Talk:Pretty Pretty Princess

History comments

I am the former General Counsel of Meyer/Glass Design, the company that originally licensed Pretty Pretty Princess ("PPP") to Western Publishing Group. While I believe Peggy Brown was an employee at Western at the time and very possibly had input into the published version, she is not the inventor, and statements to the contrary are misleading at best. If someone with knowledge of Western's internal development process at that time would like to add additional information about its development, that would be great, but Elizabeth Pacza is the original and sole inventor of PPP. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MarcJWhipple (talk • contribs) 14:53, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi MarcJWhipple, do you have a source for Elizabeth Pacza? There is a source that indicates Brown contributed to the game but nothing on the invention. When backing up information on Wikipedia, it's preferable to have a reliable source over original research. Ibadibam (talk) 17:55, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Hello Ibadibam. As I said, I was the lawyer for the company that actually licensed the game to Western. I have copies of the original licensing agreement, etc. I also have the original time books and item tracking documentation from the invention of the game. However, it's probably not appropriate to put those things on Wikipedia. I am also in contact with Ms. Pacza, if there's anything she could do to confirm the content of the article. Please let me know how I can be of assistance. MarcJWhipple (talk) 18:11, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Ideally we'd have a published source: a book, a magazine or newspaper article, or a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. The source on Peggy Brown is a museum exhibit, which appears to rely primarily on Brown as a primary source. This is a difficult subject to properly submit to encyclopedic scrutiny, as there's not a lot of scholarly or journalistic research out there. Ibadibam (talk) 18:40, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Gotcha. I've sent an email to the World of Play museum with an offer to document the actual derivation of the game: if they correct their exhibit, that should fix everything. However, as you point out, right now the notes on the exhibit were apparently produced by Brown herself, and contain the same mistake of fact. If she or anyone else protests the edits, my suggestion would be to either remove all comments on the inventor's name, or list them both and state that at this time sources conflict. I certainly don't want to start an edit war. MarcJWhipple (talk) 21:34, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

That's fabulous! I hope their curator gets in touch with you. For now I'll flag the passage for future citation and we'll see what develops. Ibadibam (talk) 22:18, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

The Museum of Play was kind enough to make corrections to the item's catalog description. In the interests of fairness, I left in the reference to Peggy Brown as internal developer (I don't know that she wasn't, and it seems quite likely she was - all outside licensed items at a toy manufacturer have an internal developer.) Hopefully this entry is now both historically accurate and fair to both of the women who were involved in the development of this game. MarcJWhipple (talk) 13:39, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Great! As an epilogue, I found Peggy Brown's page on this game, where she claims credits for "Play Testing, Product Development, Plastics Design & Styling". (Note there are other games where she explicitly claims "invention", so I think we can fully rule out any competing claim for inventorship of this title. If, by the way, you have information about any other games, books or other properties, your unique access to information would be valuable for other articles and WikiProject Board and table games! Ibadibam (talk) 21:53, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

References