Talk:Overstock.com

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Overstock.com article.

I'm changing this back to what we had posted a few weeks ago. Our intentions were to give factual and descriptive information about the company, and what is currently stated is a very vague overview - with half of the content referring to the company's lawsuit and Patrick's personal battle with Naked Short Sellers. (Although this may deserve a mention, it shouldn't account for half the content that describes Overstock.com - Patrick has his own article for this). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.116.113.10 (talkcontribs).

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[edit] Spam reversion

While some of what was just added by Overstockwiki improved the article, the vast majority of it read as an advertising spam for Overstock.com. At the same time, sections of the current article detailing inappropriate corporate behavior by the company were blanked. If anyone would like to sort through the new information and re-add it, I'd appreciate it, but the entire article went from "okay" to "yay overstock!" because of the totality of the edits. That is just not appropriate for a wikipedia article. ju66l3r 18:21, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changing it back..

I am changing this back to the page we created a few weeks ago. Our intentions were to give factual and descriptive information abdout the company - and what is currently stated is a very vague overview. Half of the content refers to the company lawsuit and Patrick's personal battle with Naked Short Sellers, and although this may deserve mention it shouldn't account for half of the content that describes Overstock.com. Patrick also has his own page where the lawsuit and his personal views can be discussed. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Overstockwiki (talkcontribs).

This is inappropriate. Please see WP:SPAM and WP:NOT. --Yamla 22:22, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

"inappropriate corporate behavior by the company" - in who's opinion? Yours, Yamla? What's "inappropriate? For a company to defend itself against illegal "behavior" against its stock? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.70.155.234 (talkcontribs).

[edit] Updates - suggestions

We would like to update the information on this page - could someone please give us guidelines as to what we are allowed to do? We basically layed the page out as amazon did, but it seems that when we do it it's 'spam'. Do you think that instead of reverting the page back to it's original version - you could simply edit/make suggestions to the offensive parts? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Overstockwiki (talkcontribs).

Given your username, advertising-like editing, and fervid interest with this article, it would seem that you may be employed or maintaining a self-interest in Overstock.com and that is cause for alarm for many other wikipedians as it is a violation of the autobiographical guidelines, since you will hardly have a neutral point of view. Beyond that, if you are the one that is adding information from the unsigned IPs as well, then you're sockpuppetting which makes it harder for others to trust that you're interested in fair discussion of the article. I'll add this article to my list of things that I'd like to do and I will see what information can be brought in while maintaining the importance of other facts that other contributors clearly see as important to maintain as well. ju66l3r 13:50, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Ju6613r: You are correct - only "neutral points of view" should be included in this article. Which eliminates Herb Greenberg's CBS Marketwatch commentary - which is his opinion, not verifiable facts, as a legitimate source to use for quotes on Overstock and Patrick Byrne. Greenberg is named in affidavits in a suit against his some of his sources at Rocker Partners and Gradient Analytics. Even if this were not the case, including his opinions, not based on any facts, is "spin", one-sided, and not approriate for Wikipedia, regardles if his opinion can be linked via a source to CBS marketwatch. Perhaps we should start adding Forbes articles to balance out Herb Greenberg's personal bias against Overstock and Patrick Byrne, or decide to not include any "commentary" from journalists that isn't fact based. --- regards, my soon to be blocked IP. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.70.155.234 (talkcontribs).

I can understand your consternation and will definitely be examining the relevance of Greenberg's comments for inclusion in the article, but for not I left them in because I haven't had the time to give everything a full review and it's best if the page remain fairly static to avoid "edit warring" so that everyone can look at the issues on the page while deciding the consensus for possible changes to be made. I'll add the appropriate tag to the article to note that this is being discussed on this talk page. In the meantime, as we discuss it here, please be sure to use the macro for adding your signature to the end of your comments on talk pages so that other readers can follow the flow of discussion better. Just type four tildes (~~~~) after your last thought and the information and timestamp will be inserted for you. Thanks. ju66l3r 17:20, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Paulfromatlanta 03:38, 10 February 2007 (UTC)I know that for neutrality Wikipedia is trying to not over-emphasize the fight over short selling but should't there be a reference to the lawsuit filed February 2, 2007? The suit is for three and a half billion dollars and is against some very big names (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns and Citigroup). Here's an article we could use as a reference that seems pretty neutral. I didn't want to just jump in and do the edit without discussion, since I can see that there has been a lot of back and forth editing already. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070202/overstock_com_lawsuit.html?.v=1

I added on the SEC dropping the Gradient investigation, which is all over the news this morning. There were a few sentences on Reg SHO that seemed out of place so I substituted with a briefer reference more suitable to an encyclopedia. There was a "POV" box at the top of the section apparently because of the lengthy sentences that I took out, so I removed the POV box. --Samiharris 15:26, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Online Chat

On their website today looking for DVRs, when a little note popped up that was imbedded in the page asked me if I wanted to talk with someone to get help. Click yes and it opens a small window where an Applet starts. Long story short, they seem to have some sort of program dedicated to talking with the site visitors and asking them what they're looking for. It's basically an intuitive advanced search (it couldn't be a person i was chatting with because it would talk in circles), probably for people who know very little about finding what they're looking for. 64.229.147.133 18:49, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Having worked with the company that did the support for that (before they shipped it offshore), it's called LiveAgent, and while it may have seen "robotic" it was probably some poor sod in Bangalore or somewhere like that. Bo-Lingua 06:39, 10 February 2007 (UTC)