Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/WebTrain (2nd 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 delete.  MBisanz  talk 02:52, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

WebTrain
AfDs for this article: 
 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Found this article through an ANI report regarding WP:NPOV. Appears to fail WP:PROMOTIONAL and WP:CORP.

Review of the sources eliminated all but two as dead links. Web searches did not find copies of the sources published by other outlets. Most returned only the WP article and reprints of it. The company is now defunct, and so the creation of additional WP:RS seems unlikely. Searches appear to return mostly or entirely other products or companies with this name.

Article was originally speedy deleted twice. Article was previously nominated for AfD in 2008, and seems to have been narrowly kept based on a WP:COI editor (COIN) presenting a number of sources. These sources now appear to be broken/outdated.

IMO, the sources provided on the 2008 AfD and previously on the article fail to meet notability even if they were well sourced, don't establish the company as a major player even in their own very niche market, and boil down to "we made a program that a dozen or so orgs used."

The founder Doug Hallett may be notable, and some of this content may be suitable for an article about him. Timothy Joseph Wood 13:28, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Articles for deletion/Log/2016 June 28.  —cyberbot I   Talk to my owner :Online 13:42, 28 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete. No claim to notability given, and no current sources that imply anything like notability.  Current links to this article in WP mainspace are only lists with no text -- effectively an orphan.  As a defunct company, notability can only decrease from here.  --A D Monroe III (talk) 15:42, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I worded that poorly. It should have been " chance of notability can only decrease".  --A D Monroe III (talk) 13:12, 29 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. GSS  (talk) 16:37, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions. GSS  (talk) 16:37, 28 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Weak keep. I was able to find an archived version of the British Columbia Technology in Action awards list from 2006, where the company was one of two runners-up for an award; the write-up added a detail about their service. I found one news article, in The Globe and Mail in 2002, that has a multi-paragraph treatment of the company. On that and the evidence of wide adoption—the broken references, including some of the references in that section, have all been stripped out but I suspect some are archived, like the BCTIA one—I think this squeaks by. It is defunct; I found an iffy site actually saying so; but notability is not temporary. Unfortunately the masternewmedia.org review is irrecoverable and so is the source for the Saskatchewan government quotation. I hope more references can be exhumed; search is complicated by the other companies using the same name and probably by old newspaper stories not showing up. But in my judgment it's just on the right side of having adequate documented coverage. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:05, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment. This article is the subject of this essay on the Masternewmedia site. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:10, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Yngvadottir, Not really sure how I feel about this essay. It would be easy to argue that this is a treatise in gaming the system for promotional purposes. It may be just as easy to argue that it is a success story in reforming an editor. I think I lean toward the former, since at least the current WP:COI policy discourages COI editing period. Not sure if there is precedence for applying policy retroactively, or even when the current policy took effect. The author pretty clearly states that their purpose outright was not to build an encyclopedia, but to help market their company.
 * Regarding the award, I notice that the other runner-up has no article, while the winner does, as does the runner up's founder, Dick Hardt. Although that's not a definite verdict on notability. The founder's page seems to have survived AfD, but it doesn't look like a page for the company was ever created, or survived speedy.
 * Even so, it looks like the org is a group of companies bound in the pursuit of promoting companies, so it's unclear how much credence to give it. The winner's article does cite the award, but it hardly rests on it. Timothy Joseph Wood  00:46, 29 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete. For an award win to confer notability in and of itself, that award has to be one whose announcements of its winners get covered by the media as a news story — if an award's own self-published list of its own award winners is the only source that can be found, then the award is not notable enough to carry the company's notability. And outside of that, all we've got here is primary sources, with the exception of a single news article which isn't substantively about the company, but merely namechecks its existence in the context of an article whose subject is the general field of e-learning — and that's just not enough to satisfy WP:GNG. And the article still has some PR overtones to it (frex, who gives a flying monkey what an unnamed provincial government bureaucrat said about it in a client satisfaction survey?) None of this, in other words, suggests or sources a reason why it's earned a place in an encyclopedia. Bearcat (talk) 18:39, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete and I would've also explored speedy and PROD, as there's nothing at all minimally convincing for the needed notability. SwisterTwister   talk  06:54, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. Yngvadottir did a good job unearthing sources, but I'm persuaded by Bearcat's assessment of the award. There's just not much here. Mackensen (talk) 01:39, 7 July 2016 (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.