Talk:Atmel

Latest comment: 8 months ago by PaulBoddie

Why does this page discuss Atmel in the present tense? For all intents and purposes, post acquisition there is only Microchip now. 199.21.163.10 (talk) 21:50, 3 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

I find the treatment of acquisitions to be disappointing on Wikipedia. European Silicon Structures (ES2) was apparently acquired by Atmel given that references to it redirect to this Atmel article, but we learn relatively little about ES2 itself beyond a brief confirmation of its acquisition. There was a similar problem with references to Eidos which were redirected to an article that only described the founding of a completely separate company, Domark, that was one of a number of companies acquired and merged into Eidos' ownership structure.
People then like to play the notability card presumably because they are unaware of the company in question, and then the whole notion of notability becomes this self-reinforcing phenomenon. Thus, well-known entities have their significance magnified and lesser-known ones are gradually erased from the historical record.
In any case, there is value in preserving distinct articles for acquired companies, if only to preserve the historical detail. Otherwise, substantial amounts of information get deleted as companies get distilled down to the level of a line item in a list of acquisitions. Having an article about Atmel is better than seeing its content merged into the Microchip page and then pared back to an unsatisfactorily minimal level.
But, yes, the past tense is probably appropriate for this article now: one of the many people doing that kind of change may well come along and do it. Plenty of people seem to have style-checked and grammar-checked pages that I have edited. PaulBoddie (talk) 23:37, 28 March 2024 (UTC)Reply