Talk:Mr. Ouch

Advert tag

My article got flagged with a “written like an advertisement” note. I’ve made some changes. Does it still sound promotional?

I have no affiliation with NEMA, or any of its member companies—I’m a graphic designer and I study warning signage. (I did get a lot of the historical info from NEMA’s standards document. I tried to keep the writing as original as possible, but the tone of the original publication probably filtered into my writing.)

Other questions:

• How do I credit multiple authors of a story in a reference? Note that the “Conflicting Issues” reference item has an error because I added two authors to the first name.
• Could I change the name of the page to just “Mr. Ouch”, similar to how the article about Mr. Yuk is just named for the design? I’m not sure why it added “symbol”.
• I’m not sure I’ve handled the image file licensing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch_symbol#/media/File:Mr_Ouch.svg) properly. Although I created that specific SVG, I wanted to specify that the copyright for the design is owned by NEMA. When I added a "Non-free logo | image has rationale=yes” tag, I got a “speedy deletion” note, because the non-free-logo status conflicted with the public domain license I uploaded the image under. I’ve noted the copyright status on the image page, but it’s not using the standard Wikipedia note. Do I need to do something with this, or is it acceptable as-is?
• I’d like to add a caution symbol (triangle with ! symbol) to the article, in the second paragraph of the “Usage” section. When I added one before, Wikipedia noticed it was a Unicode icon, and flagged this as a sign of poor-quality content. How do I add this?

Thanks!

—Chrisilverman (talk) 23:03, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Hello Chrisilverman. To address your first question (tagged as advertisement), the correct procedure for that is to discuss it either here, or on the talk page of the user who tagged the page. To talk with them here, you would use a "ping" to do so. To do this, you type {{u|username}}. In this case, the user Deb was the one who tagged the article. I have pinged Deb in that statement and hopefully they will see the notification and come to check this page.

To address the other questions:

• Crediting multiple authors: If you click the citation and click 'Edit', scroll down to 'Add more information', type 'Author' in the field box, you will see things like "Last Name 2" and similar, add the correct fields for each author in turn (2, 3, 4, etc.).
• Article title: The page name certainly can be changed. We would want the article title to reflect the common usage in most cases, except where there is a naming conflict with another article. I don't see any problem with this. Often times, it is best to discuss a change like this on the talk page, first.
• Regarding the symbol, it should be editing to reflect the correct author of the symbol.
• I'll have to look to see if there's a template for a caution symbol, but I will also have to see if it's appropriate for the content. I'll get back to you on this.

Hope this helps! Chrisw80 (talk) 00:57, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Chrisw80. I didn't know how to ping users—that's useful. Huon took care of the author issue.

I think I've fixed the author issue on the image page. Magog the Ogre helped out with that.

The caution symbol I meant is this: ⚠. Probably not essential, I just wanted to include the warning icon I was referring to.

—Chrisilverman (talk) 05:08, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I have fixed the reference issue. Citation templates can be given numbered parameters - first1, last1, first2, last2, and so on - to accomodate multiple authors' first and last names.

I'd say the article needs better references. Almost every single source is primary and/or self-published, and I don't even think all the content is based on the given references. Wikipedia content should be based on reliable third-party sources. In particular, adding company websites with text that amounts to "Buy Mr. Ouch here!" is likely to get an article labeled as spam. Huon (talk) 01:56, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Huon—appreciate the help. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there about the Mr. Ouch design. I've spent about a week looking, and the most detailed summary I found so far was in the document from NEMA.

There is an article I'm tracking down now: "The Story of Mr. Ouch", written in an industry publication. Besides that, I'm not sure what additional references I could add. Any suggestions? I do understand the third-party requirement, although in this case, I assumed NEMA's official account of the project history was trustworthy, since they created Mr. Ouch and would have the most reliable description of its development. My hope for the Wikipedia page was that anyone who knows more about the history of the design would find it and add updates.

Also, what part of the article did you not think was based on the references?

I can remove the links to the company websites, if you think that would help with the tone. I think they're useful for showing the design is available for general use, although anyone looking up Mr. Ouch will find them, so they're probably not crucial. Again, I'm not acting on behalf of any sites listed here—there are a number of industrial supply companies who sell Mr. Ouch labels, and I picked these two at random. (The Brady site had a video that I thought was useful as far as explaining the improvements to ANSI-Z535.)

—Chrisilverman (talk) 04:52, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Chris. My normal practice when I see an article that constitutes blatant advertising or a conflict of interest is to speedy delete the article. Your article doesn't come into that category because it's not obviously intended to be promotional and your user profile and history doesn't suggest any conflict of interest. Hence the tag - because I wasn't sure if others would agree that it sounded promotional.

From my point of view, the article sounded like it could have been written by NEMA. This is probably because your sources were primary ones and you were trying to use a formal tone - nothing wrong with that - but, as Huon pointed out, the references weren't great. In the absence of better ones, you might need to consider is whether the symbol is actually notable enough to have its own wikipedia article. Maybe a section within the NEMA main article would have been adequate. Deb (talk) 11:30, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Deb. I'm working on the references. In addition to the article I'm looking for, I found a newspaper article about Mr. Ouch that I missed earlier—I've added that. A friend of mine who works in the campus library thinks she may be able to locate possible sources of info, so I'll see how that goes. I'm also hoping to locate the designer of the symbol, and get some confirmation from OSHA regarding Huon's question below.

I think Mr. Ouch is notable because it's one of the few hazard symbols that has been designed specifically for children. Mr. Yuk is the only other one I'm aware of. Other more common hazard symbols (radioactive, biohazard, even many high-voltage icons) don't immediately convey danger to someone who hasn't been told what they mean. Warning people about a relatively intangible hazard that they don't understand is not an easy design challenge (like long-term nuclear waste warnings), and I think Mr. Ouch is an example of an effective solution.

Although the design hasn't been as publicized—it's a corporate design, with less of the local pride that the Mr. Yuk icon enjoys—it's still in regular use. Several pages I found, and the video I linked to, suggests that schools are running programs to teach kids about the symbol. (I didn't reference the school event pages, since they didn't offer much info besides the fact that Mr. Ouch is still current, but I can add them if you think they sound like a useful source.)

The advantage to having a page for the symbol is that I can categorize it under warning signage, where it's more likely to be found. When I first started looking up the origins of Mr. Ouch, Wikipedia was the first place I checked. I was looking under hazard and high voltage icons—I would not have initially thought to look for it under NEMA.

Update: Located another more recent study of Mr. Ouch's effectiveness, this time from a group that isn't affiliated with NEMA. I also found some results on Google Books that contain more information about the design. I can't preview them, though. I'm going to see if I can find physical copies of them in the library.

—Chrisilverman (talk) 19:08, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

One rather obvious example of content I doubt is based on the references: "It is not known whether current Mr. Ouch labels require additional OSHA-compliant labeling." - do we really have a source confirming that the status is unknown? Which one? Regarding the company websites: Is there an independent source discussing the availability, or are the only "sources" on that topic stores trying to sell the label? In the latter case, the question of general availability does not seem to be a significant issue for the Mr. Ouch symbol. Huon (talk) 17:13, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Huon: That's a good point. I don't have any source specifying the status, I just didn't know what it was. After I've clarified this point with OSHA, how would I reference that? I'm assuming that emails from a reliable third-party source would need to be published somewhere (mailing list, website, online archive) before they're considered legitimate, like the OSHA memos I linked to.

—Chrisilverman (talk) 19:08, 26 February 2016 (UTC)