Jtseaton

Speedy deletion nomination of Old Black Bear Brewing Company

A tag has been placed on Old Black Bear Brewing Company, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing no content to the reader. Please note that external links, "See also" section, book reference, category tag, template tag, interwiki link, rephrasing of the title, or an attempt to contact the subject of the article don't count as content. Moreover, please add more verifiable sources, not only 3rd party sources. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content. You may wish to consider using a Wizard to help you create articles - see the Article Wizard.

Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. If you plan to expand the article, you can request that administrators wait a while for you to add contextual material. To do this, affix the template {{hang on}} to the page and state your intention on the article's talk page. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Hairhorn (talk) 03:40, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, Jtseaton, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines, and may soon be deleted.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

• Starting an article
• Your first article
• Biographies of living persons
• How to write a great article
• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Help pages
• Tutorial

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Questions or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! JohnCD (talk) 09:56, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Old Black Bear Brewing Company

Hii. Welcome, again. We don't do "watch this space" articles - if a reader comes to an article, s/he should find at least some serious content. If you want to take your time over developing an article, you can make a draft in your user space - see Help:Userspace draft for how to do that - and work on it until it is ready. Read WP:Your first article for good advice. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 09:56, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Article deleted

I have deleted this article again, for reasons explained on the talk page of its first author at User talk:Yunushasan#Old Black Bear Brewing Company. JohnCD (talk) 08:13, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Advice as promised

Wikipedia doesn't do a good job of explaining to new users what it is not for and how it differs from sites like Myspace which provide in effect an on-line noticeboard for people to write about themselves, their companies, their bands etc. I have this conversation so often that I have written User:JohnCD/Not a noticeboard as a short explanation.

However, I have thought of another way to put it, which I would like to try out on you. If you told the editor of the New York Times that you wanted to write in his paper about your brewery, its founders' high ideals, and the excellence of its beers, he would refer you to his advertisement sales manager. That is because, like every reputable newspaper, there is a clear boundary between the editorial content, which has the newspaper's name behind it and on which its reputation rests, and the advertisement/"advertorial" content, which is clearly labelled as such, and where the reader knows he is being addressed not by the editor but by an advertiser, and can take an appropriately sceptical attitude to what he reads.

Wikipedia is the same, except that we do not have any advertisement section, there is only the encyclopedia, the "editorial" part. So our attitude to someone wanting to write about his company is just as suspicious as would be the NYT editor's attitude if you proposed to write about your company in his editorial section.

One of the reasons why editing with a conflict of interest is discouraged is that authors who are close to their subject seem to find it genuinely difficult to adopt our neutral point of view, or to realise when they are writing promotionally. You probably feel that "desire to create a great beer that real people can not only enjoy, but also relate to... unique blend of malts giving it a rich, deep roasted flavor... a beer that will really hit the spot on those hot summer afternoons... " etc etc is just telling the world things it needs to know, but I invite to you to look at it with the eyes of the NYT editor seeing it in the editorial part of his newspaper. That's how we see it - blatant advertisement, to be deleted at sight.

We would prefer to wait until someone not connected with your company finds it interesting enough to write an article about, but if you want to go ahead, what you should do is:

• Realise that it will not be your article, it will be Wikipedia's article; other people can and will edit it, and you will not be able to control it. If you want your page which you control, Myspace is that way.
• First, think about Wikipedia:Notability, which is the criterion for whether something or someone is of enough general interest to have an article. It is not a matter of opinion but has to be demonstrated by showing "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject." Significant means more than just listing-type mentions; reliable excludes Myspace, Facebook, blogs, places where anyone can post anything; independent excludes the subject's own website, affiliated ones and anything based on press releases. The test is, have people independent of the subject thought it significant enough to write substantial comment about? See also WP:42 and WP:Notability (organizations and companies). Many organizations, particularly new, small or local ones, are not notable in Wikipedia's sense: this is not to their discredit, it just means they are not suitable subjects for an encyclopedia. If you cannot show notability, you will be wasting your time.
• Read:

• WP:Best practices for editors with conflicts of interest
• WP:Your first article

• Because of your COI, you should not post an article directly: go to Help:Userspace draft which will set up a draft page for you, with links to useful advice and a button to submit it to WP:Articles for creation, where either it will be accepted or you will be give feedback.
• When writing your draft, take great care not to be promotional. Do not think of yourself as writing for the company; you are writing for Wikipedia about the company. The WP:Verifiability policy requires that "any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source", so imagine a hostile critic looking over your shoulder saying, for any claim or glowing adjective: "Who says? Can you prove that?" Avoid "puffery" - see WP:PEACOCK. Do not try to sell yourself, your company or your beer. What is required is: no opinions, just plain facts, neutrally stated, cited to reliable sources.

You mentioned Sweetwater Brewing Company. It's a pity you happened on that one as a model, it is a pretty terrible article, though it doesn't go on about how wonderful the beers taste as much as your did. Unfortunately many of our 3,900,000 articles are not up to standard, which is why the argument What about that other article? is not accepted - if it were, we would have a slide to the lowest common denominator. I see it originated in 2005 and our standards have probably risen over time. It's not quite bad enough to nominate for deletion, if the claims about prizes are correct independent references could probably be found to show notability; what it needs is a rewrite, I have added some maintenance tags to encourage that, but I don't know when anyone will get around to doing it.

Regards, JohnCD (talk) 22:30, 4 May 2012 (UTC)