Reproduct

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Welcome to Wikipedia. To find out more about how to make useful contributions, take a look at the welcome page. To stay in Wikipedia, an article has to be about something notable, that is, of general interest. Click on Notability for an explanation of what that means. Also, it must give independently verifiable sources. Articles that don't meet these requirements are deleted. Follow the links below to learn more:

1. To find out more about creating articles, read the introduction, tutorial, and the guide to creating your first article.
2. Do not write articles about yourself, your company, your band, or your best friend - that's a conflict of interest.
3. Wikipedia is not an advertising service.
4. For experiments, please use the sandbox.

JohnCD (talk) 20:20, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Reproduct

A tag has been placed on Reproduct, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article seems to be blatant advertising which only promotes a company, product, group, service or person and would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become an encyclopedia article. Please read the general criteria for speedy deletion, particularly item 11, as well as the guidelines on spam.

If you can indicate why the subject of this article is not blatant advertising, you may contest the tagging. To do this, please add {{hangon}} on the top of the article and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would help make it encyclopedic, as well as adding any citations from reliable sources to ensure that the article will be verifiable. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. JohnCD (talk) 20:20, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

deletion

I see this article was deleted for advertising. I was kind of following along with something I saw for Swingline. In my thoughts Swingline is a company whose name doesn't really mean anything and the article on Swingline talks about the company. I was trying to do the same thing for Reproduct, but guess I missed the mark. Any enlightenment is appreciated!

I'm sorry to be slow to answer, but I saw your question fairly late last night.

I should say to start that I am in no sort of position of authority, so any advice I give is just from another user, though one who has spent some time on the "Recent Changes Patrol", which is less formal than it sounds: ordinary users who spend some time looking at newly arrived pages and tagging them if they need improvement or if they qualify for speedy deletion. Wikipedia's policy of letting anyone put in anything has advantages, but also the disadvantage that all kinds of rubbish floods in, and the RCP is one way we try to filter it.

The criterion for staying in Wikipedia is Notability, see Notability (organisations and companies) for more detail. Basically, is the company interesting enough that other people have written about it? That also meets the need for verification by independent reliable sources.

People writing about themselves or their company is regarded with suspicion as a conflict of interest because Wikipedia has to have a neutral point of view; it's impossible to ban it, because of the anonymity of user-names, but too promotional a tone is often a give-away, as is too protective an attitude to an article - one thing to remember is that once you have put an article in, you don't own it - other people can, and probably will, edit it.

Having said all that, I have to admit that a lot of articles get in which don't really meet the standard, and once in, unless challenged, may well stay. In arguments about deletion it's accepted that But what about article X? is not a valid defence of something that doesn't meet the guidelines. The article on Swingline that you quote might well get challenged - when you examine the references, they amount to one press release and one product entry in a catalogue.

What you did, basing your article on an existing one, is a good way to start. Other good advice is to make the article drily factual and avoid anything promotional in tone; and best of all, if you possibly can, find and quote independent external references to the company. Get the article as complete as you can before you put it in - you can prepare it in Notepad and try it out in the sandbox. The guide to creating your first article and the links at the bottom of it are good sources of advice. JohnCD (talk) 22:22, 15 December 2007 (UTC)