BirchManner

January 2022

Hello BirchManner. The nature of your edits gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, but you have not complied with Wikipedia's mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. Paid advocacy is a category of conflict of interest (COI) editing that involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Undisclosed paid advocacy is prohibited by our policies on neutral point of view and what Wikipedia is not, and is an especially serious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to black-hat search-engine optimization.

Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question if an article exists. If the article does not exist, paid advocates are extremely strongly discouraged from attempting to write an article at all. At best, any proposed article creation should be submitted through the articles for creation process, rather than directly.

Regardless, if you are receiving or expect to receive compensation for your edits, broadly construed, you are required by the Wikimedia Terms of Use to disclose your employer, client and affiliation. You can post such a mandatory disclosure to your user page at User:BirchManner. The template {{Paid}} can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form: {{paid|user=BirchManner|employer=InsertName|client=InsertName}}. If I am mistaken – you are not being directly or indirectly compensated for your edits – please state that in response to this message. Otherwise, please provide the required disclosure. In either case, do not edit further until you answer this message. MrOllie (talk) 13:39, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi MrOllie, I am not being compensated to make edits to the article. I do have a conflict of interest as I contract for Scantrust though and while my change was in earnest to update the description of Scantrust because it appears misleading, I've added the COI to my profile. The company in this article is currently described as having a "platform for identifying products on the internet". Scantrust is a connected packaging technology company that uses IoT tags to create and maintain a record of data associated with physical items, a product is such a possible physical item, and the resulting record is available online as well as updateable through the internet. This clarification disambiguates that IoT or Scantrust are tantamount to a search engine which more closely matches the description of a system that identifies products on the internet. A company like Tinyeye.com is better described by the current article introduction for Scantrust. BirchManner (talk) 14:34, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

The Wikipedia community does not split hairs in that manner. You are being paid by Scantrust, you are editing the article, then you are a paid editor. Wikipedia generally does not use the company's favored marketing-speak as a description. - MrOllie (talk) 14:36, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

It's difficult to parse what marketing-speak is versus what is a clear description of the company, but I don't have much hope that you'll come around to that view. I will say that there is no advantage to the term "connected packaging" for marketing purposes and that in this instances it was in an effort to be categorically descriptive. You'll find that search volume for the term is all but non-existent, as support of this claim. All the same, I think I've understood your point to not use the term. Considering that "connected packaging" is generally not useable as marketing-speak, I'm still appealing for the community's help to enter a better description for how IoT is used in the capacity that the company exists in this technology niche. There is a clear problem with the description "identifies products on the internet". Finally, I assume that the conflict of interest requirement has been satisfied prior to your last response, but if you advise that I do more in that regard, I'm also soliciting your advice in that regard, assuming no guarantee you'll give it or not. BirchManner (talk) 14:50, 31 January 2022 (UTC)