Talk:PetMed Express

Edits

Thanks Jytdog. I am sorry that you felt what I wrote was adversarial, and that I didn’t write on the article’s talk page. I am more than happy to ask my questions here. I’m not sure how to prove who I am, but I would be more than willing to continue this discussion via email, and then you will see that I am who I say I am (based on my email address). If instead you want to continue here, I am willing to do it, and perhaps it shouldn’t matter who I am since really, all I’m asking for is basic fairness and for an explanation as to what has been happening to the article, and why.

As I had indicated, a few months ago it was deleted, and after we contested it, it was returned. Then the following happened which suggests to us that someone is intentionally trying to harm the organization's reputation and business. Last week we observed referral traffic from this URL: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-brutal-edit-war-over-a-3d-printers-wikipedia-page-reprap and 4 days later we noticed mass edits to this article made by you. As a result, in the span of a few months we’ve seen the article attempt to be deleted, someone came to our site after reading about your edit war with the RepRap Project, and 4 days later you made all of these edits. Based on this, I hope you can see that we are suspicious of the motives behind what is happening, and as employees of a reputable company, we do not want to see its reputation and business suffer as a result.

I saw that Randykitty wrote that if I have problems with specific edits, I should discuss here and suggest improvements based on independent reliable sources. Our issues with the edits are too numerous to do here, but I will say that the tone of the edits, especially the Business paragraph, is extremely negative and the independent reliable sources are all veterinarian-related. As is correctly indicated in the article we do compete with veterinarians, so with all due respect, these should not be considered independent reliable sources. Moreover, at least one of these “sources” is from 11 years ago, yet the edits read as if the matters are current state. We have tried very hard to improve our relationship with the veterinarian community, for the betterment of the pets for whom we dispense medications.

As you can see from my comments on only the top portion, our issues with the edits are numerous. You’re right that I don’t understand much about WP, but given that the original article was factually correct and informative with numerous actual independent reliable sources, I don’t see how that does not conform to Wikipedia standards, and why such negative edits were made, not only to content but to presentation.

AB GenC (talk) 21:54, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Alison. Travelled today to meet family. OK, this will get you oriented to how this place works, and to the key policies and guidelines. It is as brief as I can make it...

The first thing, is that our mission is to produce articles that provide readers with encyclopedia content that summarize accepted knowledge, and to do that as a community that anyone can be a part of. That's the mission. As you can imagine, if this place had no norms, it would be a Mad Max kind of world interpersonally, and content would be a slag heap (the quality is really bad in parts, despite our best efforts). But over the past 15 years the community has developed a whole slew of norms, via lots of discussion. One of the first, is that we decide things by consensus. That decision itself, is recorded here: WP:CONSENSUS, which is one of our "policies". And when we decide things by consensus, that is not just local in space and time, but includes meta-discussions that have happened in the past. The results of those past meta-discussions are the norms that we follow now. We call them policies and guidelines - and these documents all reside in "Wikipedia space" (There is a whole forest of documents in "Wikipedia space" - pages in Wikipedia that start with "Wikipedia:AAAA" or for short, "WP:AAAA". WP:CONSENSUS is different from Consensus.)

People have tried to define Wikipedia - is it a democracy, an anarchy, secret cabal? In fact it is a clue-ocracy (that link is to a very short and important text).

There are policies and guidelines that govern content, and separate ones that govern behavior. Here is a very quick rundown:

Content policies and guidelines

• WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing. You will also find discussion of how WP is not a catalog, not a how-to manual, not a vehicle for promotion, etc) Please especially read the WP:PROMO section)
• WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
• WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down to the sources you bring!)
• WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content. (Basically, think "article in the New York Times", not "company press release")
• WP:NPOV and the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what most folks think -- it doesn't mean "fair and balanced" - it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would generally give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. Of course if that drug was important because it killed a lot of people, not having 90% of it be about the side effects would not be neutral) We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references.
• WP:NOTABILITY - this is a policy that defines whether or not an article about X, should exist. What this comes down to is defined in WP:Golden rule - which is basically, are there enough independent sources about X, with which to build a decent article.
• WP:DELETION discusses how we get rid of articles that fail notability.

So, when I came across this WP article a while ago, there was unsourced content (violated WP:VERIFY), content that was basically advertising the company and its products (violated WP:NOT - this article is not the company's website, and doesn't exist to promote the company), and the company's history was in fragments. I spent a lot of time looking for independent, reliable sources, and put together the history of the company. I acknowledge that a lot of that is not pretty. That is not my fault - that is what independent, reliable sources have said.

I didn't find a lot out there about the recent history of the company. If you are aware of independent reliable sources describing that, I would be happy to build content using them. For example another user just today found a ref that told about the Texas litigation settling ten years ago (which I couldn't find when i worked on this) so now that piece is closed out. Would love to have more content describing the company today. It would be interesting too if there were any refs showing how the company's market share has evolved with time.

There is a lot that people who are interested in business, for example, can learn from PetMed's story - from the hairy early days to where things are now. Also,it is useful for people who have pets to understand how the market for vet drugs works - to know that their vet might give pushback if they ask for a prescription to submit to PetMed.

We are here to provide knowledge, not sell anything nor denigrate anything. That is the essence of the WP:NPOV policy.

Thanks again for talking. And again if you have refs that we could use, would love to see them. And if you have any specific questions about the actual content in the article, would be happy to discuss them. Jytdog (talk) 03:54, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

So.....I tried, but there really isn't anything out there I can find that isn't already in the article. The rest is all about stock and revenue performance. I will take a look at some archive databases but not sure there is much else that can be added for NPOV. --CNMall41 (talk) 05:37, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Newspapers.com seems to be the key to finding the references. --CNMall41 (talk) 04:05, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

I took another swipe as this one still bugs me a little. There doesn't seem to be much recent history so either the press doesn't find them interesting or the company has tried to stay out of the news. Either way, everything I am finding is related to being publicly traded, including recent announcements about income and other stock information. There are quite a few references on the page coming from Vet sources which I don't think are reliable as they are competing directly with the company; however, I left many of them here as it is still an important part of the company history and I cannot find better sources to support. This is likely the best I can get it unless there are better references to be found. --CNMall41 (talk) 23:46, 15 October 2018 (UTC)