Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/SuperOffice (second nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep as no consensus to delete. Ifnord 00:18, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] SuperOffice

Company with Eur30m turnover, wholly owned subsidiaries in several European countries, produces CRM software and is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. I undeleted this a few days ago after what I regarded as an inadequate AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/SuperOffice. Apparently the feeling was that it didn't have enough google hits! Since there is some concern about my unusual action in undeleting I've decided to relist.

• Well of course I think it should be a keep. We don't delete articles about companies with this kind of turnover without a very good reason. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 03:15, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per above. KrazyCaley 03:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• I vote Keep because it seems notable compared to other articles we have. Note however that this company does not meet WP:CORP which says a ranking such as Forbes 500 would qualify but just being publicly traded would not; and I couldn't find any media coverage. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-01-20 04:10Z
  • I agree that it isn't in the Forbes 500, but if that's the reason why we're deleting articles about companies like this, then the guideline is wrong and should be ignored until somebody comes up with a more reasonable one. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 04:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment The Forbes 500 is an annual listing of the top 500 AMERICAN companies produced by Forbes Magazine. I have no idea if this particular company is American or not, but why are we basing notability on an American list in the first place? Your average Venezualan company (it seems to me) are likely to fail simply because they dont appear on this list? Or am I reading this all wrong? Jcuk 09:20, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
      • I said "such as Forbes 500". I did my research; I know it is a Norwegian company and I know Forbes is American. If I had said "it is not in the OSEBX" I doubt it would be nearly as widely understood compared to saying "such as Forbes 500". —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-01-20 09:38Z
        • I never heard of the "Forbes 500" before today. I aint signed in so I'll sign manually. Jcuk
• Delete as not encyclopedic. Yay, they sell some stuff. They fail WP:CORP which actually represents the consensus opinion of a whole lot of editors. I don't see any evidence of citations in media as being at all notable. Always happy to change my mind if some actual evidence presented, but please spare us any further rhetoric. - brenneman^(t)(c) 05:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
  • They seem to sell a LOT of stuff from what I can find, so I think they're far from irrelevant, and them seem to satisfy WP:CORP in my own humble opinion. Still, I most definitely agree that we need to see some resources. KrazyCaley 07:19, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
    • I'm always happy to change my mind: how do thay satisfy CORP? The only thing I can even see as a possible stretch is the "multiple published works" and that says " non-trivial". - brenneman^(t)(c) 07:26, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Here you go. Partnering with Microsoft, announcement made by Microsoft's CRM industry manager [1], and here's the partner page on Microsoft's website [2]. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 07:37, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
      • There are thousands of these, and that they are submitted by the company themselves. Please note the little text at the bottom: "The inclusion of a solution does not imply endorsement of Microsoft of the solution." This is advertising.
        brenneman^(t)(c) 07:56, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
        • Read the press release. Those words you are reading in quotes are from Microsoft's CRM manager, not SuperOffice. Microsoft is an active partner in the deal. SuperOffice and Microsoft jointly market solutions involving a combination of SuperOffice and Microsoft products. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 08:12, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
        • Sorry, Tony, you're incorrect here. I can speak with some authority when I say that anyone can be a Microsoft partner, and wethey don't have to participate at all. Avriette 00:11, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
        • Avriette, I've cited a press release in which Microsoft's own CRM manager actively promoted SuperOffice. It may be generally true that this is a passive relationship, but in this case there is activity on both sides. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 05:05, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
    • And another partnership deal: customers who buy SAP's BusinessOne product in Norway automatically get SuperOffice. SAP Norge chose it as their CRM module [3]. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 07:48, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep but expand it soon.--MONGO 06:38, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Significant enough in a Norwegian context. Choalbaton 07:59, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep: more confusion between encyclopedic and notable. Can we do some research and find out what the Norwegian equivalent of this Forbes 500 would be? I'm assuming this is something like the FTSE 100? HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 10:02, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
  • FTSE is London; this company is on Oslo. No way a company with market cap < 100 million USD is on a stock index. (The #100 company on FTSE 100, Yell Group, has market cap of 7 billion USD.) The WP:CORP criteria are VERY high, I doubt half the companies that currently have Wikipedia articles meet it. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-01-20 11:54Z
    • Actually, the WP:CORP criteria are quite low. Any kind of independent published works will do, as long as they are more than simple directory listings or incidental mentions. Items sourced from the company itself, such as its press releases or things published by the company on its own web site, don't count, however. Uncle G 12:37, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
      • ... so this SuperOffice FAQ written by a reseller counts, albeit that it is about the product, not the company. Uncle G 13:21, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
      • I suggest that if our guidelines exclude a company listed on the Norwegian Stock Exchange with an appreciable known turnover, they're probably rather too restrictive. I agree that there's little in the way of independent literature about this company, but that is not to say that it is negligible. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 16:45, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
        • Only editors who haven't actually read our guidelines in the first place would think that our guidelines contain any such exclusions. Editors who have read our guidelines will have read footnotes #4 and #6 to them, conversely. Editors who approach Wikipedia from the direction of "Wikipedia should include individual articles for all companies with turnover X/that are traded on Y" will find Yellowikis or some other directory of companies more in line with their goals. I strongly recommend instead the approach of actually performing research to find non-trivial independently sourced published works, of the sort that Sam Vimes has below. Uncle G 15:52, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep, as it seems reasonably notable enough to me. If it fails WP:CORP, then I'll suggest that WP:CORP is too restrictive. InkSplotch^(talk) 14:20, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per brenneman. No evidence presented that this company meets any of the recommended inclusion standards at WP:CORP. Press releases and sales literature (whether by the company itself or any reseller) do not count as verifiable evidence. Rossami (talk) 14:43, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep WP:CORP is the opinions of a handful of editors not policy. Such oversimplified notability guidelines shouldn't trump common sense. older ≠ wiser 18:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Thank you suggesting that Rossami and I have no common sense. - brenneman^(t)(c) 23:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
  • The irony of that baseless argument is that this company satisfies the "oversimplified notability guidelines", as pointed out below by editors who actually took the tack of addressing the subject of the article and performing some research to see whether it satisfied the guidelines, rather than the tack of attacking the guidelines themselves and simply assuming that the company would fail to satisfy them without apparently putting any effort at all into checking that. Uncle G 15:52, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep, publicly listed companies are of interest to readers. Kappa 18:54, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. As mentioned on deletion review a company with only 180 employees someone would have to present some serious evidence that it is an influential company beyond being listed on an exchange. (apparently it's a lot easier to go public in Norway, I don't think 30 million in revenue would get you very far on a larger exchange.) My back of the envelope calculation is with only 500 million people in the world workforce there would be 2.7 million potential companies this size. That is certainly not feasible nor a good use of our time currently to have articles on companies that size. - Taxman ^Talk 22:18, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Obviously there aren't 2.7 million software companies with wholly owned subsidiaries in half a dozen European countries, selling into the US market and securing nationwide franchise agreements with the likes of SAP. The reason I bring this up now is Jimbo's recent WikiEN-L comment about this kind of AfD phenomenon: [4] So you haven't heard of them and you wrote some numbers on the back of an envelope. Is it possible that your numbers aren't the whole story? Why do we want to delete this? By my calculation there are at least one billion potential boy groups with four members, but we're not stampeding to delete the article about The Beatles. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 00:02, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
    • No but being a software company matters not. The beatles have easily documentable wide ranging influence. Next. - Taxman ^Talk 08:10, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Again you're being dismissive, ignoring the company's SAP Norge franchise. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 18:14, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
      • Look I don't have an ax to grind here, it wouldn't be the end of the world if we kept this (or deleted it). Your innapropriate repeated undeletion out of process is besides the point of whether this should be kept. I just don't see how it makes sense to have an article on a company so small and with no verifiably significant influence. And wtf is a SAP Norge franchise (the article doesn't say) and why would it matter?. - Taxman ^Talk 18:29, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
      • See SAP AG; it's an absolutely huge software house that specialises in workplace software integration. The franchise means that every company that licenses SAP's Business One product in Norway (the agreement is with SAP Norge) automatically gets SuperOffice. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 22:22, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
    • By my reading of what is actually written above, nowhere did Taxman base xyr argument on the assertion that xe hadn't heard of it. That argumentum ad Jimbonen is a straw man. Uncle G 15:52, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. For the policy-sticklers, they meet criterion one of WP:CORP: The company or corporation has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company itself., by significant and regular coverage in the Norwegian business paper Dagens Næringsliv [5] [6] [7], and in the leading Norwegian web-only business news source, imarkedet.no [8]. Sam Vimes 14:17, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I've added these to the article. InkSplotch^(talk) 18:00, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. An obvious keeper as a major Norwegian listed company with thousands of customers. -- JJay 18:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
• delete. Move content to no:SuperOffice. Avriette 00:07, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep' With thousands of customers I am sure this is notable to someone.--God of War 05:58, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. This rather small computer company is vitually unknown, even in Norway, and it receives almost no media attention whatsoever. Just being on the Oslo Stock Exchange does not make it more significant. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:03, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
  • What are those things Sam Vines linked to? Kappa 09:40, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Dagens Næringsliv is a business newspaper, so just about any company would be mentioned in it some time or another. Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:41, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
      • I think being covered in a business newspaper is enough to exclude tiny companies which no significant number of people care about, so WP:CORP is doing its job. Kappa 10:13, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
        • OK, you have convinced me. Does meet the WP:CORP guidelines so Keep. Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:28, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Guettarda 21:25, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
• It's amusing to see some editors criticising the "oversimplified notability guidelines" when this company actually satisfies the primary WP:CORP criterion. It's saddening to see that some editors think that locating independent secondary sources and adding them to articles is something that they only need to do in extreme cases, to satisfy "policy sticklers". The coverage presented by Sam Vimes appears to be non-trivial and not sourced from the company itself. Although it is not really in-depth coverage, such as can be found for Hewlett-Packard, with the additional support of the aforementioned FAQ this company appears to satisfy the primary WP:CORP criterion. Keep. Uncle G 15:52, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.