Miranda at Gatik

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Happy editing! 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 17:10, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Gatik (June 6)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by JBW was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit after they have been resolved.

• If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Gatik and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
• If you do not edit your draft in the next 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
• If you need any assistance, or have experienced any untoward behavior associated with this submission, you can ask for help at the Articles for creation help desk, on the reviewer's talk page or use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

JBW (talk) 21:03, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello, Miranda at Gatik! Having an article draft declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! JBW (talk) 21:03, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Gatik draft

Hello, Miranda. I have read your message on my talk page. Normally, I answer messages where they are posted, so a message on my talk page I answer on that page, to prevent discussions getting fragmented and difficult to keep track of. On this occasion, though, I think it may be more helpful to you to have my comments readily available on your own talk page, so I am copying the message you wrote to me here, and answering it below. JBW (talk) 21:37, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi JBW, I hope you are well. I'm coming to you for some advice on the Draft:Gatik you declined. I was hoping you could provide me with some insight on which parts of the draft read like an advertisement so that I can move forward with bringing the draft up to Wikipedia's standards. Just to clarify, I have a COI which you can learn more about at my user page. Thank you for taking the time to review the draft. I really appreciate it! Miranda at Gatik (talk) 14:20, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

I will try to give you some kind of indication of where the problem lies, but first I will give a fairly long preamble explaining why I think my attempt may not be as helpful to you as one would like.

The draft you have created comes far closer to being what is needed for a Wikipedia article than the vast majority of drafts created by new editors. My impression is that you have probably put a significant amount of work into trying to produce what is considered acceptable for a Wikipedia article, and you have come close to succeeding. I have not checked the references in the draft, so I don't know how suitable they are, but apart from that the only problem I see is that the overall feel of the draft is that it was written to promote the image of the company. I have found over the years that in this situation is is, unfortunately, very difficult to convey to the writer of such a draft what the problem is, for, I think, at least two reasons. Firstly, you have not produced a draft which reads as outright marketing copy or blatant spam, for which it is easy to pick out a few glaringly promotional sentences; instead, we are dealing with a page of text no one sentence of which is blatantly unacceptable, but which as a whole gives a generally promotional feel. In this situation, I have found that picking out individual quotes can actually be counterproductive, because it may lead to the creator of the draft focussing on particular aspects of those particular quotes, rather than picking up the overall tone of the writing. Secondly, another thing which I have found over the years is that people who work in marketing very often find it extremely difficult to see that the "overall feel" of a passage of writing is promotional. In my early days of contributing to Wikipedia, I often used to think that such editors were deliberately being obstructive and uncooperative, because they refused to admit that they could see the promotional nature of writing which to everybody else read as blatant spam, often very much more so than what you have written. After some time, however, I realised that the people in question were being perfectly honest; it seems that if one works in marketing, one gets so used to reading, writing, hearing, and speaking marketing language hour after hour, day after day, for years on end, that one eventually get desensitised to the promotional tone of writing, so that one effectively becomes blind to such a promotional tone.

Of course, like everything to do with how human minds work, there is considerable variation in the extent to which these problems apply to different people. For the point about being blind to the promotional tone of wrting, the fact that your draft is only promotional in tone, rather than blatant marketing copy, gives hope that it may be less of a problem for you than for some people, but for the other point, that there are no glaringly problematic sentences to pick out, unfortunately the very fact that it is not blatantly promotional makes it more difficult.

OK, having given that (as I said above) fairly long preamble, here is my attempt to give some pointers to where the promotional spirit lies. The article consists almost entirely of a list of achievements, looking like an attempt to impress the reader with how successful the business has been. I have no reason to doubt that "The deliveries were made using autonomous trucks with no safety driver behind the steering wheel" is a straightforward statement of objective fact, and likewise "...making them the first company to conduct a middle mile commercial delivery route without a safety driver behind the steering wheel" and "The move made Gatik the first company to remove safety drivers from their daily delivery routes in Canada". Assuming that is so, it is impossible to fault any particular sentence, but when a page contains sentence after sentence telling us that the company did wonderful new things that others hadn't done, it is impossible to avoid the impression that an attempt is being made to impress us with how wonderful the company is. Then there are statements such as "In August 2021, Gatik secured $85 million in an investment round led by Koch Industries' venture arm Koch Disruptive Technologies". I'm afraid a reasonable response to that might be "So what?" Of course securing finance deals is of great importance and interest to people working for a business, but is the average reader of Wikipedia really concerned with where the company got its financing? Again, it is not that including that particular sentence is problematic, but rather that it and numerous other sentences each contributes a little bit towards the impression "whoever write this is trying to impress me with what a great job this company has done" - in this case how successful it has been in "securing" financing.

I hope those comments may be some help to you. Of all the ways one can contribute usefully to Wikipedia, creating new articles is probably the most difficult for a new editor, because it is the one which requires most understanding of Wikipedia's standards. I therefore usually advise new editors to get experience in other areas before trying to write new articles, but probably that advice won't appeal to you, as you are presumably here for the single purpose of creating an article about the company you work for. You are, of course, very welcome to work at improving the draft, and resubmitting it for review. If so, having once declined it, I will not review it again, but will leave it to someone else, so that you get an independent second opinion. JBW (talk) 21:37, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you so much for the detailed response. I really appreciate the feedback. I'm going to work on alterations to the article for resubmission. Miranda at Gatik (talk) 19:56, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Gatik (November 6)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed. Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reasons left by Timtrent were: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit after they have been resolved.

• If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Gatik and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
• If you do not edit your draft in the next 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
• If you need any assistance, or have experienced any untoward behavior associated with this submission, you can ask for help at the Articles for creation help desk, on the reviewer's talk page or use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 17:10, 6 November 2023 (UTC)