User talk:Jselanikio

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[edit] Deleted page "Episurveyor"

A page you created, or image you uploaded, Episurveyor, has been deleted in accordance with our deletion policy. In particular, it meets the one or more criteria for speedy deletion; the relevant criterion is:

Blatant advertising. Pages which exclusively promote a company, product, group or service and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic.

Wikipedia has certain standards for inclusion that all articles must meet. Certain types of article must establish the notability of their subject by asserting its importance or significance. Additionally, since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, content inappropriate for an encyclopedia, or content that would be more suited to somewhere else (such as a directory or social networking website) is not acceptable. See What Wikipedia is not for the relevant policy.

You are welcome to contribute content which complies with our content policies and any applicable notability guidelines. However, please do not simply re-create the page with the same content; it will be deleted again and may be protected from re-creation. You may also wish to read our introduction to editing and guide to writing your first article. If you have any questions, please contact an administrator for assistance. Thank you – Gurch 12:27, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Your article

Hi again. The main problem with your article was not the issue of whether the project was sufficiently notable or important to merit an article (although this is obviously a consideration), but that it did not really read like an encyclopediaic article. The article's deletion does not prevent you from re-writing your contribution and re-creating it; indeed, you are encouraged to do so. There are three main points you should consider to ensure your article meets our guidelines:

• Provide sources and reference your claims. See our policies on verifiablility and citing sources. The best sources are reliable sources, and preferably independent ones. Keep the article free of original research. If the project has been mentioned in the media, use this as a source; if it's mentioned in a mainstream online publication, even better – provide a link along with the reference.

• Assert the importance or signifiance of the subject. Explain how the project is notable, so that it meets our notability guidelines.

• Write an encyclopediaic article. Remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. There are many things which Wikipedia is not, but is often misuses as – a directory, for example, or a social networking site. Try to ensure the tone of your article reflects this, and that the article doesn't read like an advertisement or product description. In particular, make sure your article is written from a neutral point of view.

You may also wish to consult our full list of content and style policies.

I hope this information is useful to you – Gurch 19:55, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Advertising

Hi again; I understand your confusion here, apologies for not explaining.

Wikipedia gets several thousand new articles per day, and a good few hundred of these are attempts to promote organizations, products or services – often written by the marketing department of the organization in question. Many of them are easy to spot as they are copied-and-pasted directly from the organization's own website, or a product description page. Others are not so obvious, but are written in an unencyclopediaic way. For example, they don't link to other articles, they read like a product description, they fail to provide any sources (except sometimes a link to the organization's website), or they provide a perspective that is excessively biased towards the organization, product or service. Until a couple of months ago, these articles would not always be deleted; sometimes they would be removed after a discussion, or trimmed down to a minimal "stub" article with just a couple of sentences, or cleaned up to remove the above problems and conform to the guidelines I mentioned before.

Unfortunately, the increasing popularity of Wikipedia has resulted in an exponential increase in the number of "promotional" articles being written – at one point, a business was even set up to write articles for companies on-demand (the account they used was prompty blocked from editing). This somehow needs to be kept under control by a relatively small group of volunteers. We have found that the only way to deal with this influx of spam and other advertising is to delete unencyclopediaic articles concerning organizations, products and services that look as though they may have been written solely to promote that organization, product or service.

Wikipedia has recently shifted its focus from creating new articles to improving the quality of existing ones, in an attempt to prevent the project becoming unmaintainable due to its sheer size. The target now is not an increase in the number of articles, but an increase in the number of featured articles, and an increase in the average quality of existing articles. This inevitably means that the standards expected of new articles have risen.

However, if you bear in mind the points in my previous reply, and write an article that is reasonably in keeping with the guidelines, then it shouldn't be deleted (at least not without a full discussion beforehand). It doesn't have to be perfect – far from it; the whole point of Wikipedia is that anyone can improve articles. But now that quality, rather than quantity, is the project's main focus, sources, citations, and neutrality are crucial. Hope this helps – Gurch 20:45, 29 November 2006 (UTC)