User talk:Danielle mcneil

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Hi Danielle mcneil,

A bit of background - I have no vested interest in the company or its article and like any Wikipedian, I cannot claim ownership over an article, so there is no problem with your making edits (major or minor) to the Mitel entry, so long as they are done in good faith and comply with the policies of the Wikimedia Foundation. The important thing that readers of, and contributors to, Wikipedia want is accurate, factual information. Given how ubiquitous Wikipedia information is on the internet through replication across various mirror sites and search engines, I can understand that Mitel would want to see the company presented correctly.

I have 3 main concerns:

1) Referencing. The boilerplate that you and User:Zkidca inserted and reinserted over the past few days appeared to have been copied directly from another source, so there was a potential copyright violation occurring. If you are both in fact Mitel employees and have legal access to posting such information, then by all means do so, although it should be referenced to a publically-accessible part of Mitel's website. If it is not publically available, then we have no way of verifying you are employees with permission to post the material - you could actually be working for one of Mitel's competitors, etc.

2) Properly identifying yourself. Please make sure you sign your posts on discussion forums with the four tildas, and for any edits, please add a brief edit summary for other contributors to refer to when looking at an edit history of a particular article. As with any new user of Wikipedia (I'm assuming you are new users), many editors forget to sign their posts (if you read my User talk:Plasma east, you'll see that I was negligent in this area several times early on and needed, and appreciated, reminders). If what you are contributing is a major edit, such as the Mitel "boilerplate" that was being inserted and completely overwriting the previous information, then make sure the check-mark for "This is a minor edit" (underneath the Edit summary) has been removed. When both of your contributions were being made in multiple edit sessions over the past several days, completely overwriting previous information with what appeared to be copy-vio information, and you did not have your User Home Pages enabled, nor were you offerring any explanation in the Edit summary, I was suspecting this was a case of malicious editing (vandalism, sock puppetry, etc.), which is why I reverted the previous edits and contacted an administrator (in this case, User:Adam Bishop). So please sign your posts and give an Edit summary!  :-)

3) Conflict of interest. This is where it gets tricky... Both you and User:Zkidca appear to be paid employees of Mitel and it appears that you are being directed by your employer to edit Wikipedia information to suit the company's purpose. While we all aspire to having factual and accurate information in place for every article on Wikipedia, the open editing nature of a Wiki environment will never allow 100% completeness. Also, the democratic nature of the Wikipedia community allows the freedom for anyone to make subsequent edits. We appreciate your honesty about who you are and your willingness to offer good information, so by all means do so. You should bear in mind that Wikipedia entries are encyclopedic and should not repeat just the standard corporate message. The existing information on the Mitel article was compiled by over 20 different editors across several dozen edit sessions, and while it was a bit choppy and poorly worded (I only came across the article a few days ago), it did have some interesting historical information, albeit it was a bit light on the current corporate activities. That being said, any edits you make will have to be done carefully and in good faith to avoid any perception of bias in the Wikipedia community. I would also encourage you to try to incorporate and/or preserve information from previous contributors (whether it is flattering or not to the corporation), so long as it is accurate. Otherwise, you will end up in edit wars with other users who might not see things exactly the way Mitel sees it - for an illustration of what could happen, check out the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited or Toronto Port Authority discussion pages, where employees of these companies have become locked into edit wars with other Wikipedians who claim these articles are biased.

Best of luck. Plasma east 15:47, 17 August 2006 (UTC)