Talk:Merry Maids

Restored

I restored this article, which was redirected. Source searches demonstrate notability. Concerns about promotional tone can be addressed by copy editing the article. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 05:07, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

I've also done a bit of cleanup to the references (one was duplicated) and added two new sections ("Safety record" and "Labor relations") with additional references. There is a good mix of favorable and unfavorable information: excellent on safety, not so good on labor relations. I don't think anyone who reads the section on labor relations could now see this article as promotional by any stretch of the imagination.

—Syrenka V (talk) 23:27, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Safety record

I've reverted removal of the section "Safety record", which was removed with the edit-summary comment "trivial". An award from a U.S. state (Pennsylvania) for an outstanding safety record is hardly trivial. Such a record cannot be taken for granted just because Merry Maids is a cleaning company. Nor is this biased/promotional at all. Had I found negative information about safety, I would certainly have included that, just as I included the negative information about union-busting that I found when I created the "Labor relations" section.

—Syrenka V (talk) 11:46, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

An award from one state in one year is trivial. Material is intended to give an impression that they have an excellent safety record generally--which may be true, but using individual state material like this doesn't prove it. But such use is, of course, a standard promotional technique.

And a standard promotional technique in writing WP articles is to use whatever minor material is available, in order to have what look like a sufficient (or, sometimes, impressive) number of references.

I know that the editor adding this section is are not in any sense a promotional editor--but using the techniques that they use can only encourage them to continue their effort to corrupt WP. DGG ( talk ) 19:00, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

Hello @DGG: I appreciate your explaining the background of your concerns. Although the Pennsylvania award was given in one year, it referenced an incident-free record of more than 4 years, and a fatality-free record of 23 years. It is true that information from a single state of the USA, even over a period of years, is grossly inadequate evidence to infer "an excellent safety record generally". But I don't think this datum will usually be read that way; it certainly wasn't my intent for it to be read that way. Instead, I intended it, in eventualist fashion, as an anchor for the section heading "Safety record", so that anyone else working on the article would be reminded to look for that kind of information, and would have a convenient place to record their findings. I don't think the kind of comprehensiveness that would support a strong conclusion about a company's overall safety record is a requirement for a heading in a Wikipedia article; certainly not for a heading within a short stub-class article like this one.

I agree that promotional editing is a serious problem, and is capable of corrupting Wikipedia through biased editing—involving both inclusion and deletion. But I don't see the mere existence of separate articles about for-profit companies of substantial size or reach as a problem at all, let alone a problem serious enough to justify avoidance of otherwise legitimate types of editing activity. Most reasonably large companies probably should have articles—not because size or reach is itself encyclopedic (except when it attains Fortune 500 levels), but because it's likely to correlate with encyclopedic interactions with consumers, employees, other companies, and governments.

I also don't think it's an effective strategy against promotional editing to try to prohibit any editing style that looks as though it might be useful to promotional editors. Instead, the best solution is to recruit more total editors—more encyclopedic signal to drown out promotional noise. I recently discovered the essay WP:1EDITMYTH; I can believe that Wikipedia was written mostly by less than 10,000 people. But it doesn't follow that it can be kept neutral in the face of promotional editing by less than 10,000 people, no matter what strategies they try to use. Indeed, the essay mentions efforts to recruit new users. The recent article "Watching Wikipedia's extinction event from a distance" by Andrea James is a good example of how potential recruits are likely to react to anything that looks even vaguely like deletionism. (I learned of this article by chasing down reference chains in the essay WP:EAGER by Northamerica1000.)

—Syrenka V (talk) 01:21, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

I think you probably do not realize the extent of true promotional editing, most of which is undeclared paid editing contrary to the terms of use. Its spread is the most critical single danger to WP--if we cannot be trusted not to contain advertising, we would be no better than Google. And then no volunteer , new or old, would want to bother working here.

It's true that the suspicion of promotionalism can do harm to good faith new editors. The only way to avoid it is to first, make certain that what you write on is unquestionably notable, and second, to absolutely avoid anything that resembles a promotional manner. To do this effectively, you need to become familiar what is presently regarded as notability and non-promotionalism here. One thing to avoid is to insist on wording others tell you is promotional -- it's characteristic of promotional and other COI editors. DGG ( talk ) 06:39, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

You are however

• The Governor's Award content from the State of Pennsylvania's Health and Safety Division comes across to me as relevant, because the award has an objective criterion and selection process, whereby a company has to qualify for the award, which then goes through a review process. After that, nominees are considered by the Semi-Finalist Review Committee, and companies that make it to the semi-finalist stage are visited by personnel from the state's Department of Labor & Industry’s safety team, which conducts a tour of the site/facility and reviews the company's safety program. Then, the final winners are determined by the state's Secretary of Labor & Industry. These steps provides proper verification and ensure that the award is awarded selectively and accurately. Also, only a handful are given out every year, which suggests that the Governor's Award selections and the award itself has sufficient gravitas, as opposed to the notion of being awarded arbitrarily. For example, there were only three 2017 winners, five 2016 winners and eight 2015 winners. I consider these types of matters on a case-by-case basis, and per the background of the award, I don't consider the content to be promotional in nature. Rather, it is objective content that improves the article. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 07:16, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out, Northamerica1000! The process for selecting winners is absolutely relevant to the significance of the award.

—Syrenka V (talk) 05:01, 20 November 2017 (UTC)