User talk:Mdwyer/LCLabs linkspam

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Dear Mdwyer, Dirk Beestra, and others,

Thank you very much for providing Dr. Doyle (AKA DrBird or 71.245.157.18) an explanation of your intentions re commercial links on Wikipedia, which I have now reviewed.

Wikipedia is a valuable Web resource, and our firm takes very seriously the need for the Wikipedia site to objectively serve the needs of its primary audience.

I would like to offer some comments here that are intended to be constructive for all concerned.

A. Level Playing Field. I am sure you would agree that there should be a level playing field for all parties on Wikipedia. If commercial links are permitted for any firms, then such links should be permitted for all firms. If commercial links are denied to some firms, than all firms should be denied such links.

B. Factual Errors. Though I understand the concept underlying your attempts to distinguish "discoverers" and/or "manufacturers" from mere "resellers" regarding biochemical reagents such as Geldanamycin, Leptomycin B, Sirolimus and Tacrolimus, etc., please note that you have not been successful at distinguishing these correctly.

C. Regarding "discovery":

--Geldanamcyin was discovered 36 years ago by the former Upjohn Company (Kalamazoo, MI) in cultures of a fungus from a Kalamazoo soil sample: J. Antibiotics, Vol. 23, pp. 442-447 (1970)

--Leptomycin B was discovered twice, independently, by Japanese workers [J. Antibiot., Vol. 36, pp. 639-645 (1983)] and at about the same time by the former Warner-Lambert Company, as subsequently reported [U.S. Patent No. 4,771,070]. This patent was applied for in 1986, and the actual work was probably carried out several years earlier.

--Sirolimus (a.k.a Rapamycin) was discovered in 1975 by Ayerst Research Laboratories (Montreal) in a soil fungus from Easter Island: J. Antibiot., Vol. 28, pp. 721-726 (1975).

--Tacrolimus (a.k.a. FK-506) was discovered by the Fujisawa Company, as reported in Euro. Patent No. EP184162 and J. Antibiot., Vol. 40, pp. 1249ff (1987).

D. Regarding "manufacturing": there are about 75 purveyors worldwide, including our firm, LC Laboratories, that sell products of this type. Some, such as Sigma and Calbiochem, sell tens of thousands of such products, a small percentage of which they manufacture themselves. Some, such as AG Scientific, have essentially no manufacturing capability whatsoever; they are only repackagers and resellers.

Here at LC Laboratories we manufacture essentially all of our very small list of products (about 100) ourselves. Even for those very few products that we buy and resell, we take on inherent responsibility for the product by conducting substantial purity and quality testing ourselves; this is necessary and is a substantial benefit to our customers because the sources of such compounds (various Asian countries, for example) are often highly questionable regarding quality. To the best of my knowledge, AG Scientific does not carry out any quality testing itself on the products it resells. To confirm this you would need to contact Mr. A.G. "Chip" Lindgren, the founder of AG Scientific.

E. Regarding "reselling": as noted to some extent in the previous paragraph, it is not a given that "reselling" is a trivial activity. There are literally thousands of sources of biochemical reagent sources around the world -- small academic labs, scientists literally making things in their cellars or garages, small primary manufacturers like LC Laboratories, larger primary manufacturers such as Sigma's RBI division, etc.

I would like to emphasize that even the resellers are providing essential services and value to the 180,000-odd biomedical researchers around the world. By collecting many important compounds into a single catalog or Web source, even pure resellers such as AG Scientific are providing valuable efficiency to its customers, enabling them to quickly locate and obtain reagents for their studies.

F. More about "discoverers": I can assure you that exactly zero of the "small-molecule" reagents sold by the ca. 75 biochemical vendors alluded to above, reagents such as the four I have already listed, or the 100-odd in the LC Labs catalog, or the many thousands of small-molecule products in Sigma's or Calbiochem's catalog, were discovered by these vendors. Again for emphasis: NONE. Compounds of these types are discovered by drug companies and, to a very much smaller extent, by academic laboratories.

[Sooner or later LC Labs will become an exception -- we will begin selling some compounds that we have discovered ourselves. Unlike other biochemical vendors, we also do pharmaceutical discovery research. LC Labs is a division of PKC Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and we are close to releasing some of our non-clinical, proprietary compounds to the research reagent marketplace, to enable other researchers to benefit from our discoveries (US Patent Nos. 5,643,948, 5,716,968, 5,750,568, 5,886,017, 5,886,019, 5,891,870, 5,891,906, 5,955,501, 5,962,498, 6,043,270, 6,080,784, etc. & foreign equivalents)].

G. LC Labs in particular: by trying to selectively block our commercial links on Wikipedia, you are strongly dis-serving biomedical researchers. As our home page notes, we are the highest-quality, lowest-priced supplier of every product in our product list (there might be 1-3 exceptions in certain currencies). In some cases our prices get down to 1/50th or 1/100th of those charged by firms like AG Scientific or Fermentek. You can verify these claims for yourself; we provide price comparison tables for all of our products vs. our competitors:

H. To wrap things up here: I and our IT team are strongly committed to the level playing field concept. On Wikipedia, for us this is something of a self-appointed role, much as your role of "link-remover" based on factual errors appears to have been a self-appointed role.

We will leave it to you to decide where you think this situation ought to go. If you think commercial links should be allowed for the important biomedical research reagents in question here, then we will insist that ours be allowed and will take all necessary steps to achieve that. If you decide "no commercial links", then we will assist you by automating the removal of all of same from the relevant Wikipedia entries, because we absolutely will not accept any discrimination between firms on any basis.

In closing, let me again thank you for stepping forward with an explanation of your viewpoint; I hope my offering here in return is received in the constructive way that it is intended. My associates and I look forward to resolving this particular topic to everyone's satisfaction.

Sincerely,

Paul E. Driedger, Ph.D. General Manager of LC Laboratories; President of PKC Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

PKCpharma.com 165 New Boston Street Woburn, Massachusetts

WHOIS Administrative Contact: Driedger, Ph.D., Paul

Dr. Driedger,

First of all, let me personally thank you for coming forward with this explanation. I have reviewed it, and I agree with you, so I am letting your edits stand. The pages in question should have neither Fermentek, LC or AG links. I will personally continue to monitor these topics. Keep in mind that, on Wikipedia, these kinds of issues are NEVER truly closed.  :(

I'm afraid it was your agressive pricing that suggested spam to me. You'll note that the Fermentek web pages list no prices. They appear to only list 'content', including links to what appear to be studies. On the other hand, your company's pages are indistinguishable at a glance from someone selling herbal impotence pills. I'm sorry, but that was actually my first impression. I didn't even bother to scroll down and see that you had just as much -- if not more -- content as Fermentek.

As with other linkspam of this type, I quickly removed the links. When your agents returned and began to actively damage other links and damage pages, including the categorization tags, I (and likely Beetstra) determined that you were NOT acting for the good of Wikipedia, and should be monitored and eventually blocked.

To prevent this from happening again, please register a username for yourself (or your agent). Drive-by edits by anonymous users are quickly flagged as suspicious. In addition, it will allow us to continue this conversation on your own user page. Be sure you add your company to Beetstra's Wikipedia:Chemical_sources project so that you ARE represented correctly in Wikipedia. It doesn't appear complete, yet, but it is projects like his that suggest the correct way to do multi-sourced products. It is meant to be similar to the ISBN lookup features that prevent Amazon from being the only book links. I went ahead and added it to the unsorted part of that page. I'm not sure how to integrate it into your search engine, yet, but I included a sample link to Sirolimus to start with.

Finally, adding content to the pages is always preferable to adding links. WP:EL I strongly recommend against your suggestions of automated removal of external links. Robots are generally frowned upon on Wikipedia, because their snap judgements are often worse than mine.

Again, I appreciate your handling of this. THIS is how edit-wars should be resolved. I apologize for the misunderstanding. --Mdwyer 05:40, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

For now, I am reverting, I am sorry. The link is to a property page on a commercial supplier, the data does give extra information about the compound. Although less strong, a similar reasoning can be held for non-commercial links, so that would make all external links sections, on all pages impossible. I can agree with the fact that it is the only one link to a commercial supplier, but there are many chemical pages with more than on link.

This discussion, or very similar, has been running on several wikipedia already (including requests for comments, the chemistry portal etc.), this is the consensus that has been reached now. As soon as the Wikipedia:Chemical sources is being operational, I will go through all 3000 chemical pages on my list, and remove all superfluous links. For now, the links serve their purpose, they give extra data on the compound. I appreciate the discussion, but I have held this one earlier, and the only proper solution to this is getting the chemical sources page up and running, and frankly, I could use help with that. Thank you. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 22:41, 17 September 2006 (UTC)