Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Techno Source (second nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus, defaulting to keep. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 00:08, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Techno Source

Previously nominated here. I closed that AfD as 'no result' because significant work was done to the article during the AfD, and neither of the two editors arguing for the deletion addressed whether it made any difference or not. Apart from the article's creator there were no other participants. At the request of someone else, I've opened a new nomination which will hopefully result in a clearer consensus on the finished article. The reason given for the original nomination was "advertisement, no evidence of notability". No opinion at this time. --Sam Blanning^(talk) 16:31, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I originally nominated, but didn't push it when the page creator made substantial improvements over the original page which looked like an ad.

I think the article is sufficiently well-developed to make it a tough call. I'm also going with No opinion. --Dweller 16:47, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

This ([1]) reference alone is sufficient to prove notability in my book. Strong keep. --Dweller 20:59, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

*Delete - my concern is the number of unsourced statements. If the statements are accurate and find sources then the company would be notable and I should be happy to change my opinion. BlueValour 17:02, 11 July 2006 (UTC) *No opinion - in view of extra sourcing. BlueValour 20:44, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

• Response to BlueValour: Hi, I am the original author of this article (my name is different only because I could not remember my old password). I think that the souces I found online will help allay your concerns about unsourced statements. I have filled in almost all the ^{[citation needed]} and even added some additional ones. Since this is my first article, I would appreciate help in formatting. On a related note, are articles from PR Newswire or any articles that have a company boilerplate OK to cite? If yes, I can source the remaining ^{[citation needed]} without a problem. Jay 23 20:20, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

• Company press releases can be used to a certain extent, but claims of notability and any other claims that a company would have an interest in not being impartial about would generally need an independent source to back them up. See WP:RS#Self-published sources in articles about themselves for more explanation. --Sam Blanning^(talk) 20:26, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• I have fixed your references so that they now work - click edit by References to see what I have done. The key claim that you need an independent source for is 'fastest growing'. BlueValour 20:31, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

• Keep - In view of the sources added, I think it's a keeper. --PresN 21:52, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per the above. References seem to bring it comfortably within WP:CORP. Tevildo 22:17, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - OK; I have cleaned up the article further and eliminated much duplication. BlueValour 22:31, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• Caution - sorry, but the quality of verification, i.e. whether the sources back up the article, is not 100%. Let's go through the sections of the article backed up by footnotes at time of writing. (After edit conflict - unfortunately the article was cleaned up while I was writing and the footnotes are now different, but the main claims and the references that try to back them up seem to remain the same in a different order. Please click on the above linked version to see what the numbering below corresponds to.)
  1. "benefiting from the recent success of its handheld Touch Screen Sudoku" - dubious. Backed up by a guide from a website for the elderly which mentions the product, but says that is "creating a lot of excitement". To me "success" equals "profit", not "excitement". There was excitement about the Titanic.
  2. "nominated for Toy of the Year in 2005" - verified, but not much of an assertion of notability. According to the awarding body's official site, "Representatives from any toy manufacturer or toy-related company are eligible to nominate products and/or companies for award categories defined in the T.O.T.Y. Awards Program Guidelines. TIA members may submit nominations free of charge." [2]

• Response to Sam Blanning: I looked into the award guidelines on the TIA (awarding body) site and it is a multi-stage process. From mid-September to the end of October in 2005, any toy company could write in a nomination for a product they believe deserves one of the 11 Toy of the Year awards. The TIA reviews all of the written nominations, tabulates them, and culls down the list to 5 nominees in each category. The TIA sends out this paper ballot to all TIA members who vote for the winner in each category. The winners were announced in February 2006. See the following site for reference:
  

http://www.toy-tia.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Toy_Industry_Association/toty/Award_Guidelines/Award_Guidelines.htm Jay 23 03:22, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

• 1. "featured in the celebrity 'swag' given out at the 12th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards" - verified. Nice bit of trivia.
  2. "one of the pioneers responsible for the rise of the 'retro gaming' market" - not verified. The "source" is the interview with the Executive VP, and you can probably interpret his remarks as saying that... but we can't rely on one of the company directors for such of a claim.
  3. Same claim as 4.
  4. "with... the Intellivision 10, Techno Source sold over 1,000,000 units". Questionable. Sourced here and here. The former reports that a spokesman for the company claimed they sold 1m units - well, he's probably not lying, but he's not impartial, and the key is verifiability, not truth. There are a lot of ways to generate a million sales, and getting a million people to pay you full price to own your product is only the most obvious one. The latter, from the same website, repeats the 1,000,000 figure as fact, without attribution to the spokesman. Maybe that means they've checked and it's true, or maybe they just left the source out that time. As I said, questionable.
  5. "and received the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval in 2004". Verified by the sources above. Ok, so it works.
  6. "Techno Source has sold more Intellivision games today than Mattel Electronics originally sold in the 1980s". Verified, probably. Sourced to thelogbook.com, who attribute it to "the original programmers of the classic Intellivision video games", so no reason to doubt this. But how much can that be, really?
  7. "Dr. Toy named Techno Source to its list of 100 Best Products for this assortment in 2005". Verified... but 100 every year is a lot of toys. Most of the companies on the list are probably not notable.
  8. "The company has also grown through the success of its handheld Sudoku and other puzzle games" - not verified, it's the About.com site again, which says that Techno Source sell handheld Sudoku, but nothing about 'other puzzle games', or that it's part of their growth.
• After all that, I'm still leaning towards a weak keep (see below), as the amount of third-party coverage means the company is probably worth an article, there just don't seem to be strong concrete claims to being a particularly high-growth company (of which there are an awful lot in the technology sector with less ambiguous claims to fame). The claims of growth and suchlike are ephemeral - if I saw even a modest sourced turnover or profit growth figure, I'd be much happier than with a hundred more websites - and it's somewhat dubious how much of an achievement the other claims are. There just needs to be a more rigorous approach to sourcing in the article, being more cautious about the claims to notability if necessary. I do urge editors to check the quality, not just quantity, of sources when they support keeping on that basis.
• And I guess selling 1,000,000 creaky old games is probably an achievement, even if the accountant in me is demanding "for how much? did they need to sell at a discount to move that many? did they cover overheads?" etc - after all, if it turns out they were selling them for peanuts and go bankrupt, we still cover notable failures. --Sam Blanning^(talk) 22:56, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
• Response to Sam Blanning: The original Intellivision sold 3.2 million games in the 1980s. Here's a press release for reference when Techno Source introduced the Intellivision 10 2nd Edition http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/02-10-2006/0004279335&EDATE= —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.142.148.51 (talk • contribs) .
  • From that PR: "Techno Source expects their line of Intellivision branded products to surpass..." (emphasis mine) Not only are press releases are not reliable sources for assertions of notability (if a company is truly notable, third-party sources will publish those assertions, and only after they've been through a fact-checking process), but that doesn't even claim that they have surpassed Matell, only that they expect to. --Sam Blanning^(talk) 01:09, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete fails WP:CORP for lacking non-trivial third-party articles. The references are an avowed press release, a couple of newsletters, a catalog listing, and a couple of blogs. I admire the dogged persistence of the author, and do not anticipate this will go easily. Tychocat 07:28, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Comment Have you (or anyone else saying delete) read this ([3])? This is a keeper and this Afd should be closed pronto. --Dweller 11:26, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Comment Thank you, yes, I did read it. It's trade-show glad-handing, by an association whose stated purpose is to put on trade shows for the people who pay it. I did not discount it as non-trivial, however it is scarcely the "multiple non-trivial published works" as suggested by WP:CORP, and its singular questionable appearance only points out the company cannot muster the necessary media notice to meet guidelines. Tychocat 16:23, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Comment I think you are trivializing this award expecially since Techno Source is not even a member of the TIA. The fact that Techno Source was nominated even though they are not a member seems to at least partially counter your point. Some would say that the Oscars are show business glad-handing, but that does not mean that the actors or actresses nominated are any less notable. See the reference here to search the TIA member database: [4] Jay 23 19:02, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

• Per Tychocat's reasoning above I now think that delete would be the better option. The claims to notability are just too shaky for me to support an encyclopaedia article on the company. --Sam Blanning^(talk) 16:30, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete The relevant standard is WP:CORP - as a private company it obviously can't pass the third (stock market index) test. The second test is inclusion of the company on ranking indices by well-known and independent publications - I don't see that in the citations of the article or in the evidence here. The first test is "The company or corporation has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company itself". "Been the subject of "means that the article, or a large fraction of it, needs to be primarily about the company. Coverage of products does not meet the standard. I find no coverage that meets this test. The artcile also reads like advertising copy. GRBerry 16:49, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
• Please also take another look at the article. I have added several more sources that show Techno Source winning several awards for their educational products in preschool as well as entertainment products for older consumers. Jay 23 19:02, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
  • As I said in my comment immediately before the request, the test is not whether there is coverage of the products (that would be relevant for an article on a specific product), it is whether there are multiple works about the company. GRBerry 20:49, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment This seems like a very difficult standard to attain for a private company because the very things that would make a company notable, such as sales volume, are the very things that are not publicly reported. In terms of notability, several sources I have cited state that Techno Source was one of the pioneers in the retro gaming market in 2003 when they partnered with Intellivision. Additionally, are not some companies defined by their products? In this case, award-winning products that have been well-received and written about by various publications for their entertainment and educational value should prove a degree of notability for the company that produces them.Jay 23 14:37, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.