Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Delrina/archive1
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- Self-nomination. A fairly exhaustive article on the company that was best known for being the creator of the original WinFax product, but influential in many other fields. It is well researched and backed by appropriate references, and contains information not collected together in a cohesive format anywhere else that I have been able to find. Have found interesting and representative screen and product shots to illustrate the article. Has already gone through a peer review and have plugged most of the more-pertinent dead links, as well as other suggestions. It is what I hope is an interesting slice of software corporate history, for which there are not too many examples on Wikipedia (at least when it comes to "dead" companies). - Captmondo 00:02, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
- Support. Very well done. The only quibble I have is the large amount of red links around the second half of the article; having those cleaned up would be nice. Otherwise, excellent work! The Catfish 03:18, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
- Reluctant oppose. Good-looking article I'd be happy to support if it had some citations to printed works, e.g. articles in the business press. PedanticallySpeaking 16:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
- A point I hadn't considered, and I can see the point. Ideally a range of sources is a good thing, not just those found on the Web. Guess I'll have to head down to the reference library sometime soon and brush up on my microfiche-reader skills... ;-) Captmondo 22:12, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
- But in this modern age, printed works are searchable on the web! Try Google Print... I've only glanced at the results, and they're not all relevant, but you may be able to tease some citations out of there. — Haeleth Talk 23:32, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
- Thanks for the suggestion Haeleth! Have managed to find about four *relevant* print links, which I will be adding to the article in due course. I was really surprised, since I doubted very much that there was much out there that wasn't strictly product focused that would be in print. Captmondo 10:44, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
- Done. Print references now provided. Captmondo 03:26, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
- Support. A fully-written article on a relatively significant company. Amazing that the company was essentially based in my backyard, and I used their products, yet I've never really heard of them. This article just helps to prove my ignorance! -- user:zanimum
- Object I think it's a great article for content. It seems to provide a thorough profile of a notable software company. But I have two points:
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- Writing needs cleaning up - Overall, it's OK for readability, but there is quite a bit of loose construction: a couple of typos, word redundancy, etc. The whole thing needs a once over, and particularly the lead paragraph should be tighter.. Examples of sloppy construction:
- Over time, parts of the company would be sold, such as the sale of Delrina's Group Electronic Forms Division to JetForm in September 1996.
- Other than WinFax, perhaps the other best known product Delrina released was its series of screensavers products. The original purpose of any screensaver product was to ensure that there would be no phosphor burn-in of images left on a CRT based screen of the time, but Delrina added sounds and some interactivity with its series of screensaver products, arguably qualifying it as an early form of multimedia.
- Were there any common-industry-knowledge issues/controversies or other negatives associated with Delrina over its history? - I ask because, the flying toasters and Opus aside, this is a notably clean, trouble-free corporate story. Was a decision made to write this strictly on a "business facts" level, omitting other "newsworthy" stuff that may be of interest? For example, big companies like Symantec often bought out smaller competitors or would-be competitors to kill off the competition. Was there controversy around the sale...? Or, was there a notable problem with, say, a version of WinFax that people might remember? I'm not looking for, or expecting "dirt", just wanting to be assured that this isn't a selectively clean version.
- --Tsavage 00:35, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
- The first point is well-taken -- I am my own worse copyeditor. ;-) The second point is harder though, and while I don't doubt that there was controversy, I couldn't find it. I don't doubt that there were bad reviews and a few problems with the software *are* noted, and the relatively well-known court case over the screensaver is noted. At some point this becomes more an exercise in journalism than in encyclopedian-ism, and in some cases absence of dirt may simply mean that there were none to be found (or at least, that was publicly documented -- this should not be a place for conjecture).
- Will spend some more time with this article before resubmitting as a FAC and see what I can find by way of further info, and will try to clean up the text as well. Cheers, and thanks for the constructive criticism. Captmondo 21:39, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
- Thanks for the reply! I just skimmed the article again (I read it the first time), and it does seem to be THOROUGH. It's the kind of piece I'd like to find if ever I needed to look up Delrina... Once the copyediting is done, should it be resubmitted to FAC, for what it's worth, I should have no problem with supporting it. Later on... --Tsavage 22:21, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
