Talk:Angel capital

=Notes on this entry=

This entry, Angel capital, was a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to rewrite the venerable and carefully developed Wikipedia article Angel investor. After a significant amount of discussion among many of the long-standing editors of the original article, the decision was made to restore the original as the definitive Wikipedia entry on the subject, attempt to move over the useful new parts from this article, and then deprecate this one to avoid confusion.

As such, all of the long-standing editors with appropriate interest and domain expertise in this field are continuing to maintain the original entry, and this one for the moment is something of an orphan. If you have serious expertise in the subject and are interested in contributing to the Wikipedia entry on the topic of angel investing, it is recommended that you do so at Angel investor. Yorker (talk) 03:44, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

'''Please be aware that the single most common problem with any of these articles is the inappropriate addition of commercial links, or links to specific websites or business angel investment groups. These WILL be deleted, so please think carefully about additions.'''

Historical Discussion (from Talk:Angel investor What to do about new edits?)
Rather than reverting all of the changes, I am restoring the old article content to where it used to be, at "Angel investor" (which is a more common, central term than "Angel capital"). There is indeed a good argument for why one would have two articles anyway, because both the investment itself, and the people who do the investing, are notable subjects. But there's obviously a deeper problem.

The earlier incarnation of the article is incomplete, not fully sourced, US-centric, and has a number of other problems. However, it is basically a sound article in that it gives a lay reader unfamiliar with the subject a quick, fairly accurate understanding of what the subject is all about. I'm afraid the new version, though much more accurate, is problematic as a Wikipedia article. Obviously it needs a thorough copy-edit for format, and also the internal wikilinks. But it's also got no inline citation links, so it's very hard to verify. It has academic-style references rather than in-line citations, which aren't the favored way and make it hard to do collaborative work. Plus, even though the fine level details seem to be in order I think it's fundamentally off in its depiction of what angel capital really is. The lead section simply doesn't say it. What distinguishes angel investments from others is not that it's equity versus debt, but that it's money put up by small arm's length investors as opposed to owner/managers or larger, more formal funds. In the start-up world, particularly in tech, angels occupy a very specific niche in their relationship with company founders and with venture capital funds. It also reads like an essay and makes lots of claims that are dubious, or at best are not global. It makes no sense to talk about, say, only 2-3 percent of small firms demonstrating potential for rapid growth. That kind of statement is inherently POV. It's a judgment, not an encyclopedic summary of the world. If one sources that statement to a business book one is merely repeating someone else's business judgment, not repeating an encyclopedic fact.

I doubt the article in this form is viable. It is so far from where it needs to be content-wise that it's probably a dead end. Rather than trying to fix it, it would probably be better if someone could patiently take it piece by piece, sentence by sentence, find what is encyclopedic, relevant, and sourceable, and add that to the main article. In the meanwhile, I don't think we should dump the old article in favor of this version - we should have an article that can tell readers quickly and accurately what an angel invstor is, which is why I restored that version. Wikidemo (talk) 17:54, 10 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I think Wikidemo is bang on target with the above comments. Peter Kemball clearly spent a lot of time on his work, and he clearly means well, but unfortunately, as Wikidemo notes, he just 'doesn't get it', [sigh]. For all the noted reasons, I agree that it's a bit of a lost cause to try to edit, so, unless one of the other regular editors of "Angel Investor" has a problem with it, I am going to go back to the original (thanks, Wikidemo) and slowly try to bring over the good bits from the new article, with appropriate citations, editing, etc. Doing it a little bit at a time will allow everyone to follow along with the changes, and jump in with suggested edits. Once that's all done, I'll post notes to both articles' discussion pages with a pre-warning, and then edit "Angel Capital" to point to the new and improved "Angel Investor". Fair enough? Yorker (talk) 21:56, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Just as a followup note to those concerned about this page, I see that folks are beginning to get cute and edit in things like references to specific angel groups (such as the recent addition about Keirestsu Forum). Rather than constantly policing this page, I'm simply going to work on cleaning up the original article, as note above, and then we'll deprecate this one.Yorker (talk) 05:27, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Merger
Having two articles is a WP:POVFORK. I don't care which title it is at, but there is only one topic, and so there should be only one article. jnestorius(talk) 18:03, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
 * We considered this a while back (see section immediately above for how this came about) and decided against. It would be a bad idea, unless someone is going to take the time to rewrite a new article from scratch.  Angel Capital is a dead-end article, and essentially useless because it is mostly uncited opinion and is somewhere between a narrow picture and inaccurate.  Angel investor is a better article but still not very careful.  Simply transporting sections from one to the other will make it worse, not better.  We really should have a decent article because it is a broad and fairly important subject.  Wikidemon (talk) 19:39, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Agree completely with Wikidemon. However, jnestorius does have a rational point. But, as the talk page here makes abundantly clear, this article Angel investor is THE article. While we should indeed improve it (and I know I've promised to work on it, but have just been snowed under with other commitments, so it's my bad), we certainly don't want to merge it into the other one (or, as Wikidemon noted, try to merge that one into this one.) So therefore, since this is the strong consensus of the long-time editors of this page, I'm going to remove the tag from THIS article, but leave it in the other one. JNestorius, if you feel comfortable in recommending the Angel capital page for deletion, by all means go ahead, and no one here will disagree with you. Likewise, if you have the time and would be willing to try to move some of that one over here, then you're certainly welcome to do so, and we (a) would be appreciative, and (b) will try to edit helpfully. But otherwise, we'll simply try to improve this article over time (and I'll consider this a not-so-gentle reminder to get my rear in gear and start doing so :-). Yorker (talk) 02:35, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That's a completely unacceptable approach! Either merge the articles, redirect one to the other, or establish a difference. Since you say "Angel investor is THE article" I've redirected Angel capital to it. jnestorius(talk) 19:06, 29 June 2009 (UTC)