MountainEarth

March 2010

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used as a platform for advertising or promotion, and doing so is contrary to the goals of this project. Because Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. ThemFromSpace 04:48, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

The information I am posting is relevant as what I am posting is a listing of competitors / contemporaries in the Specialty Printing industry of which Press-A-Print is a part. However someone continues to undo my changes. To that end, the Press-A-Print page becomes little more than a advertisement for a company and as such should be deleted from Wikipedia. Otherwise it seems to me that a section on competitors is entirely relevant. Please advise. MountainEarth (talk) 05:00, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

The way to fix pages that appear like advertisements isn't to link externally to their competitors: that just makes the page even more spammy. The way to fix promotional writing is to rewrite the material to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. I've read over the article and it doesn't appear to be all that promotional to me. What it could use is more evidence of notability: that is, more citations from third-party reliable sources which discuss the company. ThemFromSpace 05:12, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

So you are saying that I can list companies with shared history (contemporaries, competitors, etc.) as relevant to the topic, but I should not link to them? Just text then? I can do that. The problem here is it seems that the very company the page is about continues to delete any edits I do, and if that's the case then is that not considered an attempt at protecting the platform for sake of advertising and/or self promotion?

No, you shouldn't list commpanies with similiar histories just to have a list. That is not relevant to the topic of the article. But if, for example, the company has an interaction with another that would be relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of it, that could be put in. Suppose company X buys out company Y and it makes the headlines, that should be written into both company X's and company Y's article. What we should avoid is writing "here are a similiar list of companies... X,Y,Z".

I do note that in some cases we do have stand alone list articles for companies such as this. Typically though each company needs an article to go on the list, although that practice changes from list to list. You could try adding them here, although over time the links will probably be removed if they don't lead to an article. ThemFromSpace 19:33, 10 March 2010 (UTC)