Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/NTA (company)


 * 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 move to draft namespace. Note that in a later comment, User:DGG stated that they support a move to Draft namespace, and the "weak keep" by also suggested this move as a part of their !vote. As such, to a reasonable degree, overall consensus is to draftify. The article is now located at Draft:NTA (company). North America1000 07:40, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

NTA (company)

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Fails CORP. Only reliable third party sourcing appears to be the region's main newspaper. No indication of the widespread covstage required under Corp. John from Idegon (talk) 04:12, 29 October 2015 (UTC) John from Idegon (talk) 04:12, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete. Non notable private Energystar certifying agency, one of the about 20 such enterprises. No evidence it's the leader or has the major market share. As would be expected, no refs for notability: just press releases and mentions.  I do not consider that news article reliable for notability : local newspaper articles on local companies are normally undiscriminating, and normally written as if they were a press release. After extensive work of several of us trying to help, no better refs have been identified.  DGG ( talk ) 04:19, 29 October 2015 (UTC)


 * I work for NTA, so I am COI encumbered. Several refs were found over the last day or so, and I will be proposing them for addition to the article. The newspaper articles, however, I am still not convinced they are 'press releases' as they are news articles, not "paid" advertisements in well established local newspapers. Wscribner (talk) 12:35, 29 October 2015 (UTC)


 * We are a Third Party Certification agency. We are registered to do business in all 50 states.  We are the largest of 5 private companies approved by the federal government to inspect manufactured housing which is about 10% of the building industry.  We currently inspection 40% of all MH homes being produced in the United States.  There are over a 1.5 million homes currently in the US with our name on them.  We also inspection almost all homes produced in the US and exported to Canada.  We have also written an engineering design guide for the SIP panel association and certify a majority of their panels which build about 2% of the building industry.  We are involved with HUD and FEMA every time there is a national disaster. If a company that is involved with 10% of all homes in North America is not noteworthy because they haven't screwed up enough to get in the newspaper then I agree, you should delete our page.  Dtompos (talk) 13:09, 29 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Move to draft space. I think it is difficult for a company to garner mainstream media attention when that company works in a specialized field of industry serving industrial clients rather than consumers. Once such a company does get attention in one media outlet, then often more coverage follows. I can think of other examples that we probably should have articles on but don't: A world-leader supplier of industrial screws (TR Fastenings), India's largest maker of buttons for clothing (Jindal Buttons). I've always felt that WP:GNG or WP:CORP could be expanded to include articles about companies that have demonstrated significant industry reach or influence, even if not covered in the mainstream press. I have objected to coverage in trade publications as an indication of notability, but in some cases that may be the only coverage available. ~Amatulić (talk) 17:42, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
 * And all that has absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand. The discussion above should be at the appropriate guideline talk page.  John from Idegon (talk) 18:50, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Wrong, it has everything to do with the case at hand. Sources below have been identified, and insofar as some are weak or quasi-independent, the relevance of those sources as they pertain to notability must be considered carefully. ~Amatulić (talk) 20:21, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment, I've been working with Wscribner and Dtompos to train them in the wikipedia ways, and fill them in on the policy-stuff they've been missing. They are responding well to gentle treatment, though since they are not WP:ADDICTED just yet, it has been slow going.  Under the duress of AfD, they have flooded in a few dozen additional potential-refs (besides the South Bend Tribune piece from 2009), which I will evaluate to see if any of the new stuff passes WP:RS muster.  I personally have no COI, which means I have been able to help them learn the ropes here on the 'pedia, but also of course means I have little clue how to sort the wheat-refs from the chaff-refs.  I suspect there are probably offline refs on microfiche, but do not have access necessary to WP:PROVEIT at present.  I will comment further towards the end of this AfD, but if anyone would like to follow along with progress, most of the preliminary-evaluation-work is happening at User_talk:Wscribner.  Thanks, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 04:15, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep, or failing that, Pagemove to Draft:NTA_(company), on the basis of the following extant sources:


 * . This is the local newspaper piece from 2009, which User:DGG is characterizing as having "the content of a press-release". But he does not mean, that the newspaper article is a regurgitated press release, written by NTA, as is often seen.  This is a legit independent publisher, and a legit independent author, writing their own coverage rather than parroting.  One can argue that it is 'routine' coverage of a local business, but characterizing this as a 'press release' is factually incorrect.  It is at worst a reworked rewrite of a press release (cf regurgitation which involves no fact-checking), and at best a decently-in-depth WP:RS, albeit of limited WP:GEOSCOPE.  Taken in concert with the other sources, which show broader geographical impact, I think this newspaper piece helps count towards wiki-notability, and certainly contains plenty of useful boring dry just-the-facts material.  It is not a paid advertisement, but earned media coverage.  Simply because this media coverage is about a corporation, and their activities, is *not* a reason to belittle the author and publisher as Not Truly A Source, which would set a dangerous precedent (cf Eminem and Hannah Montana and other celebrities who are Not Truly Notable in a traditional academia-only encyclopedia but have *oodles* of press-coverage about their "business" of entertaining people). Depth is ~25 sentences specifically about NTA, or ~15 sentences eliding direct quotations.


 * . This is an academic-journal from 2012, paid for by the wood-supplier industry (NTA is in the broader construction industry but not in wood-supply: they test and certify some kinds of wood-based products for residential and business construction work, plus write some of the specs which become municipal building-code-laws, specifically the Structural Insulated Panel spec-slash-code).  Editorial committee of this journal is around ten PhD-and-or-PE folks, so prolly counts as peer-reviewed, and in any case the ISSN shows the publication is WP:RS despite not having a bluelink as yet.  Depth of 5 sentences specifically about NTA is borderline-helpful towards demonstrating wiki-notability.  Same coverage-event was mentioned by trade-rag of the American Plywood Assn.  Subject is the work being done by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) committee on Wood, with a subcommittee on Lumber && Engineered Wood, creating a sub-subcommittee chaired by E.Tompos of NTA_(company) (cf concrete-shear-testing below) to write some ASTM specs about Structural Insulated Panels (roughly:  two sheets of plywood sandwiched around a foam-insulation core at the factory and used to create highly-energy-efficient semi-manufactured homes).  Official ASTM news-release from Oct'12.


 * . Has 59 cites on scholar.google.com, and is in a peer-refereed archival publication.  This piece is a seven-page 2002 follow-up on the 80-some-page master's thesis (Effectiveness on The Shear Strength of Reinforced Concrete Beams) that E.J.Tompos published as sole author in December 2000, which itself has three or four cites (in scholar.google.com).  E.J.Tompos was VP at NTA when the piece with 59 cites was published, and still is; because the firm is a small business, co-founded by his father and currently under his brother User:Dtompos the CEO, the impact of the family-members on the construction industry (or in this case the Civil Engineering profession as academia prefers to call it) has a direct correlation with the topic of NTA_(company).  And although one of the co-authors of the piece on concrete construction was named Tompos, per WP:SCHOLARSHIP the academia-based co-author and the refereed journal process make this piece count as WP:RS rather than as WP:ABOUTSELF, despite one of the co-authors being Tompos of NTA.  That said, I don't see this piece as counting significantly towards wiki-notability of NTA, since it has little depth specifically about NTA-the-company ("...ACI member Eric J. Tompos is an engineer with NTA, Inc., Nappanee, Ind. He received his BSCE and MSCE from Purdue..."), but it does count towards the wiki-notability of the Tompos family, showing their impact on the field of construction, and it is pretty common wiki-traditionally to count coverage of the founders as being related to coverage of their corporation, and vice versa, when wikipedia only has an article about *either* the corporation *or* the BLP (by contrast see Larry Ellison and Oracle Corporation which are independently wiki-notable).  In cases where the founder is more wiki-notable than the company, AfD bangvotes will often recommend a merge of the corporation-cites into a section of the BLP-article, and in cases where the corporation is more wiki-notable than the founder, the reverse up-merge is typical.  In this case, we have an article about the corporation already, and a subsection about the employees at NTA_(company), which is where this academia-cite about the concrete beams will fit.  Besides the 59 cite-count in academia, e.g. , the 2002 journal-paper in question was also used by professors in graduate-level Civil Engineering coursework. The precursor, the fellowship which led to the master's thesis of 2000 also got some intra-university press-coverage:    E.Tompos is now a professor at Trine University (Warsaw, Indiana).


 * The brother of VP-and-part-time-professor E.Tompos, is the CEO D.Tompos (wikipedian User:Dtompos), who serves on various committees that directly advise federal government agencies on rule-making. Most of NTA's everyday work is related to municipal and state building codes, which they play a small partnership-role in writing&specifying, but they are also involved with influencing federal executive-branch regulations.  MHCC member at Dept of HUD since ~2010, per  plus //etc, and as of 2014/2015 is now vice-chair (and sub-cmte-chair).  Also a member of the MHWG for the Dept of Energy, plus one of five firms named (of fifty participating) in a 2010 public-private Dept of Energy partnership.  Most of these are WP:NOTEWORTHY mentions because they lack depth, but in aggregate they will suggest wiki-notability to some wikipedians.


 * Various other WP:NOTEWORTHY mentions, which don't particularly help wiki-notability, but which do help flesh out the overall picture. Newspapers:  The Elkhart Truth'09, and Goshen News'09.  Trade-rags which look non-regurgitated: , .  Trade-rags which are more borderline:  ,  (but this one was listed in news.google.com so maybe WP:RS?), ,.


 * Note that most of the sources listed here have not been integrated into the article-prose yet, since I'm trying to train Wscribner to use edit_request for that effort (and to write wiki-neutral prose). There are some other sources at the article already, but the majority are only quasi-independent (ICC/IAS stuff about ISO certifications for example).  I suspect per WP:CRYSTAL that offline sources exist, but do not have them available for this AfD.  Searching for online sources is complicated by the WP:TLA problem (it helps to specify -nanoparticle -nitrilotriacetate -nitrilotriacetic in searches).
 * If this AfD ends in bangkeep, or equivalently as 'no consensus' which is probably closer to the truth in that wiki-notability is unclear at the moment since digging for && evaluation of sources is only partially completed, I intend to continue helping the COI-encumbered folks Wscribner and Dtompos seek additional refs, at which point a second AfD would likely give us a better idea of whether the firm is truly wiki-notable, or if it is WP:NotJustYet. Should the close not be bangkeep, I recommend moving the contents of NTA_(company) article to draftspace, and redirecting the mainspace pagetitle to Listing_and_approval_use_and_compliance  whatever the most appropriate leaf-node article is .  75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:29, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I would support a move to draft space; I would absolutely not support a redirect of a specific company to the page for the industry, which in my opinion is even worse than having an article--it gives them a wildly undue importance, as if they were the only significant company in the entire general field on an international basis, which they are not-- Compare them with the truly famous organizations which are listed as external links on that page. It makes as much sense as redirecting a not quite notable restaurant to Food.   DGG ( talk ) 17:42, 4 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm pretty sure WP:REDIRECT disagrees with your take on WP:UNDUE: "Redirects aid navigation and searching".  Redirects are purely meant to help the readership find what they are looking for; if they are looking for "NTA_(company)" (which is by definition exactly how they will have found the redirect in question), then they want the wikipedia article about the firm, or failing that, they want the wikipedia article which has a sentence/paragraph/subsection about the firm.  If we stipulate that trade-rags must be ignored -- though as Amatulić says this isn't always the proper course -- then known NTA refs make the company borderline-wiki-notable per WP:42.  There are one-and-a-half in-depth non-trade-rag refs when modern wiki-tradition demands three.  I see them as a weak keep, mostly due to the coverage by vastly different publisher-types per WP:SOURCES: newspapers / academia / governmental / industry.  Cert-orgs and standards-writing-bodies are a multiplier-factor, in any industry.  That said, even if the end result of this AfD is draftify, certainly the extant refs about NTA make it WP:NOTEWORTHY, and thus per WP:PRESERVE enWiki ought to have a sentence/paragraph/subsection of some extant leaf-node article, and a helpful-navigational-redirect thereto.
 * Question being, whether I've selected a good redirect-target. Your analogy of mexican-restaurant-in-Food seems pretty off-base to me; I actually worked hard to find a proper leaf-node article!  :-)      Undue weight would be putting the sentences in the wrong place ... and since you didn't say what you thought the *right* place was, I'll explain my own recommendation for a plausible redirect, to give you an idea of why I picked the target you disliked.  On general principles, my view is that enWiki is aimed at post-baccalaureate readership, but we write in simple straightforward 8th-grade English because not every university graduate among the readership is English-as-a-first-language.  Thus, I don't consider "Food" to be a top-level article, and I definitely don't consider Listing_and_approval_use_and_compliance to be a top-level "industry" article either; it is a subsidiary-field that attaches to a proper parent-industry (construction for NTA).  I would categorize NTA in the following hierarchy, starting at something I actually do consider a top-level encyclopedia-article:
 * Engineering > Civil Engineering > Construction > Housing > International Building Code > Certification listing > Listing_and_approval_use_and_compliance > Businesses of Greater Nappanee, IN > NTA_(company)
 * In other words, I don't consider NTA to be in the "cert industry" but rather in a special niche of the construction industry. (By contrast, UL is kinda-sorta in the consumer device industry; I've never heard of Intertek before this month, actually, probably since they are a UK firm.  NSF International and QAI are in the food-industry, see the restaurant-analogy below.)  For comparison purposes, your hypothetical Mexican food restaurant I would put in a hierarchy like this, again starting with a top-level encyclopedic article that is a multidisciplinary field of inquiry:
 * Science > Biology > Agricultural Science > Agribusiness > Agricultural marketing > Food industry > Food marketing > Restaurant > Mexican restaurant > Businesses of Greater Campbell, CA > Jalisco_(eatery)


 * But in any case, my own eccentric hierarchy-system is (obviously) not set in stone for all of enWiki. I certainly don't insist that Listing_and_approval_use_and_compliance is the only possible leaf-node redirect-target, should the result be bangDraftify&bangRedirect rather than bangWeakKeep.  User:DGG, what leaf-node article do you suggest, as optimal? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:00, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Indiana-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 21:21, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Business-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 21:21, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 21:21, 5 November 2015 (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.