User talk:16912 Rhiannon/Apartment Therapy

Comments

is visited by about 6 million readers a month, according to the website

I wrote a book, and the book says that it is the most important book ever written and has sold billions of copies.

Avoid self-published sources, especially when establishing notability. There are too many self-published sources in the article. The company website cannot be a source for anything except what is on the website itself. It should probably not be used as a reference at all and just left in a separate section for external links.

Site history section

Should be titled "history" or something else. Take a look at some established articles on sites like this for guidance.

The tone is good. It is less "promotional-sounding" than I expected and avoids snazzy or promotional language. However, the weight is off balance. If we ask ourselves what this prose is supposed to achieve, it is clear that this more aligned with advertising or public relations goals like "give the reader a picture of the company" or "make the company relate-able to the customer" or "make sure the customer knows how to act on your pitch (find the website, place an order)" than achieving encyclopedic goals. It is important to explain how the site is noteworthy, but it not important that the Wikipedia article explain to the readers why they should think the people behind the site are qualified. We might say our goal with an encyclopedia article is to provide an overview of a topic that helps them quickly get up to speed and understand the topic in the context of what they know about the world otherwise.

There is a lot of philosophizing to do about what exactly encyclopedic goals are. But I think everyone would agree that the main focus is on communicating knowledge and information; information that is relevant to the topic and the relevant context with other topics like it. For example the tidbit about the name of the company sounds like something that would be more important to someone inside the company than outside it. I would suggest the first paragraph of the section "Early 2000s" should be substantially condensed into something like:

Apartment Therapy was founded as a weekly email newsletter in April 2004 by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, an interior designer. His brother Oliver Ryan joined the company in 2004 to turn the email list into a daily blog of design advice.

Similar edits are recommended elsewhere.

Other

"Regular appearances" should be counted (and cited to a third-party source) or removed.

Avoid business-world colloquialisms and turns of phrase like "teamed up with".

--causa sui (talk) 20:40, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi Causa sui, this is a very detailed review - thanks! With regards to the self refs, I do see your point and I'll work on removing those (and replacing them with 3rd party sources where possible). I will also change the phrasing you mention ("teamed up with" etc).

It's interesting you mention looking at articles for similar sites - I went looking for these before I began writing and found that the organization and style of articles for other blogs were very different to each other and didn't seem like great models. For instance, I looked at the articles for Lifehacker, I Can Has Cheezburger and Go Fug Yourself, each of which has a similar level of readership to Apartment Therapy. None of these (nor any of the others I found) has a particularly good structure. If you had a particular article in mind, please let me know.

Your longer point about the weight is a bit confusing to me. My approach was to focus on relevant information about the site, the sort of details that a reader of the site would be interested in. I'm uncertain how to proceed with rewording along the lines you're suggesting. Before I make any significant edits, I'd like to hear more specific recommendations and possibly get another opinion to see if there are specific details here that should be kept / trimmed.

For the "regular appearances", I don't have exact numbers for his appearances on the two shows. This sentence is cited to the New York Times and the Orlando Sentinel, which say, respectively:

"He is the mellow makeover guru on the HGTV program Mission Organization and the author of Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Week Cure, which will be published next year by Random House."

"A new book called Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure is the brainchild of Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, an interior designer who's a frequent guest on HGTV shows Mission: Organization and Small Spaces, Big Style."

Given the mentions in these two sources, is it necessary to find another reference that notes exactly how many times he appeared on the shows?

Thanks again for your notes, it's very helpful to get your perspective on the draft. If you have any further comments, please do let me know. Thanks, 16912 Rhiannon (Talk · COI) 14:39, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Draft disclosure

For anyone visiting this page, a COI disclosure: I prepared this draft as part of my work at Beutler Ink, on behalf of then-client Apartment Therapy. I had a financial COI with this topic and did not create the page directly, instead proposing this draft. 16912 Rhiannon (Talk · COI) 20:17, 9 November 2015 (UTC)