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That article has good content but fails to establish notability for it's self. Best included as part of this one. ninety:one 17:22, 12 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Expand. No merge. Hmmm, where should things be in ten years time? What do we do now to help that happen?
In ten years, SS+BM will have 15 years of its own history. Just now, all it has is the history of several separate companies.
Wolters Samson, Kluwer and Reidel will always have their own history prior to the various mergers. Isn't that what we need to document? Does it encourage contribution of the history of each company to give them separate sections under SS+BM, or to give them their own stubs? Is the most important thing keeping Wiki "tidy", or encouraging contriubtion?
Finally, since many, many reliable sources used in Wiki articles will cite works published by specific companies at specific dates, we want to give readers interested in those publishers direct access to the relevant information. Who cares who merged with who in the 20th century if a book was published in the 19th century? Many companies merged and went global in the 20th, that had long histories as major national publishers, often family businesses. Many famous writers had particular publishing houses they worked with.
Who published Charles Darwin? Who else did they publish? Did they merge with anyone in the 20th century? How do we package the information to satisfy reader curiosity? How do we encourage editor contribution?
To my mind, merger mixes everything together, it'd only have to be unmerged some time. If it looks untidy: that's a good thing! It shows there is work to be done ... just maybe ... eventually ... someone might do it ... if we don't bite their heads off as little by little, one by one, they build up the article ... over months and years.
The only reason that a merger was proposed was as a constructive alternative to an AfD, because the article failed and still fails to establish notability. If you believe D. Reidel to be worthy of a standalone article, then please read the notability guideline for companies and try to improve the article. If the article does not establish notability (and this merger then fails) it will be nominated for deletion just like any other company article that fails to do so. ninety:one 19:21, 12 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reidel are eminently notable by those criteria. However, they are even more notable, since they were an independent scholarly publisher. Reidel are not merely a company, but a publisher. In other words, they were a manufacturer of the raw material upon which notability of anything at Wiki is actually established. The fact that some Wiki editors haven't heard about them doesn't establish non-notability. Articles do not need to enter the system at featured quality. The namespace needs to be occupied and developed. Volunteer labour to do that needs to be welcomed and encouraged, it cannot be demanded (at the salary we pay our contributors). Harold Philby (talk) 08:47, 26 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
