Help:Brands Pages

The pages related to the brands have their own structure that is kept identical to have uniformity, and also use some templates and predefined tables, so if you want to create a page dedicated to a new brand the easiest thing to do is to open an existing page, copy the content, and maintain the entire structure by eliminating the specific data related to the brand, so as to have the division into standard paragraphs, even if they were then empty. Remember then, in case you add new chronological data, to update 'always the chronological data going to modify the page related to the year of the event you want to add, according to the instructions on the help pages.

There are basically three variants of the brand pages, those of the main brands, such as Parker, Omas, Pelikan, etc., which have a more complex structure and which have all already been defined. The other two variants are for secondary brands (such as A. A. Waterman, Colorado, Haro), where the page is simpler and has a single section with possible subsections for references and notes, and minor brands (such as Perfection, Alba, Argument), those whose names are known and little more, which are even simpler and more stringed. As examples from which to start for a cut and paste, take those of the brands mentioned.

In particular, pay attention to the template that declares the information about the brand, in which must be defined the "semantic" properties of the same: these are founder, year of foundation, country, place of business, etc. In essence, it is a question of inserting a section of text in the following form on the page:

{{BrandData
|Founder=First Name Surname (of the founder, if more than one, the list separated by commas)
|Ancestor=First Name Surname (of a possible founder of a parent company)
|OrigDate=Date of origin (date of foundation for company initially not producing fountain pens)
|Date=Date of foundation (date of foundation of a company producing fountain pens)
|ProdDate=Date of the start of production (for companies initially not producing fountain pens)
|Place=City/Province/State of company headquarters (put the main or the beginning one) 
|Country=NN (international two-letter code with capital letters, e.g. IT, US, DE, etc.)
|Fullname=Full name of the brand (ex. Günther Wagner Pelikan)
}}

where only known data is entered (if not known, remove the corresponding line).

Dates must be entered in the international form (YYYYY-MM-DD), usually it is sufficient to indicate the year. If you indicate an "OrigDate", for example the initial foundation of the Pelikan, never put "Date" and instead put (if known) "ProdDate" to indicate when the production of fountain pens has started. For companies founded by one person but later known by another name (e.g. Pelikan or Holland), indicate as "Ancestor" the initial founder, and as "Founder" the protagonist who made the company significant.

Please note that brands must be categorized to appear on the three pages Marche, Brands and Marques, this must be done by adding the following wiki code at the end of the page:

[[Category:Marche]]
[[Category:Brands]]
[[Category:Marques]]

where, however, the second should only be used if the page in question has an English translation and the third only if the page has a French translation.

A further categorization is by countries, which allows you to get the geographical distribution of brands, so you have to add at the end of each page dedicated to a brand, an additional category indicating the country of the same, for example with something like that:

[[Category:U.S.A.]]

(or Italy, Germany, Japan, etc. as the case may be).

However, keep in mind that this categorization operation must be done only on the page with the abbreviated name of the brand, if this page contains a redirection to the full name you have an incorrect situation and in this case you need to reverse the roles and bring the page with the contents on the short name and put the redirection on the full name. In fact some companies have changed name several times, and it is the case to indicate them in a unique way with the simple name with which they are known, putting the redirections on the various names adopted over time.