The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. — Aitias // discussion 23:48, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Expressive commerce (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

"Expressive commerce" seems to be a complex strategy for marketing auction services to buyers and sellers. The primary source for the content of the Wikipedia page is an article by a computer science professor identified in the article abstract and elsewhere as the founder, chairman, and chief scientist of CombineNet, Inc.

User Esourcerer (talk), article creator and single-purpose account with an apparent conflict of interest, apparently considered the following three edits sufficient to remove the ((prod)) (neologism / original research / spam) which had been added at 17:14, 12 June 2009 (UTC):

• 17:18, 12 June UTC (Added link to Purchasing.)
• 18:08, 12 June UTC (Fixed typo in THe.)
• 15:15, 17 June UTC (Removed company plug. Removed proposed deletion notice.)

The subject may or may not be sufficiently notable but, to quote db-g11, Esourcerer's version "would require a fundamental rewrite in order to become encyclopedic." — Athaenara ✉ 09:06, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Speedy delete, more make money fast on the Internet twaddle, obvious advertising whatever its notability might be: ... electronic market paradigm that provides participants with rich forms of communication.... Allowing market participants to richly express their willingness to buy and sell items in a form that directly corresponds to their preferences significantly increases market efficiency.... - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 14:11, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as spam. If this system is allowing the inventor to trade billions, why is he bothering to tell Wikipedia about it? Abductive (talk) 14:12, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• The article is flagged as needing more sources or references. It currently has more than a half dozen from independent and reliable industry analysts alone, a recent textbook from a reputable publishing house, plus another half dozen from a various industry participants. How many more references are needed?

  As more references are found (and published), they can and hopefully will be added to the article. That has already happened since the article was first created.

  How is the article written like an advertisement? It defines the subject, provides more detail in bullet lists, lists benefits and drawbacks, mentions usage. The excerpts from the definition that Smerdis of Tlön references for arguments that the article is make money fast on the Internet and WP:CSD#G11 do not apply: the article has nothing to do with making money fast or on the Internet. And the definition applies to the industry, not one participant.

  The definition nowhere says that expressive commerce is a "strategy for marketing" (of anything). Markets and marketing are very different terms.

  The sourcing industry is moving in this direction, as noted by the references. Maybe because it's not a glamorous industry, many people have not heard the terms and might consider them neologisms. The terms are used in the industry, again as noted by the references.

  While not necessarily relevant to the AfD discussion, here's the motivation: billions are being sourcing using expressive commerce, and those billions affect lives. (Because the effects result from improved economic efficiency, they are positive, though that's even less relevant other than it should suggest that the cause will survive.) Examples include better matching of suppliers and buyers, and less wasted fuel due to more efficient transportation networks.

  I won't address the ad hominem arguments. Or arguments that rely on correction of an obvious typo. - Esourcerer (talk) 18:09, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • The basic problem that I see in the article is that is written like an advertisment. This topic might be a valid one, but we can't tell because the sources we find by Google searches are press releases or otherwise self-published. Given that you are immersed in this field, you can't help but write this article in this way. That is why COIs are problematic. If it were truly interesting to people, a non-involved person will notice and write a Wikipedia article on it. In the meantime, the world will survive just fine without the article (although it might be a better place because of the technique). Abductive (talk) 23:09, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. I'm an active researcher in a closely related field, affiliated with a research university but with no affiliation to CombineNet. I can attest that Sandholm's work on expressive commerce is academically noteworthy and goes beyond his company CombineNet. The term expressive commerce is a generalization of the classical combinatorial auction. In the combinatorial auction, a bidder may specify a valuation for various combinations of items, known as non-linear valuations. (The auction/market articles on Wikipedia are still generally very lacking when compared to the large bodies of mathematical, economic, and computer science results on the topic.) Expressive commerce is a method by which bidders can specify compact rules for their valuations; expressing these rules in a normal combinatorial auction would be completely intractable in such cases. CombineNet is a very cutting-edge company with respect to algorithms research, known for being a research leader in the industry. A number of established professors in the computer science side of combinatorial optimization are affiliated with this company while maintaining their university positions (e.g., Craig Boutilier at U. of Toronto, David Parkes at Harvard, and Subhash Suri at UCSB, which are a few off the top of my head whose work I'm familiar with). Tuomas Sandholm's expressive commerce idea was good research that also happened to be very profitable. I completely agree that the article needs work; it does read a little like marketing-speak and it could stand to use some more formally defined examples, ideally a domain-specific example used and expanded upon consistently throughout the article. I argue that this article should be kept and improved. However, if my voice is in the minority and the community does delete this article, I strongly argue that expressive commerce at least be redirected to combinatorial auction and a section of the combinatorial auction article be devoted to expressive commerce. Halcyonhazard (talk) 05:23, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, JForget 22:20, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. Yes there are lots of sources, but all they are doing is saying that the term exists. The article generally is full of management twaddle and the vast majority is based on two sources, both of which are by Thomas Sandholm. Reviewing the sources does not give evidence of this practice receiving independent coverage. Quantpole (talk) 09:58, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. The commentary above re-affirms my original view of the article (as per ((db-g11)) "would require a fundamental rewrite in order to become encyclopedic"). If it would be a reasonable redirect to Combinatorial auction, as Halcyonhazard remarked, I recommend that it be deleted and re-created as that redirect. Otherwise simply delete. — Athaenara ✉ 22:47, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.