Talk:APX Alarm Security Solutions

To TannerLeavitt (and any others making similar changes)
The reason I undid your revisions was because you gave no justification or reason behind them. I originally moved the "Industry Involvement" section below "criticisms" because the business associations APX belongs to lacks the level of social relevance/value that the criticisms section contains. Although Wikipedia does not appear to have a clear guideline on the order of sections within a page, I based this revision on two observations:

1. The layout of major wikipedia pages -- for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moody%27s, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At%26t. These sections all have either integrated or stand-alone criticism sections that appear before sections that are analogous to the Industry Involvement section in APX (specifically the Executive Members section in the Moody's page, the Related Projects section in the Wikipedia page, and the Naming Rights & Sponsorships section of the AT&T page).

2. The use of the appearance in notable periodicals as a basis for the creation of a wikipedia page. Wikipedia is explicit about using the appearance of a business in noted periodicals as the basis for deciding whether to approve the creation of a new page. In the case of APX, the tremendous amount of media coverage of APX regarding customer complaints over the business practices of APX suggests a particularly important role for the "criticism" section.

For these same reasons, I'm moving the "Online Presence" section to the bottom of the page. Although in my opinion, the Awards and Charitable Contributions sections should also be moved down (given the disparate media treatment of the J.D. Power & Associates Award and Charitable Contributions, in contrast to customer complaints against APX), I can see some basis for arguing that these should be given more weight than "Industry Involvement" or "Online Presence."

Also, when you undid my breakdown of the BBB's handling of complaints, the change was not minor, as you had marked. I originally created the criticism section, and added the number of BBB complaints. Someone added that these have all been resolved or administratively closed. While this is true, the vast majority of these complaints have been "assumed resolved. This additional information has value for the reader (for more, see the discussion of "assumed resolved" at http://www.smartmoney.com/investing/economy/Investigating-the-Better-Business-Bureau-23879/?page=2 and http://hamptonroads.com/2009/11/better-business-bureaus-grading-system-stirs-debate).  Deleting it and labeling it a "minor change" appears at the outset to be an attempt to omit information that is relevant to a reader that wants to be informed about APX.

Feel free to disagree with any and all of the above. However, I want to be open about my skepticism towards the motivation of some of the changes that have been made to the APX page. The history shows a number of contributors (some of them with accounts such as TannerLeavitt and SethJenks; others with only ISP addresses) who appear to be representatives of APX. In particular, SethJenks, who wholesale deleted the original criticism section, appears to be a lead generation specialist at APX. In accordance with Wikipedia's guidelines on conflict of interest (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) please disclose any affiliation you have with APX before making further changes.

For my own part, I am not affiliated with APX, nor any other business in the home security system field.

Cheers,

Chector1020 (talk) 09:02, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

To Chector1020
I understand the points you have raised. However, I would similarly like to be open about my skepticism towards the motivation of some other changes made to the APX Alarm page. When looking through the History the only edits you personally have made are under the Criticism heading. When looking back on my own history of edits I see edits in multiple headings. Including the original critism heading that was deleted by SethJenks. I am new to Wikipedia so I am still learning the editing process, I am merely trying to present a neutral point of view, while it seems your edits have negative motivations. Forgive me if I am mistaken, and thank you for your comments.

Tannerleavitt (talk) 20:32, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Please disclose any affiliation you have with APX if you intend to make any further edits to this article.  Sean.hoyland  - talk 00:59, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

To Tannerleavitt
There are a few points to make to your comment:

1) You're absolutely entitled to be skeptical, and as you point out, my history of editing wikipedia has only been to add the criticism section to APX. I'm new to wikipedia, and am in the process to editing other pages as well (specifically, in the next week I will be making significant changes to the wiki page on Christine Varney, Former FTC Commissioner and head of the antitrust department at the DOJ). If there is additional information you want to know about me, I am happy to make any (reasonable) disclosure.

2) I appreciate your concern for presenting a neutral point of view, but you never really answered my criticism concerning your changes. There was still no reason or justification given for undoing my changes and for deleting the line about the vast majority of the complaints from the BBB being "assumed resolved."  If I understand correctly, the point of the general "neutral point of view" principle is to present information in a way that lacks bias. My changes were made to make the layout and substance of the APX more neutral, in light of the published information available about APX.  If you disagree about these changes, that's totally fine -- obviously the point of a collaborative exercise like a wiki page is to encourage discourse in order to create a better source of information.  But explain/justify your changes - and please do not mark them as minor... I'm pretty sure minor changes tend to be things like spelling, grammar, etc.

3) Finally, in joining Sean.hoyland, I urge you to disclose any affiliation you have with APX, in line with Wikipedia's conflict of interest standards.

You characterize my motivations as "negative" and that may be a matter of perspective. To be honest, I was fairly upset, after researching APX, that there was no mention of the consumer complaints that APX has received (I was even more upset after seeing that the criticism section had apparently been deleted by an employee of APX). Given the amount of press APX has gotten, I felt that adding a criticism section presented information relevant to the company -- ESPECIALLY since the wiki page did include a section on charitable contributions, as well as a section on awards. The page appeared to be a promotional device for APX, not a source of unbias information.

I too, am new to wikipedia (hence the lack of editing history). I appreciate and thank you for your comments,

Chector1020 (talk) 01:49, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm not new to Wikipedia and I have watchlisted this article specifically because I too have concerns that there is policy non-compliance with respect to WP:NOTADVERTISING and potential conflict of interest amongst other things. A typical example is the Charitable Contributions section. It's not at all clear why it's there. Whether information like this is sufficiently notable to be included in the article depends on it's presence in independent reliable sources per WP:DUE. APX thinking it is notable for whatever reason isn't relevant. Similarly, the weight given to criticism and praise in the article is dependent on the presence of that information in reliable sources. As Chector1020 says, it's a collaborative exercise. The bold, revert, discuss process is a good approach and this talk page is here for discussion and resolution of issues.  Sean.hoyland  - talk 02:47, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Discussion/Explanation re: Charitable Contributions
I wanted to explain my deletion of the charitable contributions section (for the second time, the first was because the section contained no verifiable third-party cite). I deleted parts and merged it with the awards section for two reasons:

1) The section still does not appear to have an independent third-party source for much of the material. One of the cites (http://www.topix.com/content/prweb/2009/10/apx-alarm-makes-25-000-in-kind-donation-to-kids-on-the-move-4) is a press release put out by the company -- this is a self-serving publication by the company itself.  Another source shows that APX is on the list of organizations that have given to United Way, but it's unclear if this is sufficient to substantiate this claim being worthy of inclusion (a quick search for "APX united way" on Google yielded nothing but APX publications). This leads me into the second point...

2) As Sean.hoyland pointed out, it's not at all clear why this section appears in the page. The basic structure of a wiki page appears, from WP:NPOV, to be based on how much weight a section has with respect to independently verifiable third-sources. I have found very few (and in some cases no) sources for the language in the awards/charity sections.  By contrast, there are many investigative reports and news articles that go to the criticisms of APX.  I felt that wholesale deletion would be unwarranted, given that there are verifiable sources w/re/t the support center award from J.D. Power and the Hurricane Ike lines.  However, since there are substantially more sources out there verifying the criticism, I moved it down.  To view a similar structure applied within the same industry, see Honeywell.

Also, to make the same request twice, disclose any affiliation you have with APX before making further edits.

Chector1020 (talk) 03:10, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Discussion of Criticism
"The BBB will hold a hearing on August 13, 2010, to determine whether to expel APX from the BBB entirely.[19]" (http://www.9wsyr.com/content/news/real_deal/story/APX-Alarm-faces-even-more-scrutiny-The-Real-Deal/dRM2dl2xI0WfyhSwjDdJqg.cspx) this story was written in 2008, it appears that the hearing supposedly took place in 2009, however it does not appear that APX had their membership suspended. There is no information about this on the BBB's website. I Feel that it should at least be reflected accurately in the article, if not taken out. Steell16 (talk) 17:36, 19 March 2010 (UTC) Steel16

Pulled the line because of the date issue -- although currently, it is unclear why the rating went from a D to a no rating. Hopefully some publication will explain why this occurred -- if not, I may add the line back to suggest that this has happened in the past (i.e. going from rating to no rating) due to BBB scrutiny, but it will be done within the context of "this happened in the past, and it is currently unclear why it has happened again." If there is information for why the current change happened, that would advance the information value of the article.

Also, Steel16 -- are you affiliated with APX in any way? I notice that your contributions to wikipedia are pretty much solely the APX site. We've been discussing the WP:COI issues on this talk page.

Chector1020 (talk) 07:46, 21 March 2010 (UTC)