Talk:Chamber of commerce/Archives/2015

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on Chamber of commerce. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20120401025738/http://www.marseilleinternationale.com/?q=1559 to http://www.marseilleinternationale.com/?q=1559
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090605111039/http://www.glasgowchamberonline.org:80/page.asp?id=2 to http://www.glasgowchamberonline.org/page.asp?id=2

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 03:31, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Inappropriate External Links - Revisited
I removed three items from the External links section because they were in violation of the WP:EL guideline generally, and in this specific case violated an instruction placed in a WP:COMMENT. These were they: The first two links were obviously in direct conflict with this comment embedded in the section's markup:
 * INDONESIAN BENELUX CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
 * Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce
 * British Chambers of Commerce Quarterly Economic Survey

following similar violations in the past (apparently in one case by the same Rogers Park recidivist). The third link was in conflict too, but less obviously so. That comment arose from a previous discussion on this Talk page. The second part of that comment reflects the general Wikipedia content guideline for External Links (which is not because of the first part). The links were removed because they were not appropriate for the intended purpose of External links in Wikipedia. These are the specific WP:External Links guidelines used in that determination:
 * WP:ELPOINTS #1 Commercial sales links are prohibited (the Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce website sells membership).
 * WP:ELPOINTS #3 Links in the "External links" section should be kept to a minimum.
 * What to link: As the number of external links ... grows longer, assessment [using the following guidelines] should become stricter.
 * WP:LINKSTOAVOID #1 It is hard to see what unique resource these links would add to the final comprehensive article on this topic.
 * WP:LINKSTOAVOID #4 The repeat offender is obviously trying to promote his website.
 * WP:LINKSTOAVOID #5 The article on mobile phones does not link to web pages that exist primarily to promote or advertise mobile phones or service. The Rogers Park website primarily exists to sell Chamber of Commerce membership.
 * WP:LINKSTOAVOID #13 This guideline states that a website on a specific subject (such as a Chamber of Commerce serving one community or suburb) should usually not be linked from an article about a general subject (this article about Chambers of Commerce in general). It also prohibits links that are only indirectly related to the article's subject. The link to the British Economic Survey was only relevant to one sentence in the article and was at best only indirectly related to the article as a whole. Its parent organization (the British umbrella group of all Chambers of Commerce) would have been more relevant, but it would still represent a link from the general (chambers worldwide) to a more specific subset (chambers in Britain), and is thus inappropriate.
 * WP:LINKSTOAVOID #19 The British Economic Survey link WP:ELPOINTS is also duplicative, because it is mentioned (and cited) in the article. That alone prohibits it from also appearing in the "External links" section.

I deleted these links without initiating a discussion or waiting for a consensus because WP:ELBURDEN assigns the burden of justification to the including editor and further states:

"Disputed links should normally be excluded by default unless and until there is a consensus to include them". The Maintenance and review section of the guideline states:

"Inappropriate and duplicative links may be deleted by any editor; if the reason for the deletion is not obvious, please explain on the article's talk page." That's what this is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChrisJBenson (talk • contribs) 18:41, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Various issues
As of 25 December 2015, I feel that this article needs some work in the following areas:

Citing English sources

 * The references provided for the historical precedence of the Chambers of Commerce in Marseilles, France and Bruges, Belgium need to be replaced with standard Wikipedia cite formats and fields. The references currently do not provide a website name, a page title, author, publisher, date of creation or date of access. I do read French, and I could quickly determine most of those fields myself, but I did not make the changes. It seems they should be replaced in their entirety (in the English Wikipedia). The WP:NONENG guideline suggests using references to sources in the English language wherever possible. The guideline also recommends that if no equivalent English source can be found, an accompanying translation should be provided. But in that latter case I would have serious concerns about the cited content's reliability.

Spin the "See also" wheel

 * Is it really acceptable to have items like these in the "See also" section?


 * 1) All pages beginning with "Chamber of commerce"
 * 2) All pages with titles containing Chamber of commerce
 * 3) All pages beginning with "Chamber of commerce and industry"
 * 4) All pages with titles containing Chamber of commerce and industry
 * These seem un-encyclopedic to me, like margin notes in an early collaborative manuscript. Even if it is acceptable, wouldn't (1) be a subset of (2), (4) be a subset of (2) and wouldn't (3) be a subset of all three of the other lists (1), (2) and (4)?

Basics and title case

 * There appear to be some factual errors, even about basic concepts. It is clearly not true that local community chamber groups never consider the impact of laws at the state or national level. There are also some subtly disparaging remarks about trade associations (as not being trusted). This suggests a lack of impartiality. The article is inconsistent in its use of title case and sentence case for its topic, even within the same sentence. For one example, all four possible capitalization variants of a two word phrase can be found in a single section (City Chambers, City chambers, city Chambers, and city chambers, all make an appearance in the Chamber models section).

US C of C
There are several references to the United States Chamber of Commerce that assume it to be a chamber of commerce in the general sense. It is instead a right wing political lobbying group that hold some extreme views, for example calling for disbelief of the scientific data for climate change. It does not belong in this article (except as a disambiguation redirection).

A continent redefined

 * The first sentence of the Continental/private law chambers section seems to imply that in this context, "continental" means all Nordic and English speaking countries. I have a further concern with that section title ...

A legal model?

 * It was unclear to me why the word law appears in two section titles: Compulsory/public law models and Continental/private law chambers. The dead-link references hint at an answer. This is not about one particular model for a chambers of commerce but about efforts by CIPE to spread right-wing political machinery across the world through the propagation of right-wing economies. CIPE is a subsidiary of US C of C the subject of my previous concern.

I hope that I made it clear that there is a distinction between a chamber of commerce (which exists only to serve the interests of the constituent member businesses) and an American lobby (which exists to further a more general political agenda). With thanks, from ChrisJBenson (talk) 03:51, 26 December 2015 (UTC)