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Expanded and improved draft

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Hello! On behalf of Travel Centers of America (TA), and as part of my work at Beutler Ink, I have drafted an expanded and improved Wikipedia article for community review. I will not be editing the article directly because of my conflict of interest, and I'll be sharing suggestions here on the talk page for volunteer editors to review and implement appropriately. I'd like to start by identifying some problems with the current article:

  • the "History" section has an "expansion needed" tag, a "needs update" tag, and several inline citations are self-published sources
  • there are several unsourced claims, including: "Much like the later merger between Pilot Travel Centers and Flying J, T/A has continued to use both the T/A and Petro brands, though some Petros were later sold to rival chains or had their franchise contracts eliminated if they were within competition of a T/A location." and "In 2008, TA was listed as 395 on the Fortune 500 list. TA's main competitors include Love's Travel Stops & Country Stores and Pilot Flying J."
  • a single TA source is used as inline citation for the "Truck service" section, but the rest of the "Services" section is unsourced
  • the "Number of locations" table is unsourced, and the galleries are unnecessary
  • in general, sourcing is poor and updates are needed throughout

I've worked to create a neutral overview of the company's history, structure, and services, and TA has reviewed the proposed draft for accuracy. I've saved a draft in full here, but I realize this is a lot of content for any single editor to review at once, so I'm happy to work section by section, if editors prefer.

Please see a request for the "History" section below. Inkian Jason (talk) 21:43, 29 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"History"

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I'd like to start by replacing the current "History" section with one I've proposed here. Again, the current section has some unsourced claims, multiple self-published sources used as inline citations, and needs some updating in general.

The proposed draft does not include the Petro logo, and instead offers readers two images provided by TA which illustrate a couple of travel centers, I'd argue better than any of the existing images available for use at Wikimedia Commons. The company has already submitted a permissions email to OTRS, but the permissions hasn't been updated yet; I leave it up to editors to decide if they feel comfortable adding the images or leaving them out of the article until the permissions are confirmed. For this section, I've worked to keep focus on the company as a whole, and not the individual divisions. (Of course, you can see how this section fits within this full draft to show how I hope to update the page overall.) The proposed "History" section is thorough, up to date, neutral, and uses Wikipedia-appropriate sourcing.

I'm seeking a volunteer to review the proposed "History" section and implement markup appropriately. I'm happy to address questions and concerns here, and appreciate any help in advance. Inkian Jason (talk) 21:43, 29 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  •  Done For full disclosure, I've reviewed and approved other of Inkian Jason's suggested updates to articles (and I'm also, personally, a fan of the TA brand and spend a decent amount of time inside its locations). All that aside, this one is really a no-brainer. The current version is essentially WP:CORPSPAM which is sourced almost exclusively to the company's own website, while the proposed version is exhaustively sourced to WP:RS. Further, the proposed version is superior in terms of layout to the original version (e.g. the controversies section is eliminated and its content integrated into the article proper, which is consistent with the MOS; to IJ's credit the content from that section was, in fact, even updated and clarified). Since there appear to be no other editors who are recently active on this article or its Talk page, I am copying the proposal over in whole, however, with two minor changes, which I'm describing below. IJ, please let me know if you think these are unreasonable and I'll be happy to reconsider or seek a second opinion.
  • The current version of the article has unedited, raw photography of TA facilities that exist on the Commons while the proposed version uses exclusively TA-provided photos. While they are beautiful looking images, they lack a certain encyclopedic value as they are posed and edited. This is not to say that they are unacceptable, however, I believe we can't have the article exclusively use these images without risking turning it into a marketing brochure. For that reason, I replaced one of the provided photos with one of the photos from the original version of the article. The TA-photo I chose to substitute was TCA 2018 image.png as I believe this is the most editorially suspect of the three. I'm not 100% certain but the (light, almost indecipherable) halo on the buildings suggests it might be an HDR image or sky replacement editing occurred which would mean it's a fictional image of a TA facility (that, of course, itself is fine as we use paintings in other articles which are also fictional images, however, if I had to choose one of these images to substitute - and, as described, I feel I need to - this one would be the one).
Secondly, all three images are from 2018 and having an older image (the one I substituted is from 2009) offers progressive historical context. While it appears TA has undergone a brand refresh, we do need historical imagery to avoid visual WP:RECENTISM.
  • I've removed the external links section per WP:ELMINOFFICIAL since an official link is already provided in the infobox. I'm always uncertain if ELMINOFFICIAL applies to infoboxes, and I don't think we've had clear direction on this point, so feel free to object.
Chetsford (talk) 18:52, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Chetsford: Thank you for reviewing the proposed draft and implementing appropriately. I think your changes to the draft are reasonable, and I'm glad there is a larger collection of images available at Wikimedia Commons regardless of which ones appear in the Wikipedia article. If I had one suggestion, I might switch placement of the Hebron Plaza Travel Center and Maybrook images because the Hebron image shows a restaurant and seems more appropriate for the restaurant section. Does this seem ok? Thanks again for your assistance. Inkian Jason (talk) 19:28, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
 Done That makes sense. Chetsford (talk) 19:32, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Chetsford: Would you consider this a constructive edit? If not, would you mind reverting? Thanks for your consideration. Inkian Jason (talk) 15:22, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

 Done obvious spam Chetsford (talk) 21:42, 3 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Update required

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  • The article mentions Quaker Steak & Lube (now apparently 42 standalone restaurants) more than once but an agreement to sell was finalized so TA no longers owns the company.
  • According to the article a suit against Comdata is awaiting a "court's final ruling" (from 2018) but it seems TA won
  • Needs reviewing: It seems to be a marketing ploy to tout the nation's largest "publicly-traded" full-service travel center network. Most readers will not know the difference between privately held and publically traded only that it is considered "the largest". It would seem some content on that in the body would add clarification. The 750 location Pilot Flying J is actually the "largest" truck stop chain.-- Otr500 (talk) 18:23, 10 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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