User talk:Abmd942

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Comments about User:Abmd942/Quarto Group

First of all, Lucy, my apologies for the fact that it has taken me so long to get round to responding to your request. The delay has been partly due to my own forgetfulness, but also largely because I am very unwilling in such cases to give an inexperienced editor feedback based on a quick skim through the relevant page, which might miss important points and therefore be misleading, and it has taken a while until I have found the time to dedicate to checking thoroughly. Usually, I answer questions where they are posted, to prevent fragmentation of discussion, which can be confusing, but this time I am answering here rather than on my talk page, as I think it is likely to be more helpful for you to have what I say readily available on your talk page, rather than disappearing into the archives of my talk page.

Reading the draft article I don't see any significant problems in its content. My general feel is that the sort of stuff it contains is more the kind of things that the company is likely to want to tell us than the sort of thing that an outsider would put into an article, but there is nothing overtly promotional about it, and I can't suggest any obvious changes that are necessary.

When I came to check the references, however, I did find problems. There are essentially two reasons why references are needed in a Wikipedia article: (1) for verification of facts, and (2) for evidence that the subject satisfies Wikipedia's notability guidelines, so that it is suitable to be the topic of an article. Many people editing Wikipedia fail to grasp the fact that the kinds of sources which are suitable for these two purposes are by no means always the same. For purposes such as verification of the name of the CEO of a company, for example, it is difficult to imagine a better source than the company's own web site, but for establishing notability, the company's own site is of no use whatever. There are various guidelines on notability (in my opinion far too many), but the central concept is the general notability guideline, which basically says that a topic is notable enough for inclusion if it has received substantial coverage in multiple independent reliable sources. The word "independent" is crucial there: what a company says about itself does nothing to show that it is notable. In addition to the general notability guideline, Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies) is of relevance.

I have not thoroughly compared the contents of the article with the contents of the sources you have provided as references, but I have carefully checked all of the sources for evidence of notability. First of all, two of them were dead links when I checked them, namely http://www.thebookseller.com/category/tags/laurence-orbach which came up with "Page not found" and a page at s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com which came up with "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below" followed by some raw XML data. You may like to check the URLs to see if there are errors in them. Leaving those two aside, what I found was as follows.

Many of the references are to Quarto's own web site, which is no doubt an excellent source of information about the company, but it is of no value whatever in establishing notability, as independent sources are needed.

Further references are to reports in "The Bookseller". These are largely news reports of business deals, appointments, and decisions. Thus, for example, we have a report beginning "Quarto Publishing has appointed Rachel Williams as publisher of Frances Lincoln Children’s Books". The fact that a business has made a personnel appointment is obviously no evidence of notability, nor is the fact that the appointment was reported in a trade journal for the type of business involved. Likewise, a mere report in a business publication of a deal between two businesses is no evidence of notability, as for example "Illustrated book publisher Quarto has entered into new distribution agreements with Hachette in both the UK and US. From 1st July, all order processing, customer service and credit control for Quarto businesses Quayside Publishing Group, QED and Rotovision will be provided by Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, a subsidiary of Hachette UK". Someone unused to Wikipedia's standards might think that another report in The Bookseller, "Quarto expected to have annual profits of $12.2m", might be more useful, as it at least shows that the business is a substantial and significant one. However, rightly or wrongly, Wikipedia does not automatically regard a busines as "notable" purely on the basis of its value or the value of its trade or its profit level: a small business which has achieved extensive news coverage is considered more notable than a larger business which has not received prominent coverage. (I say "rightly or wrongly" because I am merely reporting what the accepted standards are, rather than what I personally think would be best.)

Then we have a reference to a page at www.hoovers.com. That web site says that it provides "corporate linkage capabilities that accelerate your sales and marketing cycles", which reads rather like a declaration that it serves as a marketing platform, which means that it is not likely to be seen as an independent source.

We have references to various sources which merely give routine company information, such as the company's listing at Companies House: that is no evidence of notability, as all UK companies are listed there. Likewise, there's a reference to a document at commerce.us.reuters.com, which I have not seen, as it needs to be paid for, but the web page linking to it indicates that it provides "Quantitative analyses of financial statements (Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Sources of Capital), extensive ratio tables (Accounting, Asset Utilization, Employee Efficiency, Fixed Charges Coverage," (etc etc...). Publication of such business statistics is not regarded as evidence of notability. Similar remarks apply to a page at markets.ft.com which appears to be essentially just a listing of directors of the company, with a few facts about each one's career.

I honestly don't know whether the Quarto Group satisfies Wikipedia's notability guidelines, but I do know that the present sourcing of the draft does not demonstrate that it does. For a clearer idea of what is needed, check the two notability guidelines which I have linked to above. The guide to reliable sources may also be helpful, as may Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations. As I said above, I think there are far too many of these guidelines, and many of them are longer and more complex than I think is necessary, making them confusing for new editors, and my advice is that rather than study them all in detail, you skim down them, looking for the points which seem most relevant to your needs, and then read those points more thoroughly. There is also a page Wikipedia:So you made a userspace draft, which may or may not be helpful to you. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 10:26, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

@JamesBWatson: Thanks for getting back to me! I will go through your advice and implement the changes. Also, how can I change the title? It should be 'The Quarto Group' not 'Quarto Group'. I have the strange feeling that its not possible. Abmd942 (talk) 09:27, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

I have removed my advice about submitting to "Articles for creation", because that was wrong. In the week that passed between my originally encountering the article and my posting the above message to you, I forgot that we are dealing with edits to an existing article, and thought it was a matter of re-creating an article which had been deleted. "Articles for creation" is not for making changes to an existing article. While I was removing that, I also took the opportunity to correct a few minor errors in my message: I apologise for not having proof-read it before saving it.

You ask about changing the title of a page. The good news is that your "strange feeling" that it's not possible is wrong. If you go to the article page, among the blue links near the top of the page there is one called "Move". If you don't see it there, put your mouse pointer over the link "More", and the "Move" link should become visible. The word "Move" is perhaps a little unhelpful, as it is not necessarily obvious to a new editor that this means "Move to a new title", or, in what seems to me to be more natural English, "Rename". (While on the subject of the presentation being unhelpful, I will mention that I, in common with a large proportion of long-established editors, do not use the default interface to Wikipedia, known as "Vector", which is what you will see if you have not changed the setting in your preferences. I use an older interface, called "MonoBook" which was the standard default one when I stared editing, and which I find more natural and convenient, for a number of reasons, including the fact that it doesn't do that business of hiding links behind others, as for example hiding "Move" behind "More". It's obviously a matter of personal preference, and no doubt partly a matter of what one is used to, but there are quite a lot of editors who prefer MonoBook. If you are interested in trying it, click the "Preferences" link at the top of the page, and then select the "Appearance" tab.) The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 10:47, 12 February 2016 (UTC)