wikiHow:Brand Name
From the "guidelines of the wikiHow community":
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- wikiHow exists to help people, not for product promotion. While we encourage useful articles about how to shop and buy things, writers should refrain from creating articles to purely promote one specific business without providing useful insights to our readers.
On the subject of whether brand names should be included in wikiHow articles, editors must strike a balance between fighting spammy product promotion and retaining information which can be helpful to readers. On brand names the choice is not obvious. This page was created as a guideline to help editors think about this balance.
[edit] Times when brand names should be removed
- Anywhere a brand can be replaced with no loss of meaning or helpfulness to readers. For example in an article about "How to Appreciate Shakespeare's Macbeth" a reference to "Buy Macbeth at Amazon.com" should be changed to "Buy Macbeth at a bookstore."
[edit] Acceptable uses of brand names
- Any use of the brand name where most editors believe its inclusion clearly benefits our readers.
- Brand names used in article titles are generally acceptable and are generally encouraged for pages talking about specific brands. For example an article titled "How to Buy Books" would be unacceptable if it only had directions for buying books on Amazon.com. However by changing the title to "How to Buy Books on Amazon.com" the page now becomes acceptable because it is clear to readers that it is about a specific brand. Examples of helpful articles that are specifically about a single brand include:
- Cases where a certain unique brand is widely believed to be the only or best solution to the problem. One example of this is in How to Make a New York Egg Cream where several editors believed that Fox's U-bet chocolate syrup could not effectively be generalized to just "chocolate syrup" or "Hershey's Chocolate Syrup" or any other brand.
