Wikipedia:WikiProject Business and Economics/BEF

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The Business and Economics Forum is a place where Wikipedia contributors with an interest in business or economics can "meet" and discuss issues of importance to the business and economics section of the encyclopedia. Our mission is to improve the quality of the business and economics section, make decisions on policies relevant to this section, encourage active participation by as many contributors as possible, and build a vibrant community with a pool of expertise that will match any organization, corporate or university.

If you have an interest in these matters, please contribute to the forum, and don't forget to bookmark this page so you can watch for future discussions.

Contents

[edit] Some of our best : Featured articles

The overall Wikipedia community has recognized some of our articles as worthy of being feature articles. They are:

In economics:

In Finance:

(none yet)

In Marketing:

In Human Resource Management:

(none yet)

In Management

In Accounting:

(none yet)

In Information Technology Management:

In International Trade and International Economics:

In Business Law

In Production and Manufacturing:

(none yet)

In Business Ethics, Political Economy, and Philosophy of Business/Economics:

(none yet)

Macro-economic overviews

See also: Wikipedia:Featured_article#Economics

[edit] Almost our best : Potential feature articles

If you know of an article that you feel could become a feature article in the future, list it below. Give a brief explanation of why you think it deserves this status. If you agree or disagree, your comments are welcome here. Detailed suggestions would be better put on the article's talk page. When we feel they are ready, we can list them on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates.

I decided to post this here before subjecting it to the feature article review panel :) I'm fairly new to Wikipedia so I'm not exactly sure it's suitable. I didn't create the page, but I expanded it greatly from Pgreenfinch's original article.Psychobabble

  • Model (economics) - A very complete article on an often overlooked facet of economics: the conclusion drawn can be no better than the model and the assumptions used in that model. It may be too difficult for the average reader, but because of its subject, it may not be possible to fully avoid that. - Taxman 23:42, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)
This is a good article. I just have two comments. Can we add more "types" of economic models to make the listing more complete? Also, can we make it more understandable to a non-economist? mydogategodshat 18:47, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Well what types did you have in mind that are not discussed? What portions do you think could be simplified for the non-economist without sacrificing clarity? As I mentioned this is an article that after the intro we can reasonably assume the reader must already have an understanding of the basic economic fundamentals. - Taxman 16:38, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)
I am not particularly good at modeling theory, but I was wondering where partial equilibrium models, general equalibrium models, dynamic models, comparative static models, matrix models (input-output models, Physiocratic models), game theory, econometric models, complexity models, chaos theory models, and behavioural economics models fit in the descibed categorization scheme? Should these be mentioned in the "Types of models" section? I noticed that the article now states that it is not attempting to give a complete taxonomy of economic models: Stating the scope and limitations like this is an improvement. mydogategodshat 17:53, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Bretton Woods system -- an important article to bring up to featured status. Unfortunately, it still has to be finished. I've been fairly busy lately, so I may still take too long. So it'll be great if someone gets around to this before I do. 172 07:03, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
This article definitely looks like a feature candidate now. --Vikingstad June 30, 2005 20:00 (UTC)

[edit] Not some of our best : Peer review needed

If you have come across Wikipedia business or economics articles that don't seem quite right, but are outside your area of expertise, list them here. Briefly explain why you have listed them. If you have expertise in any of the articles listed here, please help us by fixing them.

  • Office politics Some of this sounds unsubstantiated. Can someone with an HR background check this.
  • US generally accepted accounting principles: surprisingly meager. You'd never know there were any current controversies about this, or even that there ever had been.
  • International dollar - this smells like a hoax to me, but I'm not sure.
  • Social Security (United States) With the political debate heating up, and a number of unsubstantiated assertions being floated about the program, this article is going to need serious attention.
  • Purchasing power parity - important subject with somewhat incoherant discussion. Needs someone with a background in macroeconomics.
It's all about purchasing power adjustments to GDP figures - nothing to do with exchange rate determination or relative inflation rates. Some real ranting going on here.

[edit] Filling in the gaps : Articles needed

If you know of important business or economics topics that still don't have articles devoted to them, add them to this list. If you are able to, please create any of these articles. Any new articles should be added to one of the lists at the end of this page (so that people can find the article).

In Economics:

  • Rethinking Money and Banking, questioning assumptions and practices (issueing money as debt, charging compound interest etc)
  • Mathematical economics topics like slutsky equation, comparative statics, Envelope theorem, ...
  • Misc special topics like household production functions, shipping the good apples out, tenant farming vs renting land vs paying wage, ...
  • An overview or simply a list of economic theories in chronological order for easy reference
  • Cost theory
  • Exhange rate manipulation
  • Long-run cost and production functions
  • spatial economics
  • transaction cost analysis
  • optimum factor allocation

In Finance:

In Marketing:

  • strategies for mature and declining markets
  • innovation strategies
  • growth strategies
  • advertising metrics
  • online marketing metrics
  • gaps analysis
  • complaints handling
  • sales force management
  • implementation and control

In Management:

In Human Resource Management:

  • The One Minute Manager

In Accounting:

In Information Technology Management:

In International Trade and Economics:

In Business Law:

In Production and Manufacturing:

  • lot size
  • virtual prototyping

In Business Ethics, Political Economy and Philosophy of Business/Economics:

[edit] Filling out : Stubs to be expanded

There are many stub articles that need to be expanded, too many to be listed here for now. But please add to any stub article you come across : every sentence helps.

Accounting

Finance

[edit] Leaving Encyclopedia Britannica in the dust : Improving Wikipedia

If you have suggestions on how we can improve the business and economics section of Wikipedia, mention them here. Please be specific. Comments about each suggestion are also welcome. Please, no general rants or raves.

  • I would like to see better referencing in the articles. In general, I would like to see each article have a minimum of 2 Web references, 2 book references, and 2 academic journal reference. I would also like to see most of these references cited in the main body of the text. mydogategodshat 18:40, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)
    • Some of the topics that I would like probably don't have 2 web references. But the 2 journal articles and 2 book refences should be easy to get for any reasonable topic. Of course, if wikipedia is the only internet reference, then it will immedially get the attention of economists searching for the topic. Jrincayc 02:29, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
    • I would strongly second that, Mydogategodshat, at least for more references in general. I don't have access to journal articles that I am aware of, but books I can help with. Inline citations in bibliography style (Smith, 1868) will greatly improve the articles and their acceptance as well researched. We have to do better than the average Wikipedia article on citations if we want to stand out. - Taxman 19:43, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)

This topic is now being persued at Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards. The Forum for Encyclopedic Standards, a new voluntary association, is getting started on Wiki with a mission related somewhat to that of the Business and Economics Forum. Anyone interested should take a look. Thanks, 172 03:23, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I noticed that of the economics related featured articles, four have no references: Economics - Only external links, many good ones, but none properly formatted as references Euro - Only external links and “articles” London congestion charge - Only external links Labour economics - none at all! I think we can do a lot better than that. Please help by at least going through the external links and using them to fact check the above articles, then properly format them as references. Thanks - Taxman 18:53, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Valuable or voidable : Deleting articles

If you have noticed a business or economics article listed on the votes for deletion page, and you feel additional input would be beneficial, list the article here along with the date.

[edit] Transition to the new "category" system of navigation

A question arrises about the best way to structure the new category system: Should a root category include all the articles in one of its sub-categories? I've looked at the way others have done it and there is no consistency. For example, should Welfare economics and Gini coefficient be included in only the welfare economics category, or in both the welfare economics category and the microeconomics category. (Maybe they should be in the economics category as well?) Do we make decisions on an article-by-article basis, or do we set a consistent policy? I am starting to add category tags to the business articles and for now I am going to make the first two levels of categories inclusive, but all further levels exclusive. That is, the business category will contain all the articles in its subcategories. These subcategories, which include [sub-category:marketing], [sub-category:finance], [sub-category:management], etc, will also include all the articles in their subcategories. For example, [sub-category:Marketing] will include all the articles in [sub-sub-category:Marketing research], [sub-sub-category:Pricing], etc. Articles in the sub-sub-sub categories will not be included in the sub-sub-categories. I expect this structure to result in about 1200 articles in the business category, between 100 and 300 in each of the subcategories, and less than 100 in each of the sub-sub-categories and sub-sub-sub-categories. Any comments or suggestions? mydogategodshat 22:53, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

And here is another question. Do we keep the old "list based" system of navigation or the old "footers"? We could probably remove both once the category system is complete. Any comments? mydogategodshat 23:19, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)


As far as categories and subcategores, Wikipedia:Categorization states that:

"An article should not be in both a category and its subcategory, e.g. Microsoft Office is in Category:Microsoft software, so should not also be in Category:Software. Note: An exception would be an article that defines a category, and so is itself a parent article of subtopics as well as one in a series of like topics"

I think this policy should be enforced here; I don't think an entry should be tagged cat:Business if it is more accurately tagged cat:Finance (Finance is a subcat of Business). Feco 23:37, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Issues : Colour in diagrams

Several times now, an economics article has been listed as a candidate for feature article status, and the issue of diagram colour and style has come up. Some low resolution or black and white monitors do not display the diagrams in the same way as other monitors. How can we solve this problem?

exerpt from supply and demand

To me, those without color support are not a reason to not make an improvement. The color does make them easier to see. - Taxman 16:34, Jun 24, 2004 (UTC)
It seems an improvement to me, both in clarity and general eye-candyness. — Matt 23:40, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I also prefer to see some colour. Just one caveat: When labour economics was a candidate for Feature Article status, it started with colour diagrams, but we had to remove the colour because there was an objection. mydogategodshat 02:59, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Some people will object either way. Best thing to do is to have the color diagram but have one of the lines have dashes in it so that even if it was printed b+w, the distinction could still be made. - Taxman 11:57, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)
An alternative is to have two versions of an article, one with black and white pictures and one with colour. mydogategodshat 18:12, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The color supply and demand diagram fro the econmoics article is made with xfig a GNU/Linux utility. Variants for the other diagrams should not be too hard to make (I',m too lazy to, for now, but anyone that has used xfig is welcome to have my sources).CSTAR 21:14, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Issues : Dispute resolution

Should the business and economics forum get involved in resolving disputes between contributors? When a postKeynesian and a monetarist are engaged in a heated dispute, is there any value in having a third party involved that is familiar with the issue?

[edit] Issues : Cleaning up our footers

The closing section of many of our articles need to be cleaned up. Some have 1) a See also section, 2) a References or other sources section, 3) a related article lists section, 4) a "footer" section, and 5) a category section. Some of these are Wiki boxes, some are HTML charts, and some are text lists. What can we do to clean this up?

We could eliminate some of them. Or we could combine them all into one footer. mydogategodshat 17:08, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Issues : Companies in a box

The project to use infoboxes to provide basic stats on companies came to an abrupt halt when we started talking about maintaining and updating the stats. See the discussion here. Can anyone think of a way of making this idea work?

[edit] New and improved

If you have recently created a new article or done a major rewrite on an existing economics or business article, you may list it here (along with the date of editing). This makes it easy for others to find out about these changes and make additions or corrections. If you have comments (positive or negative) about any of these articles, you are encouraged to give them at either the article's talk page or at the author's talk page.

[edit] Recommended policies and guidelines

Wikipedia has few rules. This encourages free expression and diversity of style. The guidelines that follow are not intended to be anything more than recommendations. It is up to each contributor to decide whether to follow the guidelines or not. For a business and economics guideline to be listed here, it must first be discussed elsewhere on this page (the Business and Economics Forum page). The discussion that leads up to each recommendation should be archived on the talk page and a link provided. If you agree or disagree with a guideline, your comments are welcome.

[edit] Intended audience and writing level

Most well written articles start with the basics and build in complexity with each additional section. This allows you to write for a range of potential readers. A good heuristic is to write the first paragraph as if you are talking to your grandmother (if you are a grandmother write as if you are talking to your grandchildren). Use simple everyday terms and avoid complicating details. In the middle section write for the average educated reader with only elementary training in economics or business theory. In the last section write for the economics or business specialist. It is in this section that calculus, stats, and advanced theory is appropriate. The length of each section will very depending on the subject matter and the intent of the writer.

Not all topics are well suited to this "ascending difficulty model". An alternative approach is to write more than one article (for example, a basic article, a practical article, and a theory article), and provide links between them. An example of this method can be seen in logit (theory) and logit analysis (in marketing) (practical).

The discussion of this topic can be seen at Wikipedia talk: The Business and Economics Forum#Who reads this stuff anyway?

[edit] Getting around : Navigating the business and economics section

The following is a set of lists that contain the business and economics articles. Using them, will enable you to get to any business or economics article with just two clicks.

[edit] Resources

  • http://eh.net - the Economic History Network. Notice in particular the Encyclopedia, the "How much is that?" value/inflation calculators, book reviews- mailing lists, even. I'm the technical administrator for the site. - Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 02:20, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Quote

It has long been my view that there is no economic process or problem that cannot be put in clear language - can not be made accessible to the literate and interested reader. Such effect does not, however, justify error or oversimplification. John Kenneth Galbraith "A Journey Through Economic Time"

[edit] Economics, Business & Finance Portal

There's a discussion taking place Wikipedia Talk:Browse by Category about developing a new portal that may be linked off the main page for Economics, Business and Finance. If anyone has any thoughts, join us. We don't want to recreate work already done, but it seems like these subjects could benefit from more organization. --Ronreed 03:47, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Done already. see Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Business and Economics. pamri 17:24, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Abandon

  • Yes - We don't need both. mydogategodshat
  • Yes. We can use the wikiportal and create a wikiproject for business and economics. pamri 13:50, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
  • I agree. Ideally, whatever's here would be integrated there eventually. I don't know how much of that has been already done. Maurreen (talk) 18:18, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Subcats

Many articles in Category:Business, Category:Economics and Category:Finance would be better in subcats (but I haven't checked for a while. Is anyone interested in helping with this? Maurreen (talk) 18:18, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I just made a similar post over at Category_talk:Economists. I agree on the need to subcategorize but am interested in your thoughts on how best to organize the subcategories—for people, is by nationality the best way? thanks, Afelton 14:44, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Business and Economics

Please participate in the newly created WikiProject Business and Economics and help in improving business & economics related topics. pamri 12:35, August 30, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Revival of this Forum?

I'm a bit astonished to find a forum with the last entry from 2005. I'm interested in discussing projects in business and economics and just published the new article on economy. I would be glad to hear from members here who are still active.--Jörg Sutter 17:19, 3 February 2007 (UTC)