User talk:Wscribner

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Welcome[edit]

Welcome!

Hello, Wscribner, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please see our help pages, and if you can't find what you are looking for there, please feel free to leave me a message or place {{Help me}} on this page and someone will drop by to help. DocTree (ʞlɐʇ·ʇuoɔ) WER 17:25, 31 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

quicker way[edit]

A bit faster, if it works. Give it a try please, to test it out. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:30, 17 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

NTA refs[edit]

Hello Wscribner, I took a pass at tightening up the NTA (company) article. I was planning on waiting until we'd gotten the refs in order on the article-talkpage, but there was some WP:COPYVIO in mainspace, which had to be trimmed out, see my article-talkpage comment about "pillar three" in a new subsection for the long explanation.

  The reason I came over here, was to mention that refs need not be online. The company was founded in 1976, back before websites, and if they had newspaper stories about them from the 1970s or the 1980s or the 1990s, those are just as legitimate for meeting WP:42 as the online-URL-to-a-newspaper-article. Same for magazine-articles from the offline era, and so on. WP:SOURCES can be internet-visible, or just library-visible, as long as they are wiki-reliable per WP:RS and independent of the company (journalists/professors/etc usually with the exception that WP:SCHOLARSHIP permits peer-reviewed papers authored by the employees in legit wiki-reliable academic journals and such). 75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:54, 1 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]


References[edit]

I have a couple of questions regarding some of the edits that were recently performed on our page. Thank you to whoever for the help with this.

1. It says "NTA is ISO-accredited by IAS/ICC [vague].. What can I do to make it "not vague"? 2. What type of citation would satisfy for the sentence of "one of five private agencies"? You can view the list on the HUD portal, and NTA is one of only five that can do BOTH IPIA and DAPIA. 3. For the sentence "NTA and SIPA designed [when], it was in 2009. 4. Also, by changing some of the verbiage on our page, we run the risk of having legal issues. Since we are approved for services by the federal government, and our accreditation is issued by an internationally recognized agency, we undergo audits every year to ensure we are maintaining the proper quality processes to retain our accredited status. Verbiage is a "big deal" in some of those situations. For example, when the rewrite was recently performed, a sentence was built as: "NTA writes evaluation reports, used by building code officials in determining whether a structure is compliant with laws related to construction." It is best to specify that it is both federal and local building codes, rather than "laws related to construction".

I am open to suggestions.. Wscribner (talk) 11:48, 1 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Wscribner, it was me doing the edits, or most of them. You can call me 75.108 if you wish. Click on NTA_(company), then click on 'view history' at the top of the page, to see who did what -- clicking on the little blue 'prev' button by eeach edit, will show you what happened blow-by-blow. In any case, per my note to you above, I was planning on just walking you through the steps on the talkpage, but WP:COPYVIO has to be fixed "immediately", so I made a first-pass cleanup while doing that work.
And yes, I'm at a disadvantage with respect to the terminology, and will appreciate your help making things accurate. (That said, NTA is not responsible for wikipedia content, in the usual fashion, because the wikipedia article is not an advertisement WP:NOTPROMOTION, and the copyright is CC-BY-SA rather than copyright-NTA-alone. Individual people that happen to *both* work for NTA and *also* edit wikipedia, are a special case, however!)
These four things you mention are basically all article-talkpage-questions, and while we can discuss them here just as well as there, it will be helpful if we have all the content-specific discussions at Talk:NTA_(company), so that other editors of NTA_(company) will know what's been discussed before. By the same token, I'll try to keep most of the wiki-policy-discussion (such as the mechanisms of userpage-disclosure and other stuff not directly related to content) here on this userpage. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:25, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, answered these questions over on Talk:NTA_(company). 75.108.94.227 (talk) 12:49, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

possible references[edit]

I found the following:

This is a handful I found while scouring the web. Please advise.Wscribner (talk) 12:10, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Just seeing this now. If you want to nudge me, click 'talk' in my signature, click 'new section' up top, and say something brief like "left you a note at Talk:NTA_(company), then click save.
  • None of the press-releases are WP:RS, see also WP:SOURCES which means newspapers/magazines/books/etc.
  • For the same reasons, facebook (as well as youtube/imdb/twitter/etc) are not WP:SOURCES except in extremely rare situations.
  • ICC is the cert-agency, so whether that counts as a wiki-reliable source or not, depends on how "routine" the cert is.
  • South Bend Tribune is a legit-sounding hit, good work.
  • local newspaper, that is in the list of WP:SOURCES, so publisher is reliable, they even have a bluelink at South Bend Tribune as a bonus.
  • The author was Gene Stowe ("Tribune correspondent"), so that also counts as independent, as long as Stowe isn't kinfolk to the founders, or an employee/stockholder/etc in the NTA firm's financial dealings, or similar such issues.
  • Last but not least, we can see from the URL that this is in the 'news' section of the publication, not classifieds nor editorials nor advertisements.
  • So the source is a good one, and not in the NTA (company) article yet; nice work.
  • Then the question becomes, does the sbTrib piece specifically give us in-depth detailed info, specifically about NTA and/or employees? Lucky for us, Stowe and the Tribune do a nice profile of the company, with a bit about the history, a non-WP:ABOUTSELF-cite for the IAS/ICC certs, and other nice bits. So when you have a newspaper piece like this, it counts towards WP:42.
  • because it's a wiki-reliable WP:SOURCE (newspaper w/ editorial oversight && fact-checking),
  • because it's independent from NTA (writer/editor/publisher not financially linked to corp),
  • and because it has a reasonable amount of depth and details, specifically about NTA and/or employees thereof and/or actitivies thereof.
  • (By contrast, if -- speaking hypothetically here -- the piece was mostly about one of the projects you worked on, with 99 sentences about XyzCorp plus 2 sentences stuck in the middle which said "XyzCorp hired Nappanee firm NTA Inc to certify their wall-materials to ISO #12345" or something along those lines, that *helps* and belongs in wikipedia, but is not in-depth-detailed-coverage so it would be WP:NOTEWORTHY, but not much help in demonstrating wiki-notability aka WP:N.
  • the rvbusiness.com link is very similar in content to the sbTrib piece, and is from about the same timeframe. This website *might* count as WP:RS (helpful), or it might merely be WP:BLOGS (not-usually-helpful). But in this case, we already have the sbTrib cite, from the same month and year, covering the same topic. This is called a coverage-burst, see WP:109PAPERS, usually such bursts are counted as 'one' total source when considering WP:42. In other words, we don't need to dig deeper to figure out if rvbusiness.com is a wiki-relialble source, because we already *know* that sbTrib is one, and we can just use their piece to document this April 2009 event.
  • Last and most tricky is woodallscm.com , which is another trade-magazine. The piece is from 2011, so it's not part of the 2009 coverage-burst. The focus of the piece is Cavco Industries rather than NTA, but there are a couple sentences about NTA in there, so this is WP:NOTEWORTHY, which means it gets a yellow-checkmark (helps improve NTA_(company) but does not really help WP:42 because there isn't enough depth-and-details). So the question is, can we use woodallscm.com as a wiki-reliable source? This is a subtle question, but as a first-pass prima facie test, see if they list their editors, and see if they give their legal names and physical address. Here are the pages they offer.[1][2] And indeed, it looks like a legit WP:RS, because they are putting their necks on the line. So this is also helpful, though not as helpful as if the piece devoted several paragraphs to NTA, rather than a couple sentences.
Anyways, is all this starting to make sense? Newspapers like SouthBendTribune.com, with multiple paragraphs about NTA and/or employees, those are ideal. Don't have to be online, but do have to be legit news-stories (not editorials/letters/classifieds/adverts). Television, radio, books, and such also count. So do scientific papers in recognized publications (even when NTA employees were co-authors of the papers in some cases). Trade-magazines like WoodallSCM.com, which have around a sentence about NTA, help somewhat, but in-depth WP:SOURCES are the main thing to look for. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 09:42, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
p.s. I left the www.wn.com URL as a 'homework' problem for you to analyze ... does it count as WP:RS and is it a legit wiki-reliable WP:SOURCE? Editorially oversight by legal names? Physical address and phone number? Not the kind of website where anybody on the internet can post whatever they want, like facebook/youtube/twitter/etc? Author/editors/publisher fully independent of NTA, not financially linked, not kinfolk, etc? After you estimate whether the wn.com URL *counts* as wiki-reliable, then give me a depth-estimate for the specific topic of the NTA_(company) wikipedia article... is the piece-content of the wn.com URL an in-depth-with-lotsa-details piece that has many paragraphs specifically about NTA, and could be used to help demonstrate WP:42? Or is it just a sentence or so, in a piece mostly about something else, that counts as WP:NOTEWORTHY and belongs in wikipedia but is not gonna help prove WP:N aka wiki-notability? Or is it really just tangential info, about the industry in general, or about certifications in general, without specific mention of NTA whatsoever? That's the key here; once you learn to answer these questions about sources, you'll be able to figure out on your own which kind of thing to look for. The only special exception is that WP:SCHOLARSHIP does permit non-independent authorship/co-authorship, as long as the editing-and-publication-process is sufficiently rigorous, aka in a reputable academic journal of some kind. I'll walk you though that separately, another day. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 09:51, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
p.p.s. Added the sbTrib and the WoodallSCM refs to Talk:NTA_(company) , still need to work on integrating them into the article itself aka NTA_(company), please feel free to make suggestions like "please add sentence X to article-section Y based on sbTrib source" to the Talk:NTA_(company) page if you wish. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 12:49, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

And also, this question is still open: do you think, with what you've learned of the WP:RS and WP:SOURCE wiki-policies, plus WP:42 rule-of-thumb, that this source is wiki-reliable, wiki-independent, wiki-noteworthy, wiki-notable, or some combination? http://article.wn.com/view/2012/05/15/NTA_Inc_Leads_Efforts_To_Create_New_Standard_For_Structural_/ That's one you added, which I left 'unanalyzed' so you could try your own wiki-skills out. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:33, 16 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

When I followed the links deeper, it appears to be a copy of a press release on prnewswire. Which, I believe, you said doesn't count since it was written by someone who was paid. :) 74.84.114.34 (talk) 20:30, 16 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Good call, fails wiki-independent. You yourself fail wiki-independent, and thus you aren't considered a WP:SOURCE either. That said, see WP:ABOUTSELF, for certain boring details, such as when the company was founded exactly, we can cite the homepage www.nta.com -- because it is, by definition, WP:ABOUTSELF information. Of course, this is only for factoids about which there's no controversy, and no promotionalism. By contrast, we cannot cite the NTA homepage, or a press-release, or a facebook page, or a discounted-customer testimonial, or a PR bit from a partner firm, or an infomercial on cable-access... for anything that violated WP:NOTPROMOTION. And all those "sources" are equally non-wiki-reliable, which means that, to avoid the appearance of 'puffing up the refcount' by linking to a bunch of paid PR advertorials, it is in all cases better to simply get rid of the PR refs, and directly cite the main NTA homepage, when WP:ABOUTSELF is needed.
    The next step up from WP:ABOUTSELF is WP:NOTEWORTHY mention in a WP:RS wiki-reliable source, which is like WoodallsCM, and like HUD.gov. The next step up from that, is WP:N-and-WP:42-worthy independent in-depth multi-paragraph 100%-independent press-coverage in WP:SOURCES like the SouthBendTribune. So step#3 is, trying to dig up more of the WP:42-type sources. That's the key to taking off the may-not-satisfy-wiki-notability tag, is to get a handful of impeccably independent in-depth newspapers/magazines/books/etc. The reason that the person adding the tag didn't just put the article up for deletion, is partly because it's obviously being worked on right this minute by yourself and myself, but also, because being founded in 1976 suggests that offline sources may well exist, that a quick search-engine-effort might not turn up.
    So: your main goal is to help me turn up some WP:42 material, as much as we can manage. And simultaneously, your other goal, is to learn how to do step#4 on your own: find a source, summarize it neutrally. Are you happy with the prose-sentence I proposed in step#4, over at User_talk:75.108.94.227#step.234.2C_writing_wiki-neutral_boring_just-the-facts_prose_that_summarizes_the_WP:SOURCES_from_step.233 based on the woodallsCM cite? If so, I'll show you the ropes for getting it into mainspace. Do you see how I wrote it up, as a nice wiki-sentence? If so, create a step#5 section (here on your usertalk or on my usertalk or on the article-talk), and make an attempt to summarize the South Bend Tribune cite, just the way I summarized the Woodall cite, boring neutral just-the-facts omit-nothing et cetera. There is more meat there in sbTrib than in woodallsCM, so maybe just start by summarizing the first three sentences of the sbTrib cite as step#5A, now that I think of it. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 21:19, 16 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

instructions: how to make edits, despite being COI-encumbered[edit]

Yes, the way you handled that was good. So... how do I get it in the article without violating the contributing, non-reimbursed editor issue? Wscribner (talk) 11:48, 17 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, so here is the deal. There is an official way, invented exactly for this purpose, by User:CorporateM ... who has, as part of the fallout from the new ever-more-draconian rules, now semi-retired from wikipedia. In other words, there is an official way, but it is bleepity bleep broken, and unlikely to be fixed in a hurry. I'm covering the best-practices procedures here for editing *existing* articles, if you need to create a *new* article (such as one about Dtompos or about a particular NTA product or about a big partner/customer of NTA), then you can follow the instructions at WP:AFC for creating a draftspace article like Draft:Cavco_Industries for instance, and submitting it into the AfC-reviewers -- if you do start working on something in the AfC queue, expect it to be slow going, and expect to make heavy use of the teahouse and other more-realtime-help-type-things, which I also cover below. So, the steps, when you want to edit NTA_(company), or edit any page with edit-contents that is *related* to NTA somehow:
  1. best-practices is for you to create a new section on Talk:NTA_(company), and they specify that you suggest changing X to Y. Or in the case that you are adding something, suggest adding Z.
  2. even when the wp-coi-edit-request-queue *is* working properly, and not stuffed with a multi-month backlog as it is during late 2015, big rewrites tend to get ignored (i.e. please change these existing 10 sentences to these completely different 10 sentences backed by these brand new 10 sources), because that is too much work for the wp-coi-edit-request reviewer. I'm the exception to the rule, but don't depend on luck, try to make short simple easy-to-understand requests.
  3. For the detailed instructions, see here, Template:Request_edit/Instructions -- you want the 'submitters' portion, not the 'reviewers' portion.
side note, on the idea that you also are a wikipedian, and you also can help improve the 'pedia
I mentioned above that you should be working from the submitters portion of the helpdocs, not the reviewers portion, when *you* are submitting a request. That said, as a wikipedian in good standing, you are of course free to help your fellow wikipedians review *other* people's submitter-requests, if you have the time, and if you want to build some street-cred that you are here to help improve the encyclopedia, and not just here to help NTA avoid deletion. This is per WP:CHOICE of course, but I do suggest you broach the subject with your manager and/or the CEO, about whether they are willing to pay for your time editing unrelated articles on wikipedia -- for instance, at Google and Microsoft and HP and other tech-firms, there is often a 10% or 20% allotment for the staff to work on 'projects of their choice' so in your situation, if you are spending a couple of hours aka 120 minutes on wikipedia-specific effort each week on-the-clock, it might make financial sense for NTA to pay you for an extra fifteen minutes per week of on-the-clock time, where you spend time editing wikipedia articles that are about Something Unrelated, to try and help improve the 'pedia, and also to improve your status as a contributor in the eyes of your fellow wikipedians.
    Plus of course, the other advantage is that spending time on other articles that interest you naturally (sports/movies/politics/etc), or answering questions at the teahouse, or helping unwedge the wp-coi-edit-request-queue, or whatever you do with the hypothetical 20%-giving-back-on-the-clock-time, will improve your skills with wiki-syntax and with talkpage-etiquette and so on. The hardest part of wikipedia is getting a good practical handle on the bazillion wikipolicies, and almost as important, getting a good behavioral handle on the wiki-culture, so you understand what is allowed and appreciated, what is technically allowed by taboo for some subgroups of the wiki-culture, what is technically not usually permitted but in practice happens anyways, and what is both not allowed and also verboten per wiki-culture. Of course, this is just a suggestion, and as already mentioned is 100% per WP:CHOICE, but I do think it will help you keep your wiki-skillset sharp, if you can convince NTA to fund you for 15 minutes per week of non-NTA-specific editing on wikipedia. Might even be a tax-deductible charitable contribution, or something, but even if it isn't, those few minutes per week are pretty small potatoes in the scheme of things where the bottom line is concerned, methinks, and might be intangibly helpful -- plus of practical value, in getting you steeped in the unwritten wiki-laws, as it were. Make sense? If you do end up trying this, suggest that you leave an edit-summary like "paid on-the-clock edit albeit with no WP:COI for *this* specific topic: DetailedDescriptionOfYourSpecificImprovement".
So, that's the way that you make a request. And after you make a request, even if your request is perfectly wiki-policy-compliant, well-sourced and impeccably neutral and so on,,, what happens in practice, is that you sit in the queue and moss grows on your head, and months or years later, somebody procedurally-closes your request as 'stale & unactionable'. So in practice, you have to be a bit more creative, in making wiki-friends:
practical practices: the five real steps
    The following steps are not 'best-practices' but are 100% permissible, although some subgroups of wikipedians will tear your head off ("how dare you get paid to learn the WP:PAG when *I* had to do it for free, begone from this page and never returneth!") merely for asking. At all times, be unfailingly WP:NICE, even when somebody else is not being very nice to you. That out of the way, here are the *real* steps you have to learn:
  1. make the {{edit_request}} per the submitter-helpdocs at Template:Request_edit/Instructions over in a new section of Talk:NTA_(company), as per above best-practices guide
  2. make each request small, preferably one sentence at a time per edit_request you make. It is okay to have multiple edit-request-sections open on the talkpage, and if you are chunking requests up one sentence at a time, essential
  3. the rest of the instructions reply to EACH edit_request you have open -- if you have a bunch open simultaneously, keep a separate "clock" going for each of them (every edit you sign is timestamped so this is not very hard)
  4. once you've made your edit-request (again we're talking about EACH of them but hereafter I'll refer to "the request"), wait 3 days to see if somebody will respond to you on the article-talkpage
  5. if nobody has responded to your edit-request after 3 days, probably nobody ever will -- so your next step is to nudge some wikipedian you are already familiary with, that has shown a willingness to help in the past. (In your case, you are familiar with ME of course, but here I'm acting more as your mentor than your edit-request-reviewer. Who else do you know on the 'pedia, that has helped you in the past, make an edit?) If you know somebody to nudge, and have no reason to believe they will not at all MIND being nudged, leave them a polite note on their usertalk, "hey USERNAMEGOESHERE, if you have a moment, I have an edit-request open at Talk:NTA_(company)#SECTIONNAMEGOESHERE, thanks, Wscribner".
  • on the other hand, if somebody has responded to you, then of course, work it out directly with them, on the article-talkpage. Don't go nudging your wiki-friends, it is considered very impolite to do. But of course, you will often see OTHER people do it... and of course, they are often the ones who complain the loudest, about WP:OTHERPARENT.  :-)     Such is life on the 'pedia. Anyways, once you have attracted help, don't go for outside support from people you already know, instead use other neutral steps, like the teahouse, if you need outside advice, see below.
The key to getting your edit-requests approved, besides making them short and easy for the reviewer, is to make dern sure you use WP:SOURCES for every little factoid, and make doubly-quadruply sure you are not in any way violating WP:PUFFERY nor WP:TONE nor WP:SPIP in the least. Don't use weasel-words. Don't use marketing-speak. Don't try to make judgements or add spin. Boring cold hard dry just-the-facts encyclopedic prose, is the ticket. Even then, though, sometimes your perfectly-fine request will not get answered, and you may have to escalate outside the talkpage realm to other venues, where seeking help of this sort is appropriate:
wiki-mergency practices: what to do if nothing happens for a week, and it seems like nothing will, the five escalation-steps
  1. if it has been 7 days since you last got a response, or equivalently, if it has been 7 days since you created an edit-request that nobody responded to, (and you either don't have somebody to nudge at the moment or they are busy or on vacation or whatever), then go ahead and ask for assistance at WP:TEAHOUSE. The message is basically the same: "hey folks, if somebody has a moment, I have an edit-request open at Talk:NTA_(company)#SECTIONNAMEGOESHERE, thanks, Wscribner". You might get told that 7 days is not long enough, and to be patient, per WP:NORUSH. You might get told that nobody has time for that right now, or you might get no answer at the teahouse (rare but not unheard of). It is okay to try again a couple days later, in such situations; often, if nobody has time the first time you ask, when you repeat your question a couple days later, they'll remember the first time vaguely, and get curious enough to peek.
  2. if you try the teahouse a couple times, and don't get any response (which is different from getting a response you don't like such as "that prose is WAY too promotional" ... in which case don't ask elsewhere until you've solved the problem brought up by the constructive criticism), but as I say, if you don't get help at the WP:TEAHOUSE venue, and it has been 2 weeks since you opened the edit-request, the next best venue is #wikipedia-en-help connect which is a kind of instant-messaging-system that runs inside a tab on your browser. Well, not really "instant" messaging, replies sometimes take five or ten minutes, but it is more 'instant' than wikipedia talkpages at least. It takes a bit of a learning curve to use the IRC stuff, but I definitely recommend it -- the people there are very knowledgeable usually, and will often give constructive criticism, even if they don't have time to hold your hand, they'll at least point you at a wiki-policy-page you can read for more info.
  3. finally, if all else fails, and your request has been open for 3 weeks, and usertalk and teahouse and wikipedia-en-help have all not gotten you anwheres, then you can try the other options available at WP:Q, which should probably be WP:HELPDESK first, and if even that doesn't work, then you can click here to use the help_me template on usertalk.
  4. In the extremely rare circumstance that all these attempts fail, and nobody is around to help you out, then go ahead and directly edit mainspace yourself, but make sure you leave a good descriptive WP:EDITSUMMARY for your changes (something like "paid edit: added a sentence about 2011 project with Cavco backed by trade-magazine Woodalls" is vastly more likely to keep your wikinose clean than something generic like "paid edit: added stuff"). Then, on the talkpage, LEAVE the edit_request open, but add a note that, since it has been so long, you went ahead and edited mainspace yourself: "hi folks who may read this someday, it has been NN days with no further feedback, so I went ahead and made this change to the article myself, please feel free to revert me if I made a goof" type of thing.
  5. If you ended up editing mainspace yourself at the 4-week-mark, and per above, left your {{edit_request}} open afterwards another couple of weeks, in case anybody showed up to object: at the 6-week-mark, go ahead and close the edit-request yourself, see instructions at Template:Request_edit/Instructions#Templates. Specifically, your edit-request was *self* closed in this extremely rare situation, which means that nobody else reviewed it, but per WP:IAR you are putting it into mainspace anyways, and after another couple of weeks, closing the still-unanswered request yourself. Thus, you should use {{request_edit | P | YourExplanationGoesHere }} when you self-close the unanswered-edit-request, with a reasonably detailed expanation, something like "I opened this request YYYY-MM-DD, and tried InsertThingsYouTriedLikeTeahouseAndIrcAndHelpdeskSessions but had no luck, so after N days I put the change into mainspace myself, and now after M additional days I'm marking this 'partially' closed -- I would still welcome review of my edit for wiki-neutrality, please revert if you notice any issues, thanks."
Note that the ordering here is notional. You can try IRC before teahouse, or try helpdesk first, or whatever. But don't try them all at once simultaneously, see WP:FORUMSHOPPING, just pick one venue at a time, and pick a new venue sequentially. Furthermore, note well that the numbers here are entirely notional. You don't really have to wait 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks. Those are just conservative guesstimates, based on the idea that NTA is probably a low-traffic article -- truth hurts, you are not as popular as Lady Gaga, sorry.  :-)     In practice, once you develop a rapport with some other wikipedians, and have somebody who trusts you to make good requests that are well-sourced neutral-prose, you will almost always be able to simply write up your edit_request on the article-talkpage, wait a few days to give anybody who happens by a chance to help you out by reviewing it, and if nobody shows up, nudge the Usual Suspects to give you a hand (as they have done in the past with other reqeusts).
Point being, I'm not leaving you this humongous set of steps, because you will need them every time. You will almost never need them, except when you DO need them, and then you will appreciate having the In-Case-Of-Wiki-Mergency list of the complete set of options. Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to have multipel edit-requests open simultaneously, but for now, let us begin with one, see below. Any questions about these editing-with-COI-mechanisms? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:59, 17 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

step#4 continued, woodalls & cavco sentence[edit]

Okay, so to brass tacks: we have a two-way consensus to add a sentence to mainspace. You sourced it, you wrote a first draft, I fixed up some template-bugs in the source you found, and wrote a revised sentence. But this is wikipedia, so it is 'your' sentence just as much as it is my sentence. To practice your wp-coi-mechanisms, as outlined above, I want you to make an edit-request on the NTA talkpage.

  1. click Talk:NTA_(company)
  2. click 'new section'
  3. type up the body of your edit-request, which will look something like this:

Dear edit-request-reviewer, please insert the following new sentence and corresponding new source: 
* ...Nappanee, Indiana<ref name=20111103woodall />... 
* In 2011, NTA certified [[solar power|solar-powered]] cottages made by [[Cavco Industries]], intended for [[off-grid]] use at [[campground]]s.<ref name=20111103woodall>
{{
cite web 
|url=http://www.woodallscm.com/2011/11/cavco-to-intro-solar-powered-park-model-at-koa-convention/
|title=Cavco to Intro Solar-Powered Park Model at KOA Convention
|date=November 3, 2011 
|author=<!-- staff byline ("admin"-username of the website) -->
|quote= ... NTA Inc., a Nappanee, Ind.-based company that specializes in certifying 'green' manufacturers, said Cavco’s newest off-grid solar-powered park model not only has 'Emerald' status, its [NTA's] highest rating, but is the most environmentally friendly park model the company [NTA] has evaluated to date... Alan Reder, NTA’s senior project manager. ... 
}}</ref> 
{{reflist-talk}} 

The city is mentioned in the lede (first sentence of the article).  The new sentence about the 2011 Cavco project, should go at the end of the [[NTA_(company)#Company]] section, please, after the sentence already there which reads "In 2009...plus optional additional design-properties".  I believe that WoodallsCM is a reliable source per [[WP:RS]], the firm has been publishing since 1935, here are links to their editorial-oversight.[http://www.woodallscm.com/contact/][http://www.woodallscm.com/about/]  Thanks, Wscribner ~~~~

Then click save, and I'll double check whether any goofs were made.  ;-)     Once we are happy with the formatting of the request-body, you can go ahead and (in a future secondary-edit) insert the {{edit_request}} portion at the top of the section, which will add us to the wp-coi-queue. Then, we'll wait the usual 3 days, and see if anybody responds. If nobody answers the coi-bat-signal, we will see if User:Samtar can be enticed to review your edit-request, since they've helped you in the past. Make sense? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:59, 17 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wow... looks like a lot. I am editing a training video today, so I will will have to get to this section, possibly tomorrow, to go through it a bit more slowly and get it to digest :) Wscribner (talk) 15:48, 17 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's mostly just for reference, in the long run. In the short run, just click Talk:NTA_(company), click 'new section', and cut-n-paste the stuff above that I've helpfully pre-written for you, then click save. That (plus one final step) will get us into the wp-coi-edit-queue, and somebody that is a regular reviewer (besides me) will come along to approve the request. Or if we wait 3 days and nobody shows, we'll go ask samtar on their userpage to give us a hand. Anyways, it's a lot of stuff, but youll only need it 1% of the time, the other 99% of the time, what I just explained in the last three or four sentences, is all you need to know. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:34, 17 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm very proud of my fast-ping invention.  ;-)     Anyways, when you have a chance to read through this stuff, leave me a ping, and I'll come over to see if it looks kosher, then we can submit you into the wp-coi-queue for the first time. But probably not for the last time! 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:50, 17 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

create userpage, add connected_contributor thing, and so on[edit]

When you have some time, can you start going through these hoops please? Talk:NTA_(company)#wiki-rules_about_WP:COI_and_WP:SPIP If you don't understand the steps, I can help explain them to you. Also, please ask that Dtompos follow similar steps, since they are also a financially-compensated-by-NTA wikipedian. Is there any editing done by Etompos, perhaps without logging in like myself? That's okay if there is, but we should put a disclosure-notice up on the User_talk:74.84.114.34 page, saying that the humans editing from that computer-numeral might be financially compensated by NTA. And possibly the NFL, if that happens to be also the case.  :-)     Etompos need not create a wikipedia-user-account of their very own, if they do not wish to do so (for instance *I* personally don't mess with logging in when I edit), but because the person behind that IP usertalk *is* editing the NTA article, they either need to disclose the financially-compensated affiliations on their usertalk page, or alternatively, link their IP-usertalk-page to the appropriate wikipedia-user-account. (For instance, if the person editing NTA_(company) from User_talk:74.84.114.34 is the same person as Dtompos, then we can just put a note about 'linking' the usertalk pages together, rather than a separate disclosure-note about a hypothetically-separate person.) Anyways, let me know if all this stuff makes no sense, I will try to break it down for you. The changes about the disclosure-thing are recent, they just got put in place last year, and are still causing headaches as recently as last month, so if you run into software-bugs, please also let me know *that* since I might be able to get those fixed. Thanks, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 13:00, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have replied to your note, please see User_talk:75.108.94.227#NTA_additions, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 12:46, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Replied again. I forgot to mention this step#1_C over there, but I'll mention it here: please click on User_talk:74.84.114.34 , and click 'new section' , and leave a brief note explaining that the IP address is located in Nappanee and that it is used by (NTA employees only? maybe off-the-clock after hours as a perk? part of a public network that might have non-NTA employees? whatever you think is the case). I've actually already left a note there, so I could click over to you userpage when you forgot to login first.  :-)   But it will keep our wikinoses clean, if you leave a disclosure-note there as well, like "humans editing from this IP address might be financially compensated by NTA_(company), including User:Wscribner and User:Dtompos" or similar, and should other employees create wikipedia-usernames (one person per username no sharing passwords per WP:COPYVIO and WP:NOSHARING), add their usernames to the list. It's preferable not to forget to login, of course, but it happens, especially if you don't use wikipedia all day long. Linking the usernames together is helpful, to avoid confusion. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:05, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think I got this one covered now, too... what's next?Wscribner (talk) 15:15, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

See User_talk:75.108.94.227#step_3.2C_digging_up_WP:SOURCES which is the main thing, and then see if you agree with my suggestions at step#4, immediately below. Then, we just keep repeating 3 and 4: dig up a source, summarize it, dig up another, summarize it. That's wikipedia for you.  :-)   75.108.94.227 (talk) 17:21, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, 75.108.94.227.  :) Wscribner (talk) 20:49, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
(Added colons for you.) Yeah, no problemo, thanks for helping wikipedia shape up. When you next have a chance, read what I wrote at step three, and then see if you can dig up some WP:SOURCES which are in the corporate or the family scrapbook, or at the local microfiche storage location (prolly you can just call the librarian but they might make you visit in person depending on how friendly the library is). Also, look over what I did with step#4, and see if you approve. Then, open up a new section called step#5, and take a shot yourself at writing neutral boring just-the-facts sentences, backed up by the SouthBendTribune piece. We want to summarize ALL of what it says, and use it to back up as many factoids as make sense. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:29, 16 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

editing[edit]

I am sorry it has taken me so long. We are doing training for the next couple of weeks and I am not sure when I can get to all of this in detail. etompos does not provide any editing. It is all being done by myself, as far as I know, since that is what Dtompos hired me for. So, I am the only one. Is there a time constraint to getting this wrapped up? 74.84.114.34 (talk) 19:36, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

As always on wikipedia, WP:NORUSH applies. The article has been tagged as having multiple issues, but is not in the deletion-queue (which is usually a seven-day-time-limit). So the answer is, we can take it slow. Just leave me another note, like you did, so that I know when you have some spare cycles. I may try to fix it up myself, as time allows, or maybe somebody else will pitch in. In the worst case, nothing is ever 'permanent' on wikipedia, so we can always retrieve WP:REFUND to draftspace, should the need arise. The current state of mainspace is not well referenced, but is no longer overly-promotional nor copyvio, so there is some breathing-room. Best, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:49, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. Training goes until end of next week. Hopefully one afternoon I can get to it. I don't want to wait too long.74.84.114.34 (talk) 20:00, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the problem with waiting is that the checklist gets fuzzy, and the wiki-syntax begins to fade from the brain.  :-)     Anyways, I expect the hard bit is going to be digging for offline newpaper articles, written about the company back when the internet was still quasi-scientific-research, and newspapers were archived to microfiche rather than to URLs. Incremental improvement is the key to wikipedia, though; as long as you keep circling back every so often, pretty soon we'll have a nice high-quality article. p.s. Although the difficulties of editing whilst an employee are pretty strict, and the vast array of byzantine wiki-policies pretty tough to fathom, this still really is the encyclopedia anybody can edit. Often, it helps if the people doing the direct editing are not employees, since there is an inherent bias that is extremely tough to overcome, even when one tries very hard. That said, for digging up sourcing, and making fact-based corrections/suggestions, often the people close to the subject are the best qualified. Etompos is an engineer, so they are more likely to understand why wikipedia has so many rules, and also more likely to be able to resist the temptation to use flowery or puffery language (most of the people I work with that have trouble with overly-promotional language work in sales & marketing where such lingo is *normal* but engineers tend to be comfy with dry formal technical-writing-type language). Same goes for Dtompos, too. Anyways, if you are having trouble digging for offline sources, or running short of hours in the day, sometimes many hands make light work. As long as there is just one username per human, so we can keep the legal-copyright-attribution-stuff properly managed, I don't see much reason you have to do all the legwork on your lonesome. But not being on the ground, means I don't have much insight into how the overall workload is being divvied up, so take this suggestion with a large grain of guesstimate-salt.  :-)     Talk to you later, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
And I'm not sure I understood your question about "the prn source". Did you mean www.prnewswire.com? That's a press-release, so it was generated by the company (NTA or one of their partners), which means the 'author' of the piece was paid by the company, and in most cases the publisher of the piece was also paid by the company. Therefore, the piece fails to be wiki-reliable, because it was not (financially) independent of the topic-of-the-article. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:17, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. The "legwork" is not really all that difficult, and as the others are president, vp, etc, is not time-efficient for them, which is why they hired me. No worries. I will get it done. Might just be a week or so.74.84.114.34 (talk) 20:21, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I realize.  :-)     But suggest you might want to ping the 1976 founders, David R. Tompos and Dennis Norkus, if they are available -- they and their families are most likely source for newspaper clippings, in my experience. You don't need to upload the clippings, just the metadata: piece title, date published, name of publisher, name of author, page number, that sort of thing. You can also contact the local newspaper offices directly, if need be, or hit the local libraries where old newspapers often still remain accessible, though sometimes only in person with help from a librarian. But the best was to pass WP:42 is to show repeated in-depth press-coverage over a number of years. Anyways, the WP:CHOICE of who does what, when, and how, totally up to you. Makes not a whit of difference from the wiki-policies standpoint, though it might make a practical difference in how long article-cleanup takes. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:36, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

status and next steps[edit]

Howdy Wscribner, since it is the end of the workweek for you, I figured I would check up on things. Have you given up on digesting my long checklist?  :-)     I'm not usually very terse. However, I can be iff needed. Here is the things we are doing now: since your edit-request has been stuck in the queue for many days now (and per my recent investigations into why that queue is likely to be stalled for months to come), it is time to start following the "practical steps" for making edits happen.

  • #2. After that, you should also start composing your next edit-request, which summarizes the first five sentences of the sbTrib source, which is here.[3]

p.s. Let me know if you need help figuring out what to do, or have questions, or need help doing stuff.  :-)     But I'm trying to slowly pull back, and let you "do stuff" on your own, since I've found that is the fastest way to learning the ropes of wikipedia. You'll make mistakes along the way, but that is okay, mistakes can be fixed with one click in most cases. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:24, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! I have not had a chance to go over the steps, as I am out of town at a trade show. Monday will be catch up day, so it will be midweek before I can get over here and take care of these items. Will that be too late?70.194.98.30 (talk) 16:11, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
<humour> Yes, it will be too late! WP:TIAD! Wikipedia will shut down! The internet will go offline! Electrical power will fail across the planet! The end, oh woe unto.... </humour>
Actual answer: there is WP:NORUSH, as usual. I was just making sure you were busy, rather than confused. Have fun at the show, and catch up when you catch up. Monday is fine, but whenever is also fine. Leave me a note when you are ready, or head straight to Samtar, or use WP:Q. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:48, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure what gender you are, or age, or occupation, but your sense of humor leaves me laughing. :D I left a message for user:samtar. Once they have replied, I will move onto the sbTrib source. I am sorry I am so slow at this :/ thank you for your patience!Wscribner (talk) 17:32, 5 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

On wikipedia nobody knows you are a dog, and of course, my age in dog-years is far older than my age in human-measured-temporal-metrics.  :-)     User:Samtar has approved your suggested change, and mainspaced it. You can see what they did here,[4] which is from inside the 'view history' button at NTA_(company), and if they perhaps made some tweaks during implementation, or fixed some other troubles whilst they were there -- some reviewers will edit significantly while answering requests, or partially implement the request. If you like what happened, then no further action is needed (though thanking the reviewer is always nice). If you have some problem with the actual changes the reviewer made, you can re-open the same edit-request, or open a new one just below it, as appropriate. Samtar marked your request as answered on the article-talkpage, so you are now out of the queue. Good work for starters.  :-)
  sbTrib is next, don't try to gulp it all down at once, start with summarizing the first five sentences or so. I'll critique your attempt, and then you can add yourself to the queue again, and iff needed, ping samtar once you've waited in the queue for a few days. It will help if you make more wiki-friends besides myself and samtar, of course, since we won't always be handy, necessarily, so instead of asking samtar for our next edit-request, instead maybe we'll try WP:TEAHOUSE, if the queue is still stalled.
  p.s. "Since I am COI problematic(?? is that the word)..." The usual jargon is to say "Since I am COI-encumbered" or more typically "Since I have COI with respect to that article" but my best-practices recommendation is that you specifically disclose "Since I have COI because I work for NTA" when you make a request. That way, even if Samtar has forgotten that factoid since last they talked with you, they will remember to be extra-careful to check for NPOV troubles. Make sense? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 18:31, 5 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, absolutely. I did send user:75.108.94.227 the sbTribune edit-request. You suggested the WP:TEAHOUSE, I clicked the link and checked it out, I think it's pretty simple to use. Wscribner (talk) 18:38, 5 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

pingback[edit]

Enjoying your winter weather?  :-)     Have not heard from you in awhile, so figured I would joggle your elbow. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 08:03, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not very wintery yet, we have a month or so before that happens. Right now we are at the tail end of Autumn, loads of reds, oranges and yellows on the trees. Usually by November the leaves are gone and it becomes damp and rainy and overcast for long enough to make you wonder if you will ever see warm weather again. While we may get some occasional snow in October or November, December is when it starts to become more frequent, and January is the hardest month. Coldest temps and snow, which last until about end of February, sometimes into March. Usually March is similar to November, but with more sun. Just damp from melting snow, and hardy flowers starting to peek out, like Crocus. April things start to green up a bit, and by May the trees have lacy, baby leaves and everything is warmer. Mid-May through Mid-September are the best months :) Where we are located we occasionally get what is called "lake effect" weather, caused by the temperature differences over Lake Michigan. Since the great lakes are so big, they actually make their own weather patterns which can create havoc to the south and east of them. They are forecasting a warmer than average winter for us, though, due to the La Nina, or El Nino... I think I prefer snow to the sloppy, slushy, half frozen stuff that we get in a warmer winter. At least snow is pretty. And fun. Is it winter yet where you are?
I haven't had much time to do anything further with the NTA wikipedia page, and I am, as always, unsure when I can get to it. I am not even certain what step I was on anymore! :/ Wscribner (talk) 12:18, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and you've forgotten the lesson of the colons!  :-)   Added those for you. I've visited the lakes in winter, beautiful, but yes very strange-weather patterns governed by the "interior ocean" and the winds therefrom. Still green hereabouts, though a few trees are starting to turn, but I used to be further north where there were some real winters. Status: we are on the following steps, briefly stated, look back in history if you don't know what the long-winded form of the steps are:
  • step#0, done (pillar three cleanup)
  • step#1, done (userpage disclosure)
  • step#2, done (article-talkpage disclosure)
  • step#3_repeated, dig up additional WP:SOURCES, for the notability-tag. We have the sbTrib source, but that is not enough to pass WP:42, which specifically says 'multiple' wiki-reliable sources with in-depth coverage.
  • step#4_repeated, write up wiki-neutral prose from those sources. Right now we are working on the first five sentences of sbTrib, you took a shot and I critiqued your attempt, which means now you do a rewrite, then I critique, until we are both satisfied. Eventually you'll be wiki-savvy enough to do this cloak-of-neutrality work without a critic... except the one I'm building inside your brain.  :-)
  • step#5_repeated, make additional edit-requests, and practice on the mechanics, but also seek out some people interested in the topic-area. You've already got one success under your belt, woodallsCM, but you need to get so that you remember the steps by rote (even if you've not been editing for a few months).
  • step#6, some further fixes to other articles besides the NTA_(company) one we have been concentrating upon , removing inappropriate wikilinks , question about adding more general material , [[International
  • step#7, any other questions or concerns you have, just ask. But the main stuff is above: write your own sentences from scratch, disclose honestly, stick to the talkpages, back everything with wiki-reliable sources, stay scrupulously wiki-neutral in your boring cold hard just-the-facts sentences, always make edit-requests but do not be afraid to seek assistance directly from fellow wikipedians if those are slow going, and avoid the appearance of impropriety by helping police the wiki-neighborhood of articles ontologically near NTA in the wikiverse.
p.s. Also, in the case of User:Dtompos, even if they don't plan to personally participate in steps 3/4/5/etc any more, I'd like to spend five minutes chatting with them about steps 0/1/2 because those *do* still need to be done, in order to remove the COI-tag, and because of the one-human-per-username rule, Dtompos will have to login personally to their wikipedia username for those five-to-fifteen minutes. If they have forgotten their password, let me know, and we'll find some wikipedia-admin who can fix that up. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:18, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
User:75.108.94.227 I have never lived anywhere but here in my life. Never lived more than 30 miles from where I was born, although I had family down south before Katrina. Talk about Midwest born and bred - complete with bare feet, lightning bugs and corn on the cob! You're right, I don't remember the lesson about colons, I don't even remember them coming up! But I think I figured it out... As far as the steps, I believe I had placed an edit request for an article, and was waiting, but I am not sure. I can't even see the trail I was on! To be honest, when this page is done, I will be happy to not have to worry about Wikipedia for awhile :-) Not that it isn't necessarily interesting, or at times even fun, but it's such a huge way around for an informational page, and there is always something that needs to be done. I appreciate all your help... I would be completely lost each time I open wikipedia up otherwise! Oh, who am I kidding, I AM lost each time I open it up :P 74.84.114.34 (talk) 17:35, 26 October 2015 (UTC) Also just realized I forgot to log in last time, so I am stating here that the previous comments were mine. Wscribner (talk) 17:38, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to clarify and offer apologies. I am so far behind where I was with this, and I didn't even realize it. I had a last minute trade show the beginning of October, and was out of town just long enough that getting back into things has been a bear. Our company is growing, and there have been lots of activities and meetings and such, and anyway, I do apologize. Wscribner (talk) 17:56, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No apologies needed. We are actually serious about WP:NORUSH here: everything is timestamped, everything is backed up. The readership does not care if the informational-page takes awhile to get right, they just want it to be right, eh? So to jog your memory, after (I'm pretty sure) you came back from the tradeshow, you composed -- with some significant help from me -- a sentence based on the woodallsCM.com article, about solar-cabins. Then, you made your first COI-encumbered edit-request. We waited a few days, to see if somebody would answer it, and when nobody did, you pinged User:samtar. They looked over the change, and put it into mainspace at NTA_(company). So that was good. You can see what happened over here -- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NTA_%28company%29&action=history -- which is the 'view history' button most pages have.
  Which brings us up to the present. You can see what we have left to accomplish. There are some tags in the article, pointing out the problems. Once we accomplish step 3 enough times, the notability-tag is removed. Once we get User:Dtompos back on-wiki, at least temporarily for fifteen minutes, to accomplish step 1&2 for themselves personally, we can ask about the other COI-tag being removed. Because the vast majority of the steps are more about careful exacting sourcing, and relatively little about copywriting beautific prose (which tends to be non-wiki-neutral), I usually ask for a techwriter or an engineer or some other math-type-person, people used to strange computer syntax, as opposed to people that work in the marketing department of the company, who tend *not* to have as easy of a time with the crazy wiki-bureaucracy. You are doing fine though. My suggestion is to take notes in between sessions (on a single sheet of paper preferably -- tape it up next to your screen or something), so you can bring up your checklist from the last time you worked on wikipedia: login, see if usertalk has an messages, see if edit-requests on article-talk were answered, here is a source I'm working on and about to submit an edit-request about, here is an editor that has helped answer questions in the past, here is WP:Q if I get stuck, here is how colons work, here is how to sign my posts... whatever hints you find yourself forgetting betwixt session, write them down, so you won't forget the next wiki-session.
  p.s. Alternatively, if you get in the habit of spending ten minutes a day doing wikipedia-stuff, every day, pretty soon you'll get in the habit of remembering it all in your head, no cheat-sheet required. Since you won't always have some NTA change to work on, you'd have to convince Dtompos to let you edit other wikipedia articles 'on the clock' though, such as pages about Indiana, or the Great Lakes, or even about corn cobs.  :-)     There are also a bunch of industry-related-pages that need work, which might be worth thinking about, once you learn the rules about WP:LINKSPAM by heart. The wiki-syntax and the wiki-mechanics are the same in all wikipedia pages, so as long as you are careful to stick with the five pillars WP:5, you should be fine. I will probably bring up the subject with Dtompos in person, when they are here dotting the T's and crossing the I's by putting the Talk:NTA_(company) curlycurly template in place, actually. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 11:25, 27 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
And speaking of corn cobs, wikipedia *used* to have an article about that,[5] but it has since been deleted (now corn cob redirects to the food-article about corn on the cob which is flat wrong). Sigh. So if you want an "easy" bit of work, plenty of sources exist,[6][7][8][9][10] and Draft:Corn_cob is a potential starting-place. Not a very super-duper-important topic area, but then, sometimes the quiet corners of wikipedia are the least stressful, and most productive in terms of gaining experience with low hassle. I have some COI-encumbrance with respect to corn cobs in real life, but I can help you anyways, probably, if you have any interest in this mini-project, or in seventeen-ton-flammable-mountains-of-corncob-raw-materials, I suppose. :-)     75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:53, 27 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For what it's worth, I restored the article. I agree, it didn't make sense to have them merged. — Earwig talk 09:56, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, appreciated. Sad that we've had the linguistically-incorrect redirect for so many years, but WP:NORUSH to get it fixed, I suppose. I will add the refs I found to the article-talk. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 13:11, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I apologize User:75.108.94.227, I had a family emergency that kept me from the office all day yesterday. I am not sure I have much to contribute to corn cob, however, being a very not-your-normal mom, I do have knowledge of many things sci-fi, like Aliens, "Terminator (franchise)", "Transformers" and the like, as well as "Halo (series)". Also, I am a rather good source of information on cross-referencing movie trivia and comic book storylines, which I am very passionate about - as in I do not like it when movie companies take liberties with established comic book storylines, such as Batman or Superman, and change the basic origin story :P . I am also an amateur car enthusiast. Did I get all of that wiki-speak correct? Wscribner (talk) 12:15, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]


not-so-arbitrary section break , for discussion of wiki-notability[edit]

Also, my boss received a message from User:DGG about our page being up for deletion due to "no satisfactory 3rd party evidence for notability". One question that was raised "in-office" was whether User:DGG could be a competitor? Also, someone named User:Bluerasberry has referenced being from another product testing company and has deleted some text. Is this allowable? As a member of another product testing company, couldn't it be a form of WP:COI? Wscribner (talk) 12:21, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
DGG is somebody I can confirm is not a competitor, in the way you mean. They are a librarian, and a phd in molecular biology, and a very good wikipedian on top of that. However, DGG also has a clear wiki-eye for seeing whether wiki-notability has been passed with the refs given. Right now, we have one in-depth ref, the sbTrib, and a few WP:NOTEWORTHY refs, the HUD page and the woodallsCM ref. But more press-coverage is needed (or more WP:SCHOLARSHIP papers perhaps), which is step#3_repeated in the list above. WP:42 is the shortcut. What seems to have happened is that DGG made a PROD-nom, which is wiki-jargon for a fast deletion, but that somebody removed it. Ah, looking at the edit-history, it was yourself. WP:NORUSH is correct, but it is a dual-edged sword: there is no rush for the article about NTA to be 100% fixed, but there is also no rush for there to *be* an article about NTA. The most likely thing that will happen now, is that User:DGG will nominate the page for a full AfD, which is wiki-jargon for Articles-For-Deletion, though in a case like this move-to-Draft:NTA_(company) would almost certainly be the outcome. If the article is put up for an AfD (which has not happened yet), that is a banner which is *not* removable by any wikipedian. Because the PROD-tag *is* removable by anybody, it was okay for you to remove it, although unwise since you are COI-encumbered.
  p.s. If you look at the datestamps, you can see that User:Bluerasberry last tried to contact Dtompos in September 2014, but never got any reply. And yes, it is conceivable that User:Bluerasberry might have been using the wikipedia-rules incorrectly, but there has to be evidence that they *were* doing so. See step#6 in the list, and WP:LINKSPAM, and WP:ELNO. Almost certainly, what BlueRasberry did back in Sep'14 was legit. And if not, then they made a mistake, and the correct way to solve the problem is to undo the mistake, and discuss it with them directly, right? Right. Anyways, the good news is that there are more people here now to help out with the wiki-policies. The bad news, is that in the short term, NTA_(company) is likely to get deleted from mainspace and pagemoved into draftspace, pending discovery of more-in-depth WP:SOURCES (newspapers/magazines/etc). I'll be around to try and explain things to you as time goes along, but you are also able to just directly speak with other wikipedians on their talkpages, or use WP:Q, as always. Keep your cool, and remember to stick with what you have learned. Editing mainspace directly, and edit-warring especially, is not likely to help. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 13:11, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
edit conflict , moved this bit below, so it was beneath my reply up above, which I'd already written. will respond further in a moment.
Also, I attempted to clarify the <vague> on one comment in the NTA (Company) article, as well as adding the year to the <when> on both David A. and Eric Tompos original date of joining the company. I described the changes when I made them, and added a note on the talk page. Are adding dates prohibited for WP:COI? Did I miss anything? I will follow up to see if User:Dtompos can make some time to check in here. I don't see the list of steps we are supposed to do... I will have to track them down Wscribner (talk) 13:00, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You can bring Dtompos here if you wish, but it won't be super-helpful at this point. What matters for wiki-notability is sources: newspaper coverage, magazine coverage, and so on, specifically about NTA, in multi-paragraph depth, which wasn't paid for nor authored by NTA folks (slight exception for WP:SCHOLARSHIP in peer-reviewed scientific papers by E.Tompos for instance however). Here are the steps: number zero, don't panic.  :-)     step#3_repeated, look for more sources that demonstrate third party publishers have written about NTA in some reasonable depth. And as always, remain cool and calm and try to follow the rules. There is no outright prohibition on people who are paid editors like yourself making direct changes to mainspace articles about the company paying you, but for obvious reasons, it is highly discouraged. The only reason it is not *actually* outright prohibited, is because pretty much nothing on wikipedia *is* verboten. See WP:IAR. Generally though, if you break rules, you need a really good encyclopedia-related-reason for doing so. "My boss told me to." Not a good encyclopedia-related reason. "We have to advertise our company in wikipedia!" Also not good, see WP:NOTPROMOTION. "That information was factually wrong and had to be fixed." Better, but what is the hurry, why not just make an edit-request on the talkpage, as you have been taught? "Because I forgot how to make one and saw that PROD tag and panic set in!!"  :-)     Well, understandable enough. But still bad wiki-karma. Go back and undo your changes, with the exception of the PROD-tag removal. Anybody can remove the PROD-tag, including the COI-encumbered folks, though it is still better to simply ask first. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 13:19, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed edit to NTA[edit]

Dear edit-request-reviewer, please insert the following new sentence and corresponding new source:

Under section "Company", please replace the third sentence which currently reads: "NTA is ISO-accredited by IAS/ICC in[vague] three areas." with the following to provide clarification and remove the [vague] tag:

In 2007, NTA received accreditation as a Third Party Inspection Agency, as well as a Third Party Testing agency by the International Accreditation Service. In 2009, the company was accredited by as a Third Party Certification Agency by the International Accreditation Service.[1][2][3]

Under section "Organization", to clarify the dates and remove the [when] tag:

David A. Tompos started working at the company in 1998, writing computer software and working on ISO accreditation. Eric Tompos started working at the company in 1999. In 2002, David A. Tompos and Eric Tompos (both sons of David R. Tompos and both Purdue University alumni) bought the shares owned by Norkus, who then retired. Eric Tompos became executive vice president of NTA, and a Professional Engineer,[4] as well as ICC-certified in factory-built structures.[5] David A. Tompos became President and CEO.

References

  1. ^ "IAS Certification PCA-102" (PDF). www.iasonline.org. International Accreditation Service. Retrieved 24 August 2015.
  2. ^ "IAS Certification TL-259" (PDF). www.iasonline.org. International Accreditation Service. Retrieved 24 August 2015.
  3. ^ "IAS Certification AA-682" (PDF). www.iasonline.org. International Accreditation Service. Retrieved 24 August 2015.
  4. ^ "Licensed Professional". www.energystar.gov. ENERGY STAR. Retrieved 24 August 2015.
  5. ^ Levy, E; Mullens, M; Tompos, E; Kessler, B; Rath, P. "Expert Meeting Report: Advanced Envelope Research for Factory Built Housing" (PDF). www.nrel.gov. U.S. Department of Energy. Retrieved 24 August 2015.

The references are already in the list, Thanks, Wscribner WscribnerWscribner (talk) 13:58, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

New information[edit]

User: 75.108.94.227 I am not sure where to begin, so I am putting this out there... first as the copy that would be added to the page, then the references. Thank you again for all of your help!

some draft-prose , will defer this effort until later. Simply finding some WP:RS refs, with in-depth multi-paragraph coverage, is enough to show wiki-notability. Prose can wait. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:25, 29 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Structural Insulated Panel Certification
In 2009 (then updated in 2011), NTA and SIPA designed a certification code report for SIPA-certified member-companies, which includes span, thickness, and load requirements, plus optional additional design-properties.(ref 1) Following the updated certification report, ASTM International created a section (Section D07.02.08) for structural insulated panels to deal with the issue of standardization of sips used in construction. Eric Tompos, P.E., S.E., C.B.O., Vice-president of NTA, was appointed as Chair of the Section.(refs 2,3)
Participation in Government and Engineering
David Tompos, President, served on the MHCC (Manufactured Housing Consensus Committee), beginning in 2010, and currently serves as the Committee Vice Chairperson (refs 4 - 10), as well as the Appliance Standards and Rulemaking Federal Advisory Committee (ref 11). Eric Tompos, P.E., S.E., C.B.O., Vice-president of NTA, has participated in engineering studies and published papers on energy efficiency and structural engineering issues, (ref 12)and represents NTA on a collaborative effort called ARIES (Advanced Residential Integrated Energy Solutions, led by Levy Partnership, New York, NY). ARIES is concerned with the energy efficiency of affordable housing, new and existing, whether factory or site built homes.(ref 13)

URL evaluation per WP:RS[edit]

references:
  • ms1. "IAS Certification PCA-102" (PDF). www.iasonline.org. International Accreditation Service. Retrieved 24 August 2015. , author is quasi-independent (cert fees), publisher is not bluelinked yet (albeit predecessors are -- however NTA and another ICC-subsidiary are in business together so independence is further questionable), reasonably in-depth, but not especially selective and fails to be sufficiently independent financially.
  • ms2. "IAS Certification TL-259" (PDF). www.iasonline.org. International Accreditation Service. Retrieved 24 August 2015. , see above
  • ms3. "IAS Certification AA-682" (PDF). www.iasonline.org. International Accreditation Service. Retrieved 24 August 2015. , see above
  • ms4.checkY "Inspection Agencies: List of IPIAs and DAPIAs". HUD (specifically the Office of Manufactured Housing / Office of Manufactured Housing and Standards (MHS), within the Office of Risk Management and Regulatory Affairs (RAMH), within the Housing Program Office, within the United State federal government Department of Housing and Urban Development). Archived from the original on September 27, 2012. Retrieved September 4, 2015. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help) , author is independent, publisher is bluelinked Housing and Urban Development, selectivity is reasonably good, but depth is passing-mention.
  • ms5. "SIPA Technical Bulletin No. 1" (PDF). www.sips.org. SIPA. December 12, 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2015. , author&publisher are financially-linked partner-firm.
  • ms6.checkY "Cavco to Intro Solar-Powered Park Model at KOA Convention". November 3, 2011. , author is independent, publisher is not bluelinked, mention is passing (and thus does not help demonstrate wiki-notability)
  • ms7. "Licensed Professional". www.energystar.gov. ENERGY STAR. Retrieved 24 August 2015. , author is quasi-independent (licensure-fees), publisher is bluelinked Energy Star organization, depth is somewhat decent, but information does not help much demonstrating wiki-notability since all licensed P.E. folks are listed by this website (little selectivity beyond the P.E. requirement itself).
  • ms8. Levy, E; Mullens, M; Tompos, E; Kessler, B; Rath, P. "Expert Meeting Report: Advanced Envelope Research for Factory Built Housing" (PDF). www.nrel.gov. U.S. Department of Energy. Retrieved 24 August 2015. , author is NOT independent but co-authors are , publisher is bluelinked NREL (but fine-print says "opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or any agency"), depth is passing-mention only.
  • ms9.Green tickY http://articles.southbendtribune.com/2009-04-10/news/26732946_1_park-model-leed-green-building , author is independent newspaper journalist, publisher is bluelinked South Bend Tribune , depth is multi-paragraph. (Note: User:DGG disagrees with me that this truly counts as wiki-reliable)

I have added the list-o-URLs that Dtompos provided. There are several duplicates to what Wscribner is providing. Also, several of the URLs in both lists have already been discussed further up this talkpage, or over on Talk:NTA_(company). I will remove the duplicates momentarily. Again, though, I stress that all that matters here is finding WP:SOURCES which are fully independent of NTA, and which give in-depth multi-paragraph coverage specifically about NTA. They also have to be wiki-reliable WP:SOURCES, see my instructions to Wscribner on that subject further up this page. For example, dt18 is a wikipedia article, which fails WP:CIRCULAR, thus I have removed it from consideration. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:05, 29 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Added the refs from the article (numbering here does not necessarily match numbering used in the article however). Eliminated dupes. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 04:02, 30 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

discussion of the new information above[edit]

I do not even know where to begin to ask for this to all be added or changed. It looks more like a complete re-write of some information, and the addition of more. I would suggest, from my frame of reference, to remove the paragraph beginning: "In 2009 (then updated in 2011), NTA and SIPA designed a certification code report for SIPA-certified member-companies..." and add in two more sections under "Organization" for the above information. Since DGG doesn't seem to care for the CAVCO reference, would it be better to ask for it to be removed completely? Or perhaps create a section for it, alone, titled "Green Certifications"?? I know it's alot, and I apologize.. but we are trying very hard to meet the guidelines and show that we are not using Wikipedia just for marketing, but as a resource of information for those who need it. Wscribner (talk) 13:57, 29 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Wscribner, this is a good beginning. As my zeroth comment, please note that for demonstrating wiki-notability, all that is needed is for some wikipedian to KNOW about the relevant WP:SOURCES. There is no rush to actually incorporate the sources into the article. Many of the start-class-articles I work on have two or three sentences, followed by a dozen cites.  :-)     So our job here is, in order to satisfy DGG, and in order to satisfy the person who placed the "notability tag" on the article back when you and I first began our joint efforts, is simply to find the WP:SOURCES. In the checklist, this is what I refer to as step#3_repeated: find a source. The step#4 effort, about writing wiki-neutral prose based on that source, and the step#5 effort, about getting the wiki-neutral prose into mainspace via an edit-request, are *not* necessary to demonstrate wiki-notability. Only step#3, finding sources, is what counts for demonstrating wiki-notability. Make sense? So you can do some prose-drafting if you wish, and even make edit-requests, but that stuff is both not necessary immediately, and tricky to do well.
  So, in pursuance of step#3_repeated, finding sources, you have dug up some URLs here. That is a good first step. Just like we did with the previous list of URLs, we have to categorize what you've come up with. First, I will make some syntax-fixes. No need to manually number things. Or if you do want to manually number things, use the asterisk in front, rather than the hashmark in front. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:25, 29 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you so very much User:75.108.94.227!! Wscribner (talk) 14:30, 29 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You are free to comment at the AfD page, and you have. But you are not disclosing your COI-encumbrance up front. The very first sentence out of your mouth should be "I am COI-encumbered, I work for NTA." Or maybe the second sentence. User:DGG was planning on waiting for an extra week, but User:John_from_Idegon apparently did not realize that, and has started the deletion-discussion early. I will be frank with you: nothing you say there will help, and that goes double for Dtompos. I suggest neither one of you comment further at the AfD section, not because you should not be permitted to argue for keep, but because you simply haven't spent the ten years it takes to memorize all the crazy wiki-policies by heart. I've got them memorized, and if enough sources exist for NTA to demonstrably pass WP:GNG, then the most likely outcome of the AfD-discussion will be bangkeep. In the worst case, if the outcome is bangdelete, we can continue working together on the content of the article at Draft:NTA_(company) -- which is currently empty but can be filled up easily -- until the demonstration of wiki-notability is finished. So although it is unfortunate that the deletion-discussion has come before you and I were finished doing our improvements, it is not the end of the world. Stay calm, leave the AfD discussion alone (though do edit your comment you have already made to disclose your COI-encumbrance -- and have Dtompos do the same). I will leave a brief comment as well. So....
  • Please change this:

Several refs were found over the last day or so, and I will be proposing them for addition to the article. The newspaper articles, however, I am still not convinced they are 'press releases' as they are news articles, not "paid" advertisements in well established local newspapers. Wscribner (talk) 12:35, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

  • To this:

Hi, I work for NTA, so I have COI-encumbrance. Several refs were found over the last day or so, and I will be proposing them for addition to the article. The newspaper articles, however, I am still not convinced they are 'press releases' as they are news articles, not "paid" advertisements in well established local newspapers. Wscribner (talk) 12:35, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

  • Please have Dtompos change this:

We are a Third Party Certification agency. We are registered to do business in all 50 states. We are the largest of 5 private companies approved by the federal government to inspect manufactured housing which is about 10% of the building industry. We currently inspection 40% of all MH homes being produced in the United States. There are over a 1.5 million homes currently in the US with our name on them. We also inspection almost all homes produced in the US and exported to Canada. We have also written an engineering design guide for the SIP panel association and certify a majority of their panels which build about 2% of the building industry. We are involved with HUD and FEMA every time there is a national disaster. If a company that is involved with 10% of all homes in North America is not noteworthy because they haven't screwed up enough to get in the newspaper then I agree, you should delete our page. Dtompos (talk) 13:09, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

  • To this:

Hi, I am the CEO of NTA, so I also have COI-encumbrance. Wscribner just recently asked me to re-activate my wikipedia account, so I could disclose my COI-encumbrance. We are a Third Party Certification agency. We are registered to do business in all 50 states. We are the largest of 5 private companies approved by the federal government to inspect manufactured housing which is about 10% of the building industry. We currently inspection 40% of all MH homes being produced in the United States. There are over a 1.5 million homes currently in the US with our name on them. We also inspection almost all homes produced in the US and exported to Canada. We have also written an engineering design guide for the SIP panel association and certify a majority of their panels which build about 2% of the building industry. We are involved with HUD and FEMA every time there is a national disaster. If a company that is involved with 10% of all homes in North America is not noteworthy because they haven't screwed up enough to get in the newspaper then I agree, you should delete our page. Dtompos (talk) 13:09, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

In any case, although this will be a stressful time for you, nothing on wikipedia is permanently 'deleted' and wiki-notability has very little to do with real-world notability. I will do a bit more looking over the URLs you have found up above shortly, but you also should be looking them over. That is a productive use of time and effort -- arguing at AfD is time wasted, until and unless we have the WP:SOURCES we need, in hand. Which ones are in-depth, with multiple paragraphs specifically about NTA? Which publishers are bluelinked? Which authors/publishers are questionably independent, because they are financially linked to NTA in some fashion, and which pieces are truly 100% no-question-about-it independent? Read over the stuff at WP:RS, a quick skim. We will cover it blow by blow, as we go through the list of URLs. For the purposes of wiki-notability, only the in-depth multi-paragraph-specifically-about-NTA pieces matter. Brief mentions like the woodallsCM piece are helpful to expand a wiki-notable article, but only in-depth pieces are helpful to justify a wiki-notable article. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:52, 29 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
User:75.108.94.227, you wrote the following:
  • ws5. Tulsa, OK, April 28-30, 2010 (121 KB) Final. Posted 12/21/10 , what is this one? part of nfpa.org mentioned above? or something else?
  • ws6. Alexandria, VA, October 19-20, 2011 (63 KB) Final. Posted 11/30/2012 , same questions
  • ws7. Arlington, VA, October 23-25, 2012 (542 KB) Draft. Posted 2/8/2013 , same questions

The nfpa.org mentioned is the main website, and the "smaller" links are links to the actual documents. Those documents are the meeting minutes. If you scroll through them, you will see David Tompos listed as a member in attendance at the MHCC meetings. Wscribner (talk) 12:05, 30 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Okay thanks. I am currently going through the URLs, and trying to figure out 1) which ones have multiple-paragraph depth, 2) which ones have bluelinked publishers, and 3) which ones are impeccably-independent from NTA. For instance the piece ws1 is at http://www.nordenson.com/library/images/%7B684BE26F-9097-4004-96C1-5D8639DE6DFF%7D.pdf , author is Jim DeStefano (P.E. / AIA), work is Wood Design Focus (volume 22 / number 1 / Spring 2012 / page 3). But who is the publisher behind Wood Design Focus? Does it have editorial oversight? As for depth, here is the relevant snippet from that document, per fair use law pasted here:
  • {{talkquote=...If all building structures were subjected only to uniform loads, had a very regular geometry with no window and door openings and had only simple span conditions, there would never have been a need for more than these simple span tables. Unfortunately, not many real world buildings satisfy those limitations. In 2009, the Structural Insulated Panel Association (SIPA) released an NTA Code Report for SIPs identified as SIPA120908-10. This has an accompanying Engineering Design Guide and Design Examples that can be downloaded from the SIPA web site (www.sips.org) as a pdf file. What was revolutionary about the SIPA Code Report was that it contained structural properties and design values rather than just span charts. At long last, the engineering community now has a rational design methodology for SIP structures. Of course the published design values are only directly applicable to SIPs manufactured by a company that subscribes to the SIPA Code Report and has had their products subjected to the rigorous testing and scrutiny associated with an NTA Code Report listing. As an alternative, the Plywood Design Specification Supplement 4: Design and Fabrication of Plywood Sandwich Panels published by APA, and which serves as the basis for the NTA Engineering Design Guide, also provides design guidance for SIPs. }}
At roughly four-to-eight sentences specifically about NTA and their efforts, this is what I usually call borderline-helpful when considering wiki-notability. Just in terms of depth. Now, of course, depth is not the only thing we need: we also need wiki-independence (is there any linkage between the author DeStefano and NTA/Tompos? Is there any linkage between the publisher and NTA/Tompos?). But the main thing is the wiki-reliable nature of the publisher. The URL is for Nordenson & Assoc, which is a structural engineering firm in NYC, but are they actually the publisher? From 1990-2010 there was a journal by that name (Wood Design Focus) published by Wood Products Center / Wood Products Information Center, according to Worldcat.[14] But the piece by DeStafano was from 2012, and the PDF hosted by Nordenson.com didn't mention the publisher of the overall work, they just had one of the articles, so it's not clear whether this was the *same* exact Wood Design Focus, or not. While I am going through the new URLs from top to bottom, ws1 through dt22, for each one I will be trying to figure out whether the author is independent and/or bluelinked, whether the publisher is independent or bluelinked, and how many sentences are about NTA specifically. Half-a-sentence is not useful for wiki-notability, though it might help in other ways. Five sentences, like this piece by DeStefano, is a borderline-helpful case. Fifty sentences or so, like the in South Bend Tribune piece, is plenty of depth to count towards wiki-notability (DGG's complaint is that the sbTrib author was not *truly* independent of NTA. Wscribner, if you will go from bottom to top, dt22 on up towards ws1, that way we will each be working on "half" the list. For each of the new URLs, list the author, publisher, and depth-about-NTA. For example, in the case of ws1, the see what I modified, up above. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 21:18, 30 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
User:75.108.94.227, The Wood Design periodical is put out by the Forest Product Society, which is an association for any person or entity involved in the forest product industry, from loggers to wood flooring companies. NTA has no stake in this association, nor are we connected to anyone in it, other than perhaps having performed some testing for some of them, but we have vested interest in this association. In fact, until this article came along, I had no idea such an association even existed. Wscribner (talk) 13:33, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

new home base is Draft:NTA_(company)[edit]

Somewhat surprisingly, to my wiki-eyes, although there was relatively little comment during the week, and although the discussion had just been up-posted to several wikiprojects, a wikipedia admin closed it as draftify. So what that means is, the content of the article at NTA_(company) has now been pagemoved to Draft:NTA_(company).

  We can continue to work on it there, and once we have enough sources in hand to demonstrate WP:GNG, the pagemove can be reversed back to the usual location. So for that effort, it is more of the same: digging for sources that have multi-paragraph coverage specifically about NTA, with 100% independent authors/publishers/etc (exception for WP:SCHOLARSHIP which permits co-authorship). These can be online or offline; I still strongly suspect that a visit to the microfiche vault at one of the large libraries in the area, which have the newspapers from the 1970s/1980s/1990s stored away, and a helpful reference-librarian to aid in the search, is likely to turn up some earlier coverage of NTA. If such things are found, for wikipedia-purposes all that is needed is the date/pieceTitle/author/work/publisher, and some fair use quotes from the ref. Don't upload scans of the whole thing, because that's a copyright violation, once the metadata about date/author/etc is known some wikipedian with library-access can WP:V the piece-body and help write wiki-neutral prose therefrom. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 12:56, 8 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

most-appropriate-redirect question[edit]

  So in the meantime, there ought to be a redirect from NTA_(company) to an appropriate place elsewhere on wikipedia, where NTA is mentioned. Personally I would organize it as being a redirect to Listing_and_approval_use_and_compliance , or maybe Certification listing. Alternatively, we could put a sentence under Nappanee, Indiana#Economy and make the redirect go there. Ping User:bgwhite, who properly removed the cross-namespace redirect on procedural grounds ... can you give an opinion on where a proper leaf-node-target would be, as the article was in mainspace for five years? See the partially-finished redirect-sub-discussion at the bottom of this AfD thread: WP:Articles_for_deletion/NTA_(company), also ping User:DGG in case they want to finish the conversation therein.

p.s. Wholly... mole-y... I did not know until last night that there was a T5, with Arnold. I'll be back, indeed! Since you are a critic of altered origin-stories, not sure how you feel about T2 and beyond, however.  ;-)     75.108.94.227 (talk) 12:56, 8 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I would very strongly oppose a redirect. Redirecting from an individual company in a field, especially one that does not yet have an article, to a general article about the overall broadest subject is undue emphasis. It's like redirecting an article on a deleted restaurant to Food, or even Restaurant. DGG ( talk ) 06:23, 9 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Err, User:DGG, please read my redirectly-related response to you at the AfD.[15] Or to cut to the chase, if you don't like the target-article I carefully picked as being a leaf-node, apparently because we organize our wikipedia-ontological-hierarchies in vastly different fashion ("overall broadest subject"?), then please suggest where you DO think an appropriate place to up-merge && redirect, would be. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 10:04, 9 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Things do not go into single hierarchies. NTA is a part both of the construction industry and the quality-control industry, and when it goes into mainspace,it will have a place in both categories, as well as the other dimensions: Companies by place, Companies founded by year. etc. We usually assign quite a number of categories, on the basis of what else people might be looking for, -- if they;re looking for one company in a field, they might want to know about others, and also for internal quality-improvement purposes.
lmost nothing goes in a single category. A notable mexican restaurant would be in at least 3: Restaurants by type of cuisine, Restaurants by place, and businesses founded by year. These are really ad hoc categories, assigned by what any information scientist would consider no coherent system. It's so incoherent that I don't usually work there. (We do not have and very badly need is a method of category intersection, so there are all sorts of odd work-arounds.)
Redirects are not categories. Redirects serve the purpose of directing someone to where information can be found for a topic not covered here. If someone wantsto know about your company, they will probably not be helped by a general article about the industry--or for that matter by any other article. If enough people want to know about the company, it will need its own article. Where we make company redirects is for a branch of a larger company, for a small company part of a large conglomerate where the conglomerate has an article, for an extinct company to the company that bought it, and of course from an alternate name to the name we use. Those are helpful, because the redirect the reader to where information would be found. Redirect the company name to the line of business implies that your company is so overwhelmingly prominent that someone wanting information on the lline of business would not think of the name for the field, but your specific company name. If that were true, there would be an article. DGG ( talk ) 01:03, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Aloha?[edit]

Which means both hello and goodbye, depending on the context, so I hear. Are you still planning to work on this further? Should enough sources be found, either offline newspapers from the 1980s and 1990s, or new press-coverage yet to be written that will appear during 2016, it is quite possible to get Draft:NTA_(company) turned back into the normal NTA_(company). We just have to demonstrate WP:42 properly, is all. Let me know what is happening on your end, please, and if you have any specific plans going forward. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:14, 23 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

User:75.108.94.227, I have not really the time to do what needs to be done (according to Wikipedia). They want research level information beyond rationale. With our name listed on multiple government sites showing we are approved and certified over the horizon, I would think that would be good. Since our clients are not 'ordinary' consumers, but home manufacturers, building product suppliers, modular builders, etc, and since we deal with government regulations, we do not have the option of finding lots of articles about us in the news. We don't 'invent' new things, as we have to follow government rules. We are an old fashioned, well established company that focuses on ensuring our clients products meet or exceed code requirements for the safest structures possible. There is little you will find about that sort of thing in the news regarding us specifically. I am rather disappointed in Wikipedia, given that it isn't Encyclopedia Britannica. I respect their desire to make it respectable, but they are making it so it isn't possible for 'anyone to edit anything'. Some knowledge comes from references that may not necessarily be written down. :( Wscribner (talk) 21:09, 23 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and you are correct to be disappointed. There are plenty of folks here, that believe information that is useful and factual, belongs in a project that strives to someday encompass The Sum Of Human Knowledge. Of course, there is a lot of human knowledge that is crap: for instance, it is *factual* that there are a bunch of business, located in Nappanee, which have facebook pages they wrote about themselves. It is even *useful* if you are a citizen of the town, looking for a specific company, or looking to make a specific type of purchase. But you have the yellowpages for that, and facebook for that, right? How many of the businesses are encyclopedic in scope? Here are the top twenty-five hits for the town, on facebook, re-sorted by number of 'likes' given to each fbook-page.[16]
some example incorporated entities , perhaps two or three of which , will ever have a wikipedia article which *legitimately* satisfies WP:42 aka wiki-notability
Now, because of WP:NOTDIR, wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia, not the yellow pages (and also WP:NOTFACEBOOK which is kinda-but-not-really related). Most of those "top 25" hits do not belong in wikipedia, at all. This is true even when "some" wiki-reliable sources exist. For example, probably there is some governmental website that has the barber shop listed, as a registered corporation, and as a taxpaying entity, and a few other things. Probably there is a story in the local paper, or at least a brief mention, of the barbershop at some point.
  But for the barbershop to be extraordinary, it would have to be 'significant' in some reasonably broad-reaching fashion. (Heh heh: barber shop... fashion... oh nevermind.) Did the barber shop invent some new hairstyle fad? Is it a famous barbershop, with rich-n-famous clientele? Was it the site of some event, wondrous or horrific? Well... even then, in all those cases, usually there would be an article about the hairstyle, about the clients, and/or about the event, not necessarily about the barbershop. Of course, many companies quite obviously become encyclopedic: the easy examples are the names people know, often from their consumer goods -- Microsoft and computer software, Walmart and big-barn discount retailing, that sort of thing. Underwriters Labs is a bluelink, not because they have a lot of employees or a lot of revenues, but mostly because they invented a new niche-industry, the fire-protection of consumer goods which have an electrical cord sticking out the back. Revenues and market share are also useful proxy-indicators of wiki-significance. But fame, and riches, are not the key factors.
explanation for why NTA is obviously not a local barbershop... but also not yet INDISPUTABLY ready for an encyclopedia article, by the letter of the wiki-rules
  On wikipedia, the rules are that in order to have an article, the topic must be 'significant' in the encyclopedic sense. Now that is theory, as you know... in actual practice the sole measure of 'significance' is to have sources in hand, 100% independent of NTA, 100% wiki-reliable, with multi-paragraph in-depth coverage specifically about NTA. At present, those sources *may* exist, in the newspaper-archives of the 1990s and the 1980s, or the university journal back-issues. Or maybe, those sources don't exist, in which case Draft:NTA_(company) is in limbo, awaiting future coverage: by newspapers, by business-magazines, by academic journals (civil engineering or management-and-economics), that sort of thing. In order to get the wikipedia article out of draftspace, that is what is needed, first and foremost. Without those WP:GNG-satisfactory refs in hand, it will be very difficult to get NTA back into mainspace.
  Now, as we've discussed before, real-life significance is not at all the same as wiki-notability, when trying to pass WP:42, and real-life reliability is not at all the same as wiki-reliable, when speaking of WP:SOURCES. Quite frankly, the wikipedia rules are just a compromise, and a limited flawed compromise at that. The rules are not applied fairly: corporation-articles get stricter standards that television-show-articles, for instance. That goes double for business-oriented and government-oriented businesses, which by their nature tend not to get coverage in the popular press. So not only is life not fair, but wikipedia is specifically almost anti-fair. It is possible to get through all the hoops, but not very dern easy. Besides sources-in-hand, it helps if you have somebody that knows the wiki-policies like me.
  But I'm handicapped by not knowing the industry. Lucky for us, I managed to find a wikipedian that knows *both* the wiki-policies, and also the testing-and-flammabilty industry, User:Ahering@cogeco.ca who goes by Achim. They are based in Canada, and have not heard of NTA, but they will understand what you are talking about, if you explain how your business works, and where you have the most real-world significant (and the somewhat distinct "encyclopedic-ly significant") impact in terms of testing-work, cert-writing, and governmental influence. They also may know where specifically to dig for sources. Achim has suggested you email them, see the conversation we had on my usertalk about NTA. Maybe it will turn out that Achim sees NTA as likely to pass AfD#2, or maybe it will turn out that Achim can help you dig up additional refs, but it could also turn out that Achim believes Draft:NTA_(company) is in the WP:NotJustYet category. So drop them a line, and see what they think. Achim has read over the AfD, but probably doesn't know all the gory details of what we've been working on.
  So the worst-case scenario, from an ROI perspective, is that it turns out as of December 2015, that NTA simply does not yet have enough press-coverage to satisfactorily demonstrate WP:42. If so, there are a couple of options; start keeping a scrapbook, and every three months or so, come back to Draft:NTA_(company) and tweak it a little, adding any new wiki-reliable mentions of the company and the Tompos family. Sooner or later, as long as you keep your eye on the ball -- focus on keeping you clients happy to grow your employee-base and your annual-revenues and your profit-margins, plus at the C-level keep on working to improve the industry. Coverage comes, when you do such things, naturally; especially when the company is in a "politically interesting" niche area like greening buildings. In the meantime, you might decide to spend about five minutes every five months on wikipedia, to keep the draft barely alive, which is fine per WP:CHOICE.
  However, what I actually recommend, in this worst-case-scenario of the refs simply not being there to be found, is that you spend about ten minutes per day on wikipedia, every workday. That's the only way to really learn the ropes, and get a solid feel for what wiki-reliable sources look like, what wiki-neutral prose sounds like, and what demonstrating wiki-notability truly demands. Now, over the course of a year, those ten minutes every day will add up: if you work 8 hours a day, we are talking 2% of your salary that Dtompos is paying you, being spent on sharpening your wikipedia skills. Some of that time, obviously, will be spent improving Draft:NTA_(company), which we are in the midst of doing, and which I'm happy to continue helping you with. But spending ten hard-driving minutes every day, will pretty quickly eat up all the sources, and the draft will be finished and polished within a pretty short while, just waiting for more in-depth WP:SOURCES so that we can show WP:42 and get the article back into mainspace.
  At which point, you can work on improving industry-related articles (but without mentioning NTA), as a public service and as preparation for when NTA *does* make it back into mainspace. You can also do some work on sci-fi movies that you like, and corn cobs that I like, or whatever other articles strike your fancy; a good way to get the hang of the deletion-discussions is to help with them, a good way to get the hang of draftspace-work is to help with the article-creation-queue, and a good way to understand COI-encumbered edit-requests is to help work the COI-queue.
Anyways, as usual I've gone on too long.  :-)     So your eyes are probably glazing over. But in a nutshell, here is what I think you should do:
  • First, email Achim aka User:Ahering@cogeco.ca, to see whether they might believe NTA is already wiki-notable. Myself, I'm just flat not sure, I don't know enough about the industry, and we couldn't find enough sources to pass the usual rule-of-thumb, WP:42, but we found *enough* sources that there is still a shot.
  • Second, have a talk with User:Dtompos, about whether it makes sense for you to spend 2% of your on-the-clock efforts, becoming an expert wikipedian. If you do spend 10 minutes every workday on the 'pedia, in six months or a year when the additional hot-off-the-presses coverage about NTA does appear, you will be ready to finish the draft and get back into mainspace, plus keep the article properly maintained going forward.
  • Alternatively, you could also decide to spend five minutes every five months; the downside is, that if you stay away from regular editing practice for that long, you will grow rusty about the wiki-rules and wiki-mechanisms and wiki-culture. So if the business can justify the ROI, of having you edit wikipedia 10 minutes every workday, that will pay you back with a well-tuned skillset at being a wikipedian, when the time comes to get NTA back into mainspace.
Third thing, probably obvious but worth mentioning, let me know what is going on, and what you are thinking, so I can know how best to advise you. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:07, 24 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
User:75.108.94.227, I understand what you are saying about the top 25 Nappanee businesses, however, I am not entirely certain NTA would make that list for one reason and one reason only: you mentioned Underwriters Laboratories, they are a unique B2B company that provides many of the same type of services we do. We are a B2B company, while not as well known, and focusing primarily on the housing industry, provides the same TYPE of services. Testing and verification and evaluation and certification of products. All of our references to date show that is what we do. Those kinds of businesses are not "walk in" businesses. Often, people in the area know our name, but do not even know what we do, even though we spend many hours and dollars supporting local causes (school fundraisers, turkeys for the 'homeless' at thanksgiving,etc.)
Our direction as a company is to provide the highest levels of integrity in our testing, inspection,certification, engineering,etc services so that our clients are providing the safest, most code compliant products/homes available. We also are constantly striving to improve training and instruction for the building industry to make our services even better yet. We do not seek the "public eye" for publicity's sake, rather, to let building product manufacturers and home builders know that we are here to help them, and by doing so, help the general public by ensuring safe, energy efficient structures. To support those statements, we have offered evidence of our acceptance by multiple government organizations as an approved third party agency (listed on their own websites). We have offered proof of our management being active in shaping the building codes through participating on committees and being members of appropriate organizations (we are an affiliate sponsor of the ICC, as well as a corporate member, we are a member of ASTM and we partner with various associations to ensure their members have safe, code compliant products and to help them build consistency across their own industry). We have exactly the same accreditation's as Intertek, another leading test, inspect, certify type of company, we just do not spend as much time in front of the microphone. Our goal with wikipedia was not marketing. Our goal was simple: what comes up in the SERP when you type in a search query? Often, one of the top places is Wikipedia. As Wikipedia became more 'respectable' (for lack of a better word), we felt it was important to have a page there in order to help people seeking testing, inspection or certification for a building product due to code requirements or any other necessary reason (some want testing to see if a new version is better than the old, or if they can "design out" a particular flaw). While the language may sound like marketing, it is not, in whole, marketing. It is a signpost: "Questions about testing, inspecting or certifying your building product or structure? We know our stuff and we can help you learn what you need to know".
I am sorry we do not have pages of articles about us in journals, magazines or newspapers. But we are known to the people who make major decisions across many industries. As the only marketing specialist here, I have many responsibilities, one of which was building up the wikipedia page to be a place to put information, and at that, I have failed. I do not like failure, especially when it is due not to my own lack of effort, but due to rules that are over strict, and while it may not really be so, they seem "on a whim" at times.
I have to admit that the idea of being a "wikipedian" is appealing, but not with the way they are doing things now. :( Wscribner (talk) 13:28, 25 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Wscribner, I've been thinking about how to reply here. You are correct, that being a wikipedian is appealing... but you are also correct, that the way the wiki-culture works now, is a huge killjoy. There is a lot of capricious decision-making. There is a heavy emphasis on consensus... aka whoever shows up, and complains the longest, tends to get their way. There is not enough emphasis on creating content, boring cold hard just-the-facts useful content that the readership will find useful / informative / fascinating. There is way too much emphasis on deletion-because-Rules, way too much difficulty with assuming-bad-faith, and waaaaay too much deadline-or-be-punished-mindset. This is not what Wikipedia was intended to be like, and indeed, is explicitly against the most crucial policies: WP:IAR, WP:NICE, and WP:CHOICE. These are the core of wikipedia, in addition to staying wiki-neutral, and reflecting what the wiki-reliable sources say.
  Of course, wikipedia is no longer the same as it was, back in those days when the five pillars were first written. In 2001, and even in 2005, wikipedia was just another weird website. By 2010 wikipedia was a pretty important website... and now in 2015, wikipedia is one of the most important websites in the world. Wikipedia, in the ideal universe, filters the internet, selecting what is wiki-notable, selecting what is wiki-reliable, and presenting the factual and the truthful in a neutral way, letting the readership decide for themselves how to think. We do not live in an ideal universe. You are not here to spam wikipedia; you have always been honest about your efforts, and careful to follow the wiki-policies, once somebody explained them to you. Within the limits of forgetfulness, all of us our human!  :-)     But it is a plain fact, that there are plenty of people who ARE here to spam wikipedia; although that existed in 2005, of course, when wikipedia was subject to viagra-spam and royal-family-phishing just like any other internet website. More than most, actually, since wikipedia was always anyone-can-edit.
  But in the past few years, wikipedia has become not just *a* target for religious movements, political operatives, corporate marketing, PR firms, and those who wish to control the thoughts of the masses... it is almost certainly now the #1 target. People don't trust television. People don't trust internet forums. People don't trust the mainstream media. People have some trust in their friends... but more and more,[citation needed] people trust wikipedia. Not just trust it to be *factual* but trust it to be *careful* about what is said. Wiki-neutrality is the core of that trust, and in practice, that means that wikipedia needs to be backed up by wiki-reliable WP:SOURCES, not just in terms of a namedrop here and a mention there, after which it is fine to go wild, but in terms of every single sentence having a solid reference to back up that factoid. In theory, all this sounds fine. But in practice, many wikipedians have quit because of these changes in the wiki-culture. Many of those who stay, are unhappy here. There are too many people running around, wanting to Do Something about spam... seeing bad apples under every wiki-rock... anxious to seem tough on wiki-crime... caring about maintaining that wiki-neutrality, that central component of the trust that the readership places in wikipedia, so much that they forget what Wikipedia IS.
  Wikipedia is going through growing-pains, basically: it became a top-ten-in-the-universe website, before the wikipedians were ready for it. There is an ongoing quest to define the fundamental vision of what wikipedia *is* nowadays, in the post-2015 world: is it the encyclopedia anyone can edit, where the most important things are staying neutral, being nice to each other, and ignoring all rules? Or is it the Very Important Encyclopedia where only Very Serious And Important people can edit, where the most important things are Mainstream Coverage, Driving Away Unimportant People, and Making Sure Nobody Ever Breaks Any Of The Rules Written By Very Serious And Important People? (Bet you can guess which outcome I prefer   :-)     Right now, here in 2015, it is neither: stuck somewhere in the middle, nobody sure which way it is heading. Hence, capricious and "on a whim" at times.
  Anyways, long story short, please don't feel that you failed here. In fact, quite the opposite, Wikipedia has failed you. It would be a happy ending, if I could say, I ran into Wscribner one day, hunting some *real* spammers, and worried that User:Samtar would turn out to be a sock... but it turned out that both were good apples, and we all worked together to improve Wikipedia. And that happy ending may still come true: there is WP:NORUSH about making decisions. If you decide to become a wikipedian, either for ten minutes a day on the clock, or just as a hobby in your spare moments to fix up the movie-articles, I'm always happy to help, or just hang out. If I'm not around for whatever reason (IP addresses do rotate) you can try Samtar, or failing that, pick someplace at WP:Q and make new wiki-friends thataway. So for the moment, I will repeat my aloha, rather than saying goodbye. Perhaps one day we shall meet again -- wikipedia is a big project, but like that town in Indiana, it is a small world. I can confidently predict that wikipedia will either be back to the five-pillar-roots by 2020, or absorbed into some giant technology firm who picks up the pieces after the crazy capricious bureaucracy drives a critical mass of people away. I'd rather you stay, if you can, and help improve the place, but I can certainly understand why you would depart. Feel free to drop me a note on my usertalk, if you feel like chatting about any of this, or anything.
  p.s. My point of listing the top-25-facebook-likes wasn't really that NTA would not be on that list... my point was that most of the places on that list would never be in wikipedia!  :-)     Wikipedia is supposed to be about knowledge, not about crap. Facebook is mostly filled with crap. NTA is not crap: they are a reasonably important player in the municipal building codes, and in the B2B construction industry. This is WP:THETRUTH, which is to say, we know it, you and I, but without "popular" coverage by the media ... aka the people writing infotainment pieces with the facebook-audience firmly in mind ... there are various Important Rules which, strictly applied, cause the wrong outcome. Being important, and having a lot of facebook-likes, are quite different! At the moment, NTA is encyclopedic in the WP:NOTEWORTHY sense, but there is little consensus about *where* to put that couple sentences. At the moment, because it is WP:NotJustYet able to provably satisfy the WP:42 rule, NTA was draftified as questionably-encyclopedic, on grounds of wiki-notability... which in practice, is defined as newspapers / television / radio / magazines / academia / governmental... and in *actual* practice defined by pop-media. Even then, it was a bit of a borderline call; with another source or two, giving multi-paragraph coverage, NTA-the-article could be revived. Maybe there are some newspaper pieces sitting in microfiche somewhere; maybe there will be some WP:RS coverage in 2016 or 2017, as NTA moves more and more into the public eye, through ASTM/ANSI and HUD/NFPA efforts? Hard to say. No decision on wikipedia is final, because WP:NOTFINISHED is most definitely still true. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 09:55, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
User:75.108.94.227, all I can say is you have been a wonderful help, kind and encouraging. Thank you very much for your assistance, and I hope that Wikipedia gets back on track. The biggest issue I see with Wikipedia is the amount of supporting evidence it requires. A governmental reference, though one sentence long, should suffice in certain situations, but because it is not 'in depth', it does not. With what NTA does, there isn't much out there in the way of "multiple paragraphs". If they get that straightened out, Wikipedia would be on its way to a better plane of existence. Thank you again for all of your kind and patient help :) 74.84.114.34 (talk) 12:57, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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