well in the info box. It seems to be a good place for the subsidiaries of insurance companies. Apparently someone does not agree. The externals links have both reappeared and disappeared. Before I attempt this again, any chance anyone wants to discuss this. Anyone. Anyone. Bueler. Bueler... While we're at it we could talk about the external links. When I looked at the Viking and Dairyland links the other day it looked like they were just sub pages of the main sentry site. If you go to the sentry site and and look at the site map, you can get to dairyland and viking. I think an external link to a subsidiary is fair game for an insurance company and well within the Wikipedia:External links guidelines, but it seems redundant if they can all be reached by the main sentry page. Any thoughts at all? Can any of you rapid, rabid, and mute editors give some feedback? Someone give me more than one sentence to let me know that the world still exists outside my study....HornColumbia (talk) 04:51, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

• My personal take on company subsidiaries in general: Only those which are well-known or which, if stand-alone companies, would qualify for a stand-alone article need to be mentioned. Other subsidiaries are optional and the decision to list them or not should come down to whether it improves the article or whether a long list distracts from the other content. In a short article like this, less important subsidiaries do not need to be listed. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 16:21, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

• Wow HornColumbia, what's with all the hostility? Why does this bother you so much? (I can't believe you took the time to write that long of a rant on such a ridiculous topic. Save your energy and invest it in something that matters). Visually, having the long list of subsidiaries in the information box is distracting - that's why I added it back to main body copy. If you'll lose sleep over it, we can add it back into the information box. Let me know your thoughts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 157.248.5.3 (talk) 22:10, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
• Thank you 157.248.5.3 (can I call you 157?) for your concern. My rant was because I was annoyed that seemingly veteran editors were making edits without much of a comment about things I was trying to discuss. I've upped my medication and my doctor and I both think I'm doing much better now. I looked around at some other insurance companies to see how they handled their subsidiaries. I couldn't really find a normal way of doing it. Some had the subs in a list and some had them in the infobox. I firmly believe they should be in the article, but I guess I'm not too concerned about where they are. Also, I think davidwr hits it right on the nail. I agree with those comments entirely. ThanksHornColumbia (talk) 03:01, 23 December 2009 (UTC).