Talk:Merkel Landis

Merkel Landis was one of the Social sciences and society good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
November 3, 2020	Good article nominee	Listed
February 26, 2023	Good article reassessment	Delisted

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on January 24, 2018.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that Merkel Landis, while a treasurer at a bank in Pennsylvania, originated the first Christmas Savings Club?

Current status: Delisted good article

This orphaned talk page, subpage, image page, or similar is not eligible for speedy deletion under CSD G8 as it has been asserted to be useful to Wikipedia.
If you believe it should be deleted, please nominate it on Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.

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Attribution

Text copied from Christmas club to Merkel Landis. See former article's history for a list of contributors. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 16:26, 29 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Text and references copied from Merkel Landis to Christmas club See former article's history for a list of contributors. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 22:14, 29 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Merkel Landis/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: David Fuchs (talk · contribs) 17:01, 17 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

~~In progress. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 17:01, 17 October 2020 (UTC)~~[reply]

Prose:

The lead is a bit short. I get that it's a 1000-word entry, but it still needs to summarize the article better and should be two paragraphs.
Done Put into two paragraphs and expanded each. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:03, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

He was 21 years old when he graduated. This seems superfluous; we can calculate the age ourself if we were so included, but it's also not really uncommon to be 21 and graduated from college, so I'm not sure why it's remarked upon without any followup.
Done Removed the sentence. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:03, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- Later became their president in 1921 and held that position until he retired in 1937. sentence fragment.
Done Copy edited accordingly. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:09, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- The explanation for the Christmas club seems excessively convoluted for a simple story, and not really written in Wikipedia's voice. There's no explanation why the men wanted to open a joint account or why this was novel, and how these guys opening a joint account related to the whole Christmas idea. Was it the worker's idea that they were going to distribute the money obtained? It's unclear.
Done Copy edited accordingly. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 18:03, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- I don't think the Jeopardy mention is all that relevant to the subject of the article (the banker, versus the Christmas club) and it comes out of nowhere anyhow.
Done Removed Jeoparty part. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:15, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- There is a lot of clunky repetition in this sequence: The Christmas Saving Club Landis set into place involved a system of coupons and booklet envelopes.[20] The system was simple and required very little bookkeeping.[21] It was a coupon-sheet system where a Club customer made a deposit of a nickel, dime or quarter and a coupon was torn off a 14×14-inch coupon sheet as a receipt.—we've got three uses of "system" and four uses of "coupon" in three sentences.
Done Copy edited accordingly. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 18:35, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- This sentence The state of New York usually has the most memberships, with Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California next in line. These four states produce about 50 per cent of all Christmas Club depositors. is supported by a ref that's decades old. It really can't be used to support the intimation that this is current information.
Done Copy edited accordingly. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 19:26, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Media:

File:Merkel Landis.jpg needs better information; as far as I know it could be a random guy from 1898, and we have no evidence when it was actually published as required for the PD tag.
Done Replaced with 1896 college yearbook picture. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:03, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

References:

What makes Magazine of Sigma Chi, a fraternity magazine, a reliable source?

Done Contributor: Society of the Sigma Xi. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:15, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Checked citations to current refs 1,2 , 4, 7, 8, 13, 28, 29.

Done --Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:15, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- Ref 2 doesn't say he graduated Carlisle High in 1891, it says that he entered Dickinson in 1892.

Done Reference provided. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:48, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- Ref 29 doesn't mention anything about Lois Lowry.

Done Reference provided. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 21:02, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- Ref 28 doesn't mention where he's interred, unless that's part of something that wasn't clipped.

Done news clip ref provided. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 21:23, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

--Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 22:55, 20 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Working --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:53, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Done @David Fuchs: All issues have been addressed. Can you take another look. Thanks. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 21:23, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

User:David Fuchs All issues have been addressed. Can you take another look. Thanks. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:02, 27 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@David Fuchs: All issues have been addressed. Can you take another look. Thanks. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 15:21, 29 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Spamming me is not inducing me to hurry up. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 15:25, 29 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

- The paragraph that starts with The main concept behind the idea was a forced savings is not adequately cited to the provided source. The same source also gives a different accounting of its inception, saying that it was a factory owner's idea, not the three workers. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 16:52, 30 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@David Fuchs: Thanks for comment. I'll tell you how I see it, then we will see if we are on the same or different levels. I get the idea from where the source talks of John Linder asking Landis to help him with a type of savings program for his workers he means the two gentlemen that are with him at that particular moment when they walked into the bank. Perhaps one of those men was this L.B. Harnish. The reason I think this is that Harnish considered his account booklet quit valuable as part of his concept and protected it for posterity, perhaps by putting it into a bank vault or the like. The source goes on to say that Landis patented the idea for a Christmas Club. I see the "three men" as Linder, Harnish, and a key employee of the shoe factory. When the source talks of the depositors, I see this as these three men only. I see that the idea of saving a portion of one's income in increments over time was not thought of by the general public as a potential system to accumulate money. It was an advanced concept that the smartest "three men" of the shoe company came up with for themselves. It was not a program for the shoe company in general at first, since Landis developed this original concept out, brought to him by the "three men" of the shoe company, beginning in the first week of 1910. It was called then the Christmas Club, a name I get came from Landis. The source never talks about a shoe company program along these lines, only Landis's patented idea. In fact a British salesman acquired the right to use the Christmas Club idea from Landis and sold it to banks nationwide. In fact this salesman purchased the Landis Savings Club Company and turned it into a New York City corporation. So, bottom line is that the paragraph I wrote about it being a forced savings is what the Michael Remas article says. His articles says at the end that even then only 38 per cent was actually used for Christmas gifts - so this shows that saving up during the year to have money for expensive Christmas gifts in December was new to the public. That's my viewpoint and I think I would like to stick with the words I used in this paragraph. Thanks for considering this. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 19:15, 30 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@David Fuchs: Looking into this further I am more convinced than ever that it was "three men" that walked into the Carlisle Trust bank to see Merkel Landis. I have noticed the "three men" story comes from the main newspaper in Carlisle, that has been around for over a 100 years. They most certainly would get it right, since they would know the story from the beginning - and have reported on it all along in their newspaper. They are the ones that published Landis' Christmas Savings Club plan as is outlined by the new image I have just put into the article, showing the design layout system in detail. The John Linder shoe manufacturer story comes from a newspaper in Xenia, Ohio. Probably they didn't get all the facts exactly correct as the story was passed down to them from several previous people that passed it along. You know what happens to stories as they are passed on from person to person - they lose some of the original idea from each step and/or it gets distorted. I may have even figured out who this third man was - John Bremran, manager of the shoe factory, since he is associated with clubs. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 15:50, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
User:David Fuchs Checking The Sentinel newspaper in Carlisle (PA) from 1910 to 2019 and they had no less than 50 newspaper articles on the history of the Christmas Club started by Merkel Landis. I believe their "three wise men" story to be correct as they knew the story for over 100 years. I would like to stick with the wording I have for the Christmas Savings Club section as that is what my research shows.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:18, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Your assumption would still be synthesizing material not stated in reliable sources. The "forced savings" stuff is likewise extrapolating beyond what is being said in the sources provided. What constitutes an "expensive" Christmas gift? Where is it stated that the workers wouldn't miss the withdrawals? Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 22:06, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@David Fuchs: Removed paragraph about forced savings.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 09:43, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright contributor investigation and Good article reassessment

This article is part of Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/20210315 and the Good article (GA) drive to reassess and potentially delist over 200 GAs that might contain copyright and other problems. An AN discussion closed with consensus to delist this group of articles en masse, unless a reviewer opens an independent review and can vouch for/verify content of all sources. Please review Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023 for further information about the GA status of this article, the timeline and process for delisting, and suggestions for improvements. Questions or comments can be made at the project talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:36, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]