Talk:List of venture capital firms

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[edit] Don't fast-track delete

I object to the proposed fast-track delete, so I'm removing the template. If anyone really thinks the article shouldn't exist, they can go the AFD route.

IMO the presence of a lot of red links is not a good reason to delete a list page. Firstly, lists can give a systematic view of a subject category. Secondly, even if that category is not well-populated with articles (some firms may not even deserve full articles!), the list gives a useful indication of what is in the wikipedia and what isn't.

The U.S. venture capital industry is without any doubt significant enough, both on economic grounds and on cultural grounds, to deserve a thorough wikipedia survey-list of its participants.

I have no doubt that the quality of information on the page will improve with time; and even in the state it is in at the moment, with only the data it now contains, the page is IMO valuable and worth keeping. The only thing that gives me a little concern is that the page should be more transparently systematic, reflecting some stated criteria for inclusion/non-inclusion.

But it shouldn't be deleted, definitely not. Jheald 21:45, 25 July 2006 (UTC).

• 9 months later, do you still feel that way? As it stands, it's pretty messy. If nobody maintains it, it's mostly promotional. I'm re-marking it, on the grounds that if nobody can be bothered to revert me -- and please don't hesitate to do so -- it's probably never going to get fixed. I don't see the need for AfD yet. --Abu-Fool Danyal ibn Amir al-Makhiri 17:10, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

• Thanks for the heads-up. You've given the criteria: "This is an unreferenced, somewhat self-promotional list with loads of redlinks, which seems to be totally unmaintained".

IMO (as before) those are not sufficient grounds for deletion. WP lists with lots of redlinks are actually quite helpful, as they give WP a way to harvest and place content for which there aren't articles. Such lists provide raw material that can be gathered by bots into larger lists with capsule information about the members, cf WP's consolidated list of people, or a similar possible WP consolidated list of locations, or WP consolidated list of firms, which - precisely because they do include capsule information about redlinks - can be very useful eg for bots merging data from external sources; or just to give some idea of the depth of scope of WP coverage.

- Unreferenced. Probably by pure article count, something like 99.99% of WP is under-referenced. I would imagine even weighting by usage, at least 95% is seriously under-referenced. This shouldn't be a hanging offence for an article. If people care enough that it is underreferenced or misleading, they will complain, (or start adding references). If they don't complain or start doing anything about it, then its being unreferenced is unfortunate, but maybe not too severe in the overall scheme of things.

- Self-promotional. If it's encouraging people into making their first edits, that's not the worst thing in the world. Are these entries doing harm ?

The key issue, it seems to me, is this: Is this article providing such a skewed and unbalanced listing, that it is materially misleading to readers? If that is the case, then it is serious. Otherwise, I think that so long as there is some potentially useful information here -- even if the article is pretty much unmaintained, and I don't propose to keep it on my watchlist -- then I don't see the harm in keeping it. And if somebody does take it in hand, so much the better. Jheald 17:59, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Lots of pages may be underreferenced, and normally, I'm ok with it. And yes, of course we can tolerate redlinks. And yes, lots of WP pages are unmaintained. And sure, some people do a bit of self-promotion, so what.

It's really the combined whole of all these factors which gives me concern. Redlink: no internal source, nobody has bothered writing anything else on WP about this company. Unreferenced: no external source. Self-promotion: people adding entries have a commercial conflict of interest. Unmaintained: nobody else is paying attention. In short, I can't think of any check or balance that is in place here. I think this is pretty exceptional. I'm not going to proceed with any deletion process, but yes, I have concerns that we are misleading our dear readers. --Abu-Fool Danyal ibn Amir al-Makhiri 20:08, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Just stumbled by this page and would like to give me my 2c worth: I would love to have an article about venture capitalist firms in Wiki, so the article is a good thing. It's a "starter" article, so maybe we should ring the advertising bells and invite people to add content? Looks like we don't have critical mass yet for a clean-up effort, but once we've gotten enough content I believe this could become a valuable article. Many, many start-ups are considering venture-capitalists. Thanks, Jens Koeplinger 01:50, 6 April 2007 (UTC)