User talk:Cr3

My compliments for creating The Viral Factory

I especially liked the edit summary you wrote when i was looking who created this article: Nervously creating first article - The Viral Factory

This has to be the FIRST article on a company today that does not need a SINGLE maintenance tag from my part. Properly wikified, referced, adhered to WP:NPOV, in one word, excellent work for a new article, especially if it is the first article you ever wrote. To tell you the truth, i am very glad to see an article like this. I had to remove about 90% of the articles on companies today, so this is actually a confirmation that it is still possible for people to write article about companies that doesn't have to be directed to the spam bin the second they it is created. Again, my compliments on an excellent first page! Keep up the good work :) Excirial ^{(Talk,Contribs)} 15:13, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Dispute over NPOV on article The Viral Factory

Relevant talk page

Hi Excirial,

I was super-pleased to see your comments at User_talk:Cr3 about my first article - what a great way to welcome me to Wikipedia. Thank you!
One of the points you made was that I had correctly made the article NPOV, but User:Skysmith seems to disagree, and has left a tag as such.
Would it be for the best if I rewrite portions of the article? Being new, I don't really know what to do when two major Wikipedians disagree.
Thank you for all your help! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cr3 (talk • contribs) 11:32, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

I read over the text several times and i indeed found some parts that may be called advertising under the closest scope of the rule. To be completely honest i would say the amount of "Possible advertising" is so small i don't support the decision to tag, but if you want to correct them i will be happy to give you some pointers. Note that i have been extremely stringent on compiling the list; The article is much better then most of the new company related articles, and only very little (2-3% tops) of those new articles have no sign of advertising whatsoever. Actually, quite a few long round articles are still quite advertising.

The list

• An in-house promotional viral which gained the fledging company its first viral success
• One of The Viral Factory’s first major corporate successes for a client was a campaign for the United States brand Trojan Condoms U.K / European launch
• This in turn led to an increase in global blue chip clients and further viral success with brands such as Microsoft, Ford and Coca-Cola.
• Ford ‘Ka’ — Due to the subject matter (animals supposedly dying at the hands of the product) and the way in which the viral was leaked to the public, this campaign proved a major accidental success for the client.

I think the tagger fell over the first three close succession lines when he was examining the article. Technically taken the word success is an opinion, and not a fact. If i would tell you that i am a successful self made businessman (Not true for the matter) a common reaction would be "Show-off". If i left the word successful out it would be no more then a statement about my profession.

There are two ways to solve this: The first one is simply leaving the word out altogether. The second option is to create a construction such as this one from the Primavera Systems article: "Primavera has been called one of the technology leaders in the Project Portfolio Management market by a recent research document created by Forrester[4]". This can be summed up as: Subject + positive message + notable source + actual link to that source. Note that this is a tricky construction that should only be used in case its required in the article as its closely related to WP:Weasel, along with the difficulty to find good sources to quote. In the Primavera article this construction was necessarily to establish notability, but the occurrences in this article seem to serve no major purpose so you might want to just remove them.

• An award winning animation created using the product to illustrate its functions.
• Numerous industry awards including:

This is actually how a marketeer would promote an article, and this falls under WP:Weasel. While the statement is completely true, a subtone of it is promotional. See, in this case "Award winning" could be replaced with "excellent" without changing the message (In this case award winning is used as a promotion). Second "Numerous industry awards" also indicates greatness by stating how great and successful the product is; It could be read as "We will now tell you how wonderful our product is, but since its so great we will limit ourselves to :". Or, to quote the example of WP:Weasel: "The New York Yankees have won 26 World Series championships—about three times as many as any other team.". Of course its completely true, but it is promotional :)

I hope you can do something with this rather long comment. I hope you didn't mind the length, but i wanted to explain why some things might be interpreted as adverts, as opposed to simply pointing things out and quoting rules :). Wishing you a happy wiki time, and with kind regards, Excirial ^{(Talk,Contribs)} 17:38, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Excirial - you are truly an excellent ambassador for Wikipedia - I couldn't have asked to stumble in to a kinder contributor in helping me set up my first article. I've made the changes suggested to The Viral Factory, and will continue to monitor and tweak it. Again, thank you so much for your help! Cr3 (talk) 09:49, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment! Would it be a cliche to say that i wished that each and every new editor could write such quality, and also cared for improving their articles so much? Other then that, there was one small thing i wanted to talk to you about. Apart from a NPOV tag there was also an uncategorized tag inside the article. I already added categories and removed the tag, but i thought you might be interested on how to add categories.

A category is nothing more and less then a way to group articles about the same subject. Adding categories can be done in two ways: Either by manually looking them up in a rather messy list and then adding them to the article, or by adding them with an extension to wikipedia which allows you to search that list. To add an extension, one can add it to his or her monobook. This Monobook allows a user to add scripts to his or her account that alter the Wikipedia interface. There are a load of scripts available, and they are generally quite handy when editing. For categorizing categorizing the HotCat script is pretty handy. Here is a small tutorial on how to add a script (In this specific example, hotcat):

• Navigate to Special:Mypage/monobook.js (Mypage will be replaced with your username)
• Edit the page and add: importScript('User:TheDJ/Gadget-HotCat.js'), then save the page;
• On either internet explorer or firefox press CTRL + F5 (Pressing F5 is a page refresh, and when used in combination with control it will reload the page iinstead of getting it from the cache)
• Now when you view an article, there will be a bar called categories under it which lists all the articles. There will now be + and - signs next to the categories. Clicking these allows for easy editing, removing and changing of categories. (Last line copied from the user manual at WP:HOTCAT

And done, you can now easily add categories! Excirial ^{(Talk,Contribs)} 18:29, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Hello from a b3tan

Hello, I just wanted to say hello (me = Pew Pew Pew! Lasers! on b3ta), and please be careful not to vandalise pages as you did here, as naughty things tend to reflect badly upon Wikipedians. Parrot of Doom (talk) 16:11, 13 August 2009 (UTC)