Talk:Angel investor/Archives/2012

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Angel Motivation

Regarding the motivations of angel investors: Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual Chains has a good chapter on the emotional energy boost people in finance experience from being close to the "action".

Equity v. Ownership Equity

Could someone please disambiguate the use of the term "equity" in the opening paragraph? Thanks --68.105.218.72 08:46, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Consider it disambiguated.

Creating a category for angel investors and business angels?

Why not create 'Category:Angel investors and business angels'

Umm...why? (That's actually a serious question. What would be the point? How many other articles would fit into the category?)Yorker 03:08, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Many many pages

Don't we already have categories for start-up companies, venture finance, etc? The institution of angel investing is part of that business sector, not really a separate thing in itself. If there were to be a category it should reference the phenomenon, not the people, i.e. "angel investing" and not "angel investors". Also, a.i. & b.i. is an awkward double-definition. Wikidemo 19:04, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

As the article clearly states Venture capitalists are NOT the same as angel investors or business angels. and a.i. & b.a. is NOT awkward, the definition clearly explains that they are the same thing!

If AI and BA are the same thing, we have to choose one for the title and not duplicate it. We don't have a category for "airplanes and aeroplanes" or for "people and humans" or for "dogs and canines", etc. We should say it once. Also, I know that angel investors are not venture capitalists. Is the proposal truly to have a category where we list only people who are angel investors? If so the category is appropriate but seems so narrow that it's kind of unimportant. If the category goes beyond the people and addresses the issues surrounding angel investors like investment funds, securities instruments, angel funding rounds, term sheets, etc., then it is really not a distinct category because angel investing is a part of the venture funding process, start-up companies, etc.Wikidemo 13:34, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Wrong again! 'Category:Real estate and property developers' is one such example of where the variations of one meaning: 'Real estate developer' in the U.S. and 'Property developer' in the U.K., have been combined into one category! I do not see why there is objection to creating this category! Angel investor or business angel is an occupation like 'Category:Investment bankers' or even 'Category:Lexicographers'! so what is your objection? If you wer concerned that it would be an empty category, I can assure you it wouldn't! I would add pages to it if only I could create the category! To address your other concerns above: the category would be contained within 'Category:Private equity' and would have appropriate links!

Suit yourself. I'm not opposing anything and won't, just making suggestions. Wikidemo 18:57, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
Ahh! OK, now I see what you mean. You're suggesting that we create the category as a way to organize biographies of specific individual angel investors. Well, that makes more sense than the way I orginally read it (which was a category for the single article about angel investing.) Nevertheless, I think I have to agree with Wikidemo on this one, but perhaps for different reasons. The fact is that there are probably 250,000 individual angel investors in the US alone (figure from the University of New Hampshire Center for Venture Research), and just because someone is an angel investor doesn't necessarily make them notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia. What criteria should be used to consider whether someone should be tagged that way? If they have ever done an angel investment? If they have done x number of investments? or y amount of investment? or made z dollars investing? I can think offhand of a number of angel investors who are important because of their impact on angel investing (investors who come to mind include Bill Payne, Luis Villalobos, David S. Rose, John Huston, the late Hans Severiens, all in the US; Anthony Clarke in the UK, Hans Bertram in Holland, Brigitte Bauman in Switzerland), but none of them currently has a Wikipedia bio. Based on the number of commercial additions this article routinely gets, I shudder to think of how many self-serving 'angel investor' articles the existence of that category would generate. All that said, I'm not vehemently opposed to the creation of the category...I just don't think it's [at least yet] a great idea.Yorker 02:33, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Of course I'm not suggesting creating an entry for every angel investor or business angel in the world. However there are some that are notable for instance the "Dragons" on Dragons' Den is just one instance. I believe it is as worthy a category as 'Category:Venture capitalists'

Interesting. But again, just because someone appears as an "investor" on a high-profile television show doesn't necessarily make them a serious angel investor (I'm not, of course, maintaining the inverse, but I'd note that only a very few of the deals that 'win' Dragon's Den actually get funded.) I come back to my discomfort with setting up a category which would largely (and by necessity, given the private nature of the business) be self-nominated.Yorker 14:01, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

What to do about new edits?

Rather than reverting all of the changes, I am restoring the old article content to where it used to be, at "Angel investor" (which is a more common, central term than "Angel capital"). There is indeed a good argument for why one would have two articles anyway, because both the investment itself, and the people who do the investing, are notable subjects. But there's obviously a deeper problem.

The earlier incarnation of the article is incomplete, not fully sourced, US-centric, and has a number of other problems. However, it is basically a sound article in that it gives a lay reader unfamiliar with the subject a quick, fairly accurate understanding of what the subject is all about. I'm afraid the new version, though much more accurate, is roblematic as a Wikipedia article. Obviously it needs a thorough copy-edit for format, and also the internal wikilinks. But it's also got no inline citation links, so it's very hard to verify. It has academic-style references rather than in-line citations, which aren't the favored way and make it hard to do collaborative work. Plus, even though the fine level details seem to be in order I think it's fundamentally off in its depiction of what angel capital really is. The lead section simply doesn't say it. What distinguishes angel investments from others is not that it's equity versus debt, but that it's money put up by small arm's length investors as opposed to owner/managers or larger, more formal funds. In the start-up world, particularly in tech, angels occupy a very specific niche in their relationship with company founders and with venture capital funds. It also reads like an essay and makes lots of claims that are dubious, or at best are not global. It makes no sense to talk about, say, only 2-3 percent of small firms demonstrating potential for rapid growth. That kind of statement is inherently POV. It's a judgment, not an encyclopedic summary of the world. If one sources that statement to a business book one is merely repeating someone else's business judgment, not repeating an encyclopedic fact.

I doubt the article in this form is viable. It is so far from where it needs to be content-wise that it's probably a dead end. Rather than trying to fix it, it would probably be better if someone could patiently take it piece by piece, sentence by sentence, find what is encyclopedic, relevant, and sourceable, and add that to the main article. In the meanwhile, I don't think we should dump the old article in favor of this version - we should have an article that can tell readers quickly and accurately what an angel invstor is, which is why I restored that version. Wikidemo (talk) 17:54, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I think Wikidemo is bang on target with the above comments. Peter Kemball clearly spent a lot of time on his work, and he clearly means well, but unfortunately, as Wikidemo notes, he just 'doesn't get it', [sigh]. For all the noted reasons, I agree that it's a bit of a lost cause to try to edit, so, unless one of the other regular editors of "Angel Investor" has a problem with it, I am going to go back to the original (thanks, Wikidemo) and slowly try to bring over the good bits from the new article, with appropriate citations, editing, etc. Doing it a little bit at a time will allow everyone to follow along with the changes, and jump in with suggested edits. Once that's all done, I'll post notes to both articles' discussion pages with a pre-warning, and then edit "Angel Capital" to point to the new and improved "Angel Investor". Fair enough? Yorker (talk) 21:56, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Just as a followup note to those concerned about this page, I see that folks are beginning to get cute and edit in things like references to specific angel groups (such as the recent addition about Keirestsu Forum). Rather than constantly policing this page, I'm simply going to work on cleaning up the original article, as note above, and then we'll deprecate this one. Yorker (talk) 05:27, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Reference for statistics? / The Angelsoft question

As those following this page probably know, there are really only three halfway decent sources for ANY statistics on angel investing. The 'best' is the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, although the Angel Capital Association recently released a good study with some useful data. The third, however, is Angelsoft, the commercial company that provides the back-end software for most of the world's organized angel groups. In a recent presentation at an ACA summit, they provided their latest numbers, including the fact that there are over 300 groups currently on their platform. Since that is now the high-water mark number (and, in theory, completely legit instead of estimated, like the UNH numbers), I've updated the article. But the question is what to do about the reference. On the one hand, data should be sourced wherever possible, but on the other, we absolutely don't allow commercial links in this article. I've erred on the side of citing it, but if someone else feels that including the link is starting down a slippery slope, by all means feel free to edit it out (but do keep the updated stats.)Yorker (talk) 05:26, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm not clear why you think "we don't allow commercial links on this article"? Where does that come from? Good sources have always been acceptable on Wikipedia whether they are commercial or not. Our science articles are littered with references to for profit journals that require subscriptions to view. While commercial services in the external links section are generally considered unacceptable, there's no preference in our guidelines for nonprofit over for-profit organizations (though when you're talking about associations, nonprofits tend to be more appropriate). In any case the external links guidelines don't apply to citations. When it comes to citations free to view citations are preferred all else being equal, but the primary concern is providing the best source(s) for the information. -- SiobhanHansa 06:19, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
That makes sense. I was just trying to err on the cautious side by checking it. The 'commercial' question is one that affects much of Wikipedia, but as we all know, this particular article is more susceptible than most to being spammed by the 'for profit' matching services, directories and websites that play in this space. Thanks for the clarification. Yorker (talk) 02:20, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
OK, as I feared, Wikidemo has taken issue with the reference to Angelsoft, and has removed it as spam. Since Wikidemo has been something of a legitimate contributor to this article in the past, and since I was the one who originally included the reference (to be fair, after first raising the question here) to support a legitimate statistic in the text, I'm going to leave it to SiobhanHansa, as the other long-established, serious editor of this article, to make the call on whether the reference should be reinstated. I would note, for whatever it's worth, that the vast majority of the commercial links that get put in and removed are there to entice entrepreneurs to visit the link for funding, whereas this is simply a legitimate reference link to what I believe is the only company in the world that has direct relationships with over e00 organized groups of angel investors...which is the vast majority of groups in existence. That said, Siobhan, it's up to you (for what it's worth, if you do decide to reinstate it, I'd suggest that you include a note in the edit history referring back to this discussion, thanks, so we don't cycle endlessly.) Yorker (talk) 04:07, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm confused by this comment. I haven't edited the article since back in October, and that was to remove a spammy external link, not a reference used to source material in the article. Wikidemo (talk) 05:30, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Uh oh. Is it possible that your password has been compromised? Take a look at the tag for the last edit to the article: "21:44, March 26, 2008 Wikidemo (Talk | contribs) m (6,522 bytes) (→Profile of investor community: rm spamlink disguised as source (that does not support claim)) Yorker (talk) 21:53, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
I see what happened. It is a byproduct of the ill-advised move (and complete but poor quality rewrite) of this article a while back. This is the talk page for "Angel capital", not Angel investor, the article about which you are speaking. Regarding that article, I don't believe the link supported the proposition for which it was a citation - it just looked thrown in there, the link to the home page of a software company. That's clearly not a valid external link under WP:EL. If the company released a statistic you need to link to that for verification, not to the company's home page. I don't agree that there are only three useful sources of information about angel investors, BTW. Angel investment is written about and studied extensively. Wikidemo (talk) 12:35, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
OK, fair enough comment about the Angelsoft link. I was simply trying to reference the source, but at that point I couldn't find a reference on the Angelsoft site for that particular statistic. I won't put it back in unless and until it points to a relevant reference. Yorker (talk) 03:20, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
As to the comment "Angel investment is written about and studied extensively", ummm...with all due respect, I'm very familiar with the literature and current statistics, and the unfortunate fact is that there has been very, very little written or studied about the angel investing phenomenon. Aside from some early work by Robbie Robinson when he was at Harvard (he's now at the University of Hawaii, and while he's running their angel group, he is no longer publishing academically on the subject), the ONLY current studies and/or statistics have been published by Jeffrey Sohl at the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire (who received the ACA's Hans Severiens Award last year), and Rob Wiltbank at Willamette University in Oregon (who was contracted by the ACA to do their recent survey of 600+ angels, from which they derived the data that was released in November.) Internationally, the situation is even worse. At the EBAN Congress in Arnhem last week there was a panel that discussed the only three international studies (one each from France, Holland and Italy), but all three were superficial, non-academic, and (in some cases) internally self-contradictory. If you know of any other sources of current statistics, by all means PLEASE note them here! You'll be doing a great favor to the ACA, EBAN, NAO and everyone else who is trying to figure out this market but doesn't have the hard data. Yorker (talk) 03:20, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
New information about statistics: at the 2008 Angel Capital Association Summit in San Diego, the ACA announced a deal with Dow Jones Venture One to create a new survey and annual data publication of activity in the angel space. It will rely on data self-submitted by organized angel groups (similar to PWC Moneytree for venture capital). They aren't going to publish anything for at least six months, however, and there was widespread skepticism that they'll be able to get any better data than the ACA itself has been able to gather in the past. But we can always hope...Yorker (talk) 04:37, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Someone added another Angelsoft reference, which I have just deleted (at least for now). Given the significant role that the company is playing in the angel industry, I think it is inevitable that it will eventually end up somehow in this article (at least as a reference source, if not as a substantive topic in its own right), but I don't think we're there yet. For those not following the industry, Angelsoft was founded about five years ago, and is the web platform used by just about all of the world's organized angel groups. It is the official software of the American, European, British and Canadian umbrella angel organizations, and is currently tying together (according to the data presented last week at the ACA Summit in San Diego) over 8,000 angel investors in 450 groups in 43 countries, and processing over 2,000 business plans each month. It is the primary way that all these groups are co-investing in deals, and because it is capturing granular data at the source, if they ever publish anything, it will clearly become the primary source for metrics on the subjec . But since the company hasn't YET published any data, and there isn't a whole lot on their website that can be directly referenced as objective facts, I've removed the link. But if the consensus is that it's time to include them, I'm OK with that as well (just trying to err on the side of caution here, given the previous discussion.)Yorker (talk) 04:37, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

OK, Angelsoft put out a new release month (now connecting over 12,000 investors) and has started publishing live statistics from the system at http://angelsoft.net/industry. I've therefore added them to the article, and referenced the source.Yorker (talk) 04:13, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Proposed merge

There is currently a proposal to merge this article into Angel Capital. That's problematic because Angel Capital is a poorly structured and entirely uncited article that is full of errors and so bulky that it is more-or-less impossible to fix. Some of the content from this article has already been added in, and it did not help the article. A better solution is to merge the small about of relevant, sourceable content from the other article into this one, then redirect it here (or vice-versa). That's going to be hard to do because this article is not well sourced or organized either. The real solution is a thorough reconstruction of a single article from the ground up. It's a very important subject so that's a worthwhile effort. 20:36, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Yup. I think the person suggesting the merge hadn't actually read the discussion pages for either article, because we've discussed this pretty extensively. The consensus is that (absent someone doing a complete, ground-up re-write with which we can all get comfortable) we are going to try to bring over the little bit of good stuff from Angel Capital into this one, and then deprecate the other one. As such, I'm going to take the liberty of removing the Merge tag.Yorker (talk) 04:10, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Note to anyone thinking about merging this article:
Please read all the Talk pages to understand what we're doing, and why. Thanks!

Possible sources

I just removed an assertion backed up by a blog posting as non-reliable (and in any case incorrectly summarized). However the blog did link to a study that may be very useful. But it currently contradicts some uncited numbers in the article quite significantly. The paper doesn't seem to claim to be representative of the whole US angel funding population (I've only skimmed it so far) so I wanted to find out if anyone knew where the other data came from (I just added fat tags to it) and see if that had a better basis for its numbers. The paper is at:

-- SiobhanHansa 16:13, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm...that's an interesting paper, but I would take it with a very big grain of salt, and certainly wouldn't generalize from it. Aside from the small sample size (128 Series A deals in total), the inherent problem, at least for now, is that the rapidly changing angel/venture world, combined with the 5-7 year typical hold period for investments of this type, makes it almost impossible for the data to be representative of current metrics. Typically, angel investors did not do "Series A Convertible Preferred" rounds in the same way that VCs did. This really only has begun to change in the past 3-5 years or so, and then primarily among the organized angel groups (where it is now standard practice) rather than with individual investors. I guess the question we need to answer is: which numbers are we trying to verify? If they're the ones in the preceding paragraph that you tagged, those come from the previously cited UNH Center for Venture Research quarterly and annual reports which were cited in the previous sentence in the article. My bad for not making that clear. I'll go dig up the precise current report and reference them.
The bigger question, I think, is the Angelsoft reference, which you removed. As has been noted in the discussion here over the past couple of years, in this case we have a tricky issue which can be boiled down to: (a) the source is a commercial company, not specifically corroborated by another source; but (b) given Angelsoft's position in the industry and data sources, they are now, without question, the best data source in the world about angel investing. I've held off citing them previously (and deleted previous references to them) because although they had presented some of the summary data at angel conferences, they had not published it, and therefore it wasn't citable. But now, with their live statistics page at angelsoft.net/industry, we have a source for hard numbers that encompass over 12,000 accredited angels in a majority of the world's organized groups, processing (according to the site) over 2500 business plans monthly. They are the official platform for the official umbrella angel organizations in Europe, the UK, Canada and the US, and have (as far as I know), neither commercial nor non-commercial competition, and their statistics have not been challenged by anyone. If we can't cite those stats as a reliable source, how are we going to find anything better? In any event, since SiobahnHansa felt it appropriate to remove the citation, I won't presume to revert the removal, but i would like to get a discussion going here as to when, if ever, we will feel it appropriate to use what I am almost positive are the only 'real' (ie, transactional, as opposed to self-reported) statistics in existence on this market. Yorker (talk) 06:27, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Hi yorker. I didn't know the background to the angelsoft citation. It still seems very much less than idea to me but as you say it's likely the best available. Such figures probably ought to be clarified in the article - i.e. make it clear that there are no representative statistics, but data from the company that covers the majority of organized Angel investors indicates....
On the paper I listed above - your analysis seems very reasonable. I was struck by the contrast with the figures in the article which did not have an obvious source. Thanks to your work the whole section is much better. -- SiobhanHansa 15:46, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Angelsoft as an External Link

I see that someone recently added Angelsoft as an external link. I'm frankly ambivalent about this one at this time. On the one hand, we've been really rigorous about excluding ANY commercial link, simply because there are so many attempts to include specific groups or matching sites which clearly shouldn't be there. Indeed, I reverted a previous link to Angelsoft about a year ago, because at that point my internal pointer fell more on the 'not quite ready' side. Now, however, Angelsoft really has become the dominant (almost universal) platform for the organized angel world. It's the official network of the national/international non-profit angel organizations in the US, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia. It connects over 14,000 legitimate angels in 450+ groups, transparently publishes its statistics, and is the ONLY place on line to search a definitive list of angel groups (it's got over four times as many listed as does the ACA). On the other hand, it still IS a commercial link, and all of the others are not-for-profit, national associations. So, I dunno. For now I'll leave it up, but I'd be interested in what everyone else thinks. SiobhanHansa? Wikidemo? Yorker (talk) 00:06, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm...I see that an anonymous user has deleted the Angelsoft link as 'commercial' (given the timing, I'd guess it was the same person who inserted a link for another website which one of the editors here undid). Since the Angelsoft link has been in place for over three months (as per the above paragraph) and thus (I assume) the consensus is that it is an appropriate external link for this article, I plan to undo the 'pique' edit, unless anyone feels otherwise. Thoughts? Yorker (talk) 05:13, 28 February 2009 (UTC) OK, I reverted the deletion, but edited the parenthetical phrase ("ecosystem" wasn't overly descriptive...) Yorker (talk) 23:02, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

External links

I believe the current list of external links fails WP:EL (ELNO# 1, 4, 5, 13, and 14) and WP:NOTLINK. There's a related discussion ongoing at Wikipedia_talk:Spam#Non-Profit_spam.3F. --Ronz (talk) 16:29, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with your opinion. I believe that the links in the article, which have been carefully curated over three years by the regular editors of this article, are completely appropriate under WP:EL. They fall into three specific categories which the multi-year, multi-editor consensus has determined add significant value to the article and comply with WP:EL: (1) The two (and only two) unbiased, not-for-profit institutions which publish regular, independent research and reports on the subject (The Angel Capital Education Foundation and the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire); (2) the national and continental not-for-profit institutions which represent their respective organized angel industries and are therefore as close to an "official" website as one can get on this subject (Angel Capital Association, the EU's European Business Angel Network, and the other national groups); and (3) the one source of current, live statistics about the industry and the definitive database of organized groups, about which link we have had an exhaustive, long-term, series of discussions (Angelsoft). This whole field, as the regular editors are well aware, is fraught with self-promoters and scam artists, taking advantage of the lack of transparency in the industry. This article's links to 'official' sources for additional, unbiased information, are without question the most useful links on the subject available anywhere (and nowhere else) on the web, and therefore should be retained (and continue to be curated/protected by the regular editors of this article.)Yorker (talk) 23:49, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
"which have been carefully curated over three years" I little evidence that the past management of the links was based upon the relevant policies and guidelines. I hope we can resolve this by either following them now, or making a clear case that it would be better to make exceptions per WP:IAR. --Ronz (talk) 16:15, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
WP:ELYES and arguments about "official websites" don't apply here as this is not a Wikipedia article "about any organization, person, website, or other entity." --Ronz (talk) 16:20, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
I share the discomfort with the appearance of the links, and initially had the exact same reaction. However, I do recognize that there has been consensus regarding them, and I am sympathetic to the arguments. Much of the issue, I think, is the fragmented and industry/region-specific nature of the subject itsel, and the scarcity of official organizations and comprehensive information sources despite its considerable importance in various national economies. What we do have are several national organizations and a few accepted data sources, and as far as I can tell that's it. The links are not spamlinks, nor are they arbitrary: they are more or less the totality of the available resources. That would argue for an IAR approach, because the reasoning behind WP:EL only partly applies here. I'm wondering, for style and organization purposes, if they might better be worked into a text paragraph about angel capital software and organizations, or if that might be more awkward than the links themsleves. Wikidemon (talk) 17:09, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
It would be worth trying to find published articles from the organizations represented in the external links to use as references, provided we can keep any eye to WP:SELFPUB and WP:PRIMARY. --Ronz (talk) 18:02, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
With all due respect, Ronz, (and I really do mean respect; I do understand where you are coming from, and support your spam fighting), I (and, based on their actions, the article's other editors) believe that this is a case where common sense needs to be taken into account, which is what WP:IAR is all about. The subject of angel investing is both increasingly important (likely $50 billion annually, worldwide), and almost completely unknown to the general public. At the same time, because it involves large sums of money and precisely because it is so little understood, it attracts large numbers of gullible aspirants on one hand, and a regrettably large number of self-promoters, scam artists and shady characters on the other. As such, anyone coming close to the field invariably does a search on the term, and this article is (and has been for a long time) the very first result Google returns. Therefore, for better or worse, this article is the primary source of information for most of the world on the subject of angel investing.
For many years (you can't tell from the article's history because of an unfortunate interruption from another well-meaning editor about a year ago, but we've been consistent for half a decade) we have followed, by consensus of the article's long-standing editors, a policy regarding external links that boils down to two, and only two, sets of links: the first are the two institutions that provide continuing, timely, unbiased research on the topic (ACEF and CFR), and the second are the legitimate, national, not-for-profit angel organizations in those countries in which they exist. Until the World Business Angel Association (WBAA) is fully established, operating and publishes a web site with links to the respective national organizations, there is no other higher-level, unbiased source of equivalent links. At such time as the WBAA publishes a link directory which is more definitive than the the one we have now (which could conceivably be within a few weeks, following its inaugural conference in Beijing next week), I assume that we would feel it appropriate to use that as the single link to the national organizations. The third link, to Angelsoft's statistics, is one that was fully discussed on this page (see above) for nearly a year, before we agreed that it should be included. In the time since then, it has grown even further in importance, as it is now the official software and statistics platform of the ACA, NACO, NASVF, and other international organizations. Any other external link (and people try to add links on a near-weekly basis) is rapidly reverted.
As such, since the several editors of this article, who have been working on it for many years, clearly have domain expertise, and by their actions have shown both NPOV and restraint, feel that the EL section is more appropriate as it stands than it would be in any other format (ie, working them into text paragraphs, excluding them entirely, etc.) I respectfully suggest that this be an instance where WP:IAR applies (if you are one who feels that they are in conflict with WP policy...which I, for one, do not.) Yorker (talk) 20:07, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not buying it. Wikipedia is not a linkfarm. It's unclear why these special external links are acceptable. Perhaps listing them all here on the talk page and clearly describing the rationale for each one would help, but I have doubts.

Basically, the argument is that since there is no such list elsewhere, one should be created on Wikipedia. I sympathize.

As an alternative, I suggest continue creating stub articles for the linked organizations and create a corresponding article to list them all with a clear inclusion criteria, per WP:LIST. --Ronz (talk) 16:48, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

List of ?


Here's a start of what a list article would link like, without an introduction giving the inclusion criteria. I think Angelsoft would need to be removed because of how different it is from the others, but this would depend upon the inclusion criteria. --Ronz (talk) 17:53, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Would it need to be a stub article? How about a section in the main article? Or if one of the portals / projects agrees to house it we could simply call it "list of angel capital resources" and maintain it there, with a "see also" link from the main article. In non-article space it would be fine to mention inclusion criteria; in article space it would be best to have a hidden comment referencing this discussion. - Wikidemon (talk) 18:01, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
"Would it need to be a stub" No. I think there's a misunderstanding here. My point was that Angel Capital Education Foundation, EBAN, and National Angel Capital Organization are all stubs. I was suggesting making stub articles for the two entries that currently don't have articles at all, British Business Angels Association and LINC Scotland.
"How about a section in the main article?" What article are you referring to? This could be done for UNH Center for Venture Research, by creating a sub-section in the UNH article.
"list of angel capital resources" I don't understand the criteria for the external links, so I've not suggested an inclusion criteria. The criteria would need to be clear and narrow to avoid it filling with the same entities that have been excluded from the external links here (see WP:LSC). --Ronz (talk) 18:43, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

As I mentioned previously, I believe that this "problem" will be solved within the next few weeks when the World Business Angel Association, which is nominally the parent organization of the national associations, updates its web site following the Beijing conference, and provides an authoritative external link list that will be a superset of the national associations to which we currently have links. That would reduce the external links in this article to four, and only four: ACEF, CVR, the new WBAA link list, and Angelsoft, each of which I strongly believe is an appropriate EL for this article. I really believe that it would be inadvisable for us to go around creating multiple stub articles or lists. If someone is willing to research, write and maintain an article on any of the specific organizations (such as there is for ACA), then by all means do so. (Meanwhile, Ronz, please double-check any edits you make to this article. The NAO/NACO change was good (they just changed their name at their most recent annual conference), but EBAN is, indeed, officially the "European Business Angel Network", as can be seen from their official reports. The wording you put in from their website is simply their descriptive/marketing tagline.) Yorker (talk) 19:32, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

"Meanwhile, Ronz" See WP:BATTLE and WP:V. I was not able to verify the name, so changed it with what I could find from EBAN and their own website. If anyone can verify their name, please provide a source so that EBAN can properly be updated, as well as the label for the link. (Note that the link to the pdf above does not verify the name unambiguously, but does use the longer "tagline" more often. I'm guessing that EBAN is their official name.) --Ronz (talk) 20:34, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
Ronz, I really don't understand why you seem to want to pick a fight. The name of the organization IS "European Business Angels Network", which is abbreviated "EBAN", which is how it was listed in the link. According to WP:V "The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material." You can verify the correctness of the original listing from EBAN's own published material available online. See, for example, page three of this EBAN publication, which is signed by "Anthony R Clarke, President, European Business Angels Network (EBAN)". Under what standard is that not sufficient? Yorker (talk) 22:30, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
The name was changed at the beginning of the year [1] --Ronz (talk) 16:50, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
The above-referenced article is from a secondary source published on January 25, 2009. A primary source, EBAN's own EBAN Tool Kit, directly available on the EBAN web site, published six months later on June 30, 2009, is headed "eban: european business angel network" on its cover, and uses the 'trade association...' text as a descriptive phrase at the bottom. It confirms this on page 2 in the second paragraph of the Foreword, and then again in the conclusion on page 83, where it uses the 'trade association...' text as a descriptive, and refers the reader for more information to the EBAN Secretariat: "EBAN - European Business Angel Network". But this issue may be moot (at least for this article) if we are all in agreement about dropping the entry entirely from the EL list, as proposed below. Yorker (talk) 06:52, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
The reference verifies that the name was changed. Evidence that the old name is still used on occasion means little. --Ronz (talk) 17:31, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I have—and have explicitly in writing so stated—assumed good faith on your part for everything you've done, even though I disagree with some of your actions. You are certainly more broadly experienced in Wikipedia editing than am I, and have clearly been involved in editing many more articles. On the other hand, I clearly have more domain expertise on this particular subject than do you, and along with three or four other editors have been diligently improving and monitoring it for over five years. I believe that both our backgrounds can be helpful to improving the quality of the article. But it's not helpful to simply drop in and overturn, without the courtesy of first discussing it here, a reasonable consensus decision about article structure that has been developed with intention for many years by many editors. See WP:EQ. You brought up a good point about the list of national organizations, to which I believe that we have responded appropriately, and will likely edit in the next few weeks when the WBAA site is updated. But unlike many other Wilkipedia articles, this particular one is monitored and closely curated, with 80 people following it and half a dozen regular editors. None of us are looking for a battle, and hope that you are not, either. Yorker (talk) 22:30, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Potential resolution?

OK, I've found a link on the WBAA site which is a superset of the national associations whose links we currently have in the article: http://www.wbaa.biz/members.html. I therefore propose that we edit the EL section of the main article to the following:

==External links==

According to WP:EL, "acceptable links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy." I believe that each of these four links fall under criteria 3 or 4 of WP:ELMAYBE, and are therefore appropriate for inclusion in this article. Thoughts? Yorker (talk) 04:51, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

I've gone ahead with the change, leaving the tag on the section. --Ronz (talk) 21:53, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
OK, it's been six months since Ronz made the change and no one seems to have a problem with it, so I'm removing the tag. Yorker (talk) 22:37, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Angel Network Page

I think there should be a seperate article for "Angel Networks" - I have started a very rough draft of one here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Imeson/Angel_Networks but would very much appreciate any help or guidance. I took part of this article for the history section on the new one. With the large expansion of Angel Networks in the past few years this really deserves a decent article. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Imeson (talk • contribs) 05:18, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

That's an interesting idea, and thanks for starting the draft in your userspace. I certainly agree that Angel Networks are a rapidly growing part of the ecosystem, although we'd need to work on the nomenclature: in North America and a few other places they're known as "angel groups" (with "angel networks" typically meaning an affiliated set of groups), and in Europe they're generally known as "Business Angel Networks", or "BANs". So I'd probably suggest titling a new article "Business Angel Networks", and putting a re-direct page under "Angel group". That said, I'm not sure that it really makes sense for us to start a whole separate article. Looking at your draft, it appears to be the couple of paragraphs about groups/networks from the main Angel investor article, plus placeholders for a directory of groups. The problem is that (a) Wikipedia is explicitly not supposed to be used for directories of external links to the networks (see the intense discussion we've had above); (b) there are many hundreds of such groups already, so any sort of list would be challenging if it were to be useful; and (c) there already is a comprehensive directory listing such networks (Angelsoft) which is one of the few surviving external links in the main article.
So, let me suggest a potential alternate solution: How about (a) we edit the main "Angel investor" article to include a separate section about Groups/Networks (as it is, the article has long been crying out for some clean-up editing and structuring), and (b) we propose to the Private Equity Category that we add a sub-category (WP:CAT) of "Business Angel Networks" to PE. That way, we could coordinate all of the existing angel network articles (Tech coast angels, Band of Angels, New York Angels, EBAN, etc.), and make it straightforward for anyone to add a new article about such a network (provided it meets the usual guidelines for notability, etc.) If we do that, there would automatically be a "list page" created and maintained (the sub-category list), it would link in to all the existing PE/VC/Angel articles in Wikipedia, it would let each article be edited on its own merits, and would keep everything within the appropriate Wkipedia taxonomy structure. What do people think?Yorker (talk) 02:23, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Ref 7

Reference 7 is not working. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.120.132.84 (talk) 08:40, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

It looks like the information was moved. Would http://www.angelsoft.net/a/venture-valuation be an acceptable replacement? --Ronz (talk) 20:24, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Gust (Angelsoft)

I've restored the removal of all mention of Gust and use of it as a reference and external link. While it's a primary source, it's been discussed extensively above and is probably as good or better than the other primary references used in this article. --Ronz (talk) 17:00, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

The previous discussion was solely between you and Yorker. I'm removing the external link to Gust and pointing out Gust citations that need quotes, since they have currently been misconstrued and used as a basis for original research in this article by Yorker. 24.5.68.9 (talk) 21:32, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
Take your WP:COI accusations to WP:COIN.
I've reinstated the link. Do you have any rationale for removing it? --Ronz (talk) 01:34, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
Per WP:ELNO, "Links mainly intended to promote a website, including online petitions. See external link spamming." The site is a list of companies that use Gust, not a list of angel investors. Also, "Links to any search results pages, such as links to individual website searches, search engines, search aggregators, or RSS feeds." -- the link is just to a search results page without any filters. Finally, "Lists of links to manufacturers, suppliers or customers." -- that one speaks for itself. Westeros1994 (talk) 04:44, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
Agreed. The pages have changed quite a bit since I last looked at them. --Ronz (talk) 17:13, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Cleanup

I've requested help from Wikipedia:WikiProject Finance on rewriting this article. In the meantime it would be very helpful to expand all the references fully, maybe even putting them all into Template:Citation format. --Ronz (talk) 03:48, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Ronz, I've restored my inline tags since those sources seem to be misconstrued. However, I have kept your page tag. Westeros1994 (talk) 04:38, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
Thanks! I'll take a look at them. --Ronz (talk) 04:43, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Angel_investor/Archives/2012&oldid=676355453"