Talk:American Industrial Partners

expalanation

This is one of the very few times I have ever improved and accepted a paid article. The firm is in the real world extremely important; the article fills a major gap, especially because of the unusual nature of the company's formation. DGG ( talk ) 23:07, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Incidentally, DGG, per ticket:2021122310005676, this appears to not be paid-for work. Primefac (talk) 18:13, 4 January 2022 (UTC) Never mind. Primefac (talk) 14:17, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Neutrality and Paid Contributions

I propose we remove the history and acquisitions section as it is selectively skewed toward certain events in the late 1980s and early 1990s that are unrelated to the modern day firm. This will clean up the article as well as make it consistent with peer private equity firms pages. See Littlejohn & Co. and KPS Capital Partners as examples MkkeV 558 (talk) 14:35, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

I volunteer to make the edits proposed above, unless any objections MkkeV 558 (talk) 22:13, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

MkkeV 558, has the history of the company been modified by recent events? How does that work? If it is skewed you could perhaps explain what is missing to unscrew it instead of deleting it. Do you have some connection to the company? If so you are required to make appropriate disclosure. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:23, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Justlettersandnumbers, the company changed ownership in 2008, however the history section seems to selectively present facts and events from the prior ownership. I suggest we create a new section describing funds IV through VII, which are under the new ownership. Not connected to the company, but this page could improve on neutrality compared to its peers in private equity reference above. MkkeV 558 (talk) 22:14, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Justlettersandnumbers:. My name is Jessica Wu and I am an Operations Associate at American Industrial Partners. I previously misrepresented my affiliation to the company thinking Wikipedia guaranteed anonymity and not being aware of Wikipedia’s rules to the contrary.

I apologize for the trouble my actions have caused, and for the improper copy/pasting of copyrighted content from the company website. I have disclosed my connection, educated others at our company, and learned more about Wikipedia’s sourcing requirements. Let me know if I can be of any assistance in correcting any issues, such as those raised in your edit-summary here. Pinging @DGG:, who accepted the page at AFC, if he has any thoughts as well. MkkeV 558 (talk) 22:48, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

• I'd oppose removing the historical content- -WP is a good place for company histories that cover in a NPOV fashion the entire history of the firm, and we generally consolidate material relating to changes in control (and even changes in name, when they occur) into a single article. (I could argue for doing otherwise, and some reference sources do divide the material in these circumstances; however, our consistent practice has been to keep the material together if at all possible, so when I edit articles on organization I do it the way it's usually done here. . Articles that discuss the current business and ignore the history they tend to look more like press releases than encyclopedia articles. I would not have worked on the article otherwise. I do not work for paid editors unless there's some real purpose for the encyclopedia , like an interesting historical background. There's no way we could predict whether someone coming here would be more interested in the earlier or later part of the history.

As for the limited coverage in other articles on similar firms, they need to be expanded. I wish I had sufficient time to do it.

(as a generral comment, my model for this is the corporate histories in the German WP, which are almost all done by competent professional paid editors in a very thorough fashion--they often need abridgment if translated here, and added referencing to meet our standards, which are higher in this respect than the deWP. When an amateur or volunteer writes here, it's reasonable to not expect them to know the rules and the expected style, and to help them as much as possible if they are willing to cooperate. But when someone comes here as a paid professional writer, we should expect a fully professional job--professional both in general writing standards, and taking responsibility for not submitting here without having acquired full knowledge of the relevant guidelines. And having submitted it, they shouldn't try to control it further. When someone not a professional writer comes here with a paid coi, usually the only practical advice to give them is to stay away, and wait until someone without COI thinks the subject worth writing about. DGG ( talk ) 07:13, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

MkkeV 558, DGG has already given a better answer than I could. As I've said on your talk-page, you are free to make edit requests here on this page; I recommend the utmost brevity when doing so. The article suffers from serious citekill, but I don't see any easy solution to that. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:37, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @DGG: and @Justlettersandnumbers: for your prompt and thorough responses. I had a couple thoughts:

1. DGG inferred the company is notable, whereas Justlettersandnumbers inferred it may not be. I was wondering about nominating the page for deletion to get a consensus one way or another. Am I allowed to do that (without voting or expressing an opinion one way or another)?
2. JustLettersandnumbers has concerns about “ref-bombing” and “cite-kill”, whereas DGG wants to preserve the current article’s content. IMO, the page looks great until I start really digging into the citations. I am wondering if it would be helpful for AIP to dig through the 40+ citations and provide notes on those that (a) do not mention AIP (b) only mention AIP in passing or (c) are not independent. Per DGG’s comments about my inexperience, I can have AIP outsource this to a Wikipedia expert. MkkeV 558 (talk) 00:57, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

I think you may not have understood what I and others are trying to say to you. The only honest or helpful thing AIP can do is to do nothing further here, directly or indirectly. I cannot and will not advise you how to revise your coi article, or to have it say what you want it to say. I cannot and will not advise you to hire a paid editor. There are in my opinion about three competent paid editors who sometimes work at the English WP, and good as they are, their articles are always inferior to what they do as a volunteer, and everyone here who looks at a paid article will always try to find reason to delete it or remove paid work.

I personally as a volunteer took enough interest in it to rescue it. That's unusual, but you had some good luck there. You are about to have some more: I shall review the article to see if I can improve it further. If Justlettersandnumbers and I disagree, we will work it out between us, the way volunteers do here. You and the company now have one acceptable role and one only--leave it alone. (with the exception that you may ask to revise routine statistics and personnel changes).

If you continue along this line some other admin will block you (I'm now involved, so I can't do it myself), DGG ( talk ) 08:05, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

MkkeV 558, this is very sound advice which I advise you take and stick to (it's more or less what I said on your talk-page, but better expressed).

As for the article, you've hired a paid editor and have got what you paid for – a typical paid-editor job, a mass of references in support of a text of questionable encyclopaedic relevance or interest. If DGG is really prepared to do some work here, a possibility would be to remove some or all of the paid-editor content on the grounds that it might constitute native or WP:deceptive advertising (which is illegal in the United States, where our servers are), and replace it with a few sentences of neutral volunteer-written text. But even that would be a lot of work, more than I would be prepared to do. DGG, I don't think we disagree here, just that we have slightly different perspectives. Anyway, I'm going to try to leave this alone for a while now. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:13, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Given I created this article and was (but not currently) paid for it, I'd figure I'd throw in my two cents: I'm more than a tad irritated at the article being tagged for ref-bombing before you even looked at the newspaper citations. I find it to be, to put it bluntly, an extreme violation of WP:AGF to assume an article with literally dozens of newspaper citations must be a ref-bomb without even looking at them first. The only reason this is seemingly acceptable is because it's a disclosed paid article, but that shouldn't excuse you simply not doing due diligence on actually reading the sources before making a judgement. If you made an honest review of the sources and found them lacking, fine. But explain why instead of just assuming "lots of citations means ref bombing", which is the exact opposite of how citations usually work.

I have no other comments to make on the article itself, aside from my disappointment in AIP's unwise and wrong decision to engage in undisclosed paid editing. MkkeV 558 is lucky to not be banned, in all honesty, and it would be wise for AIP to just entirely decouple from the article at this point. Toa Nidhiki05 18:26, 19 November 2021 (UTC)