User talk:Tomrust

Conflict of interest
Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username, "Bournsmarcom", may not comply with our username policy. Please note that you may not use a username that represents the name of a company, group, organization, product, or website. Examples of usernames that are not allowed include "XYZ Company", "MyWidgetsUSA.com", and "Foobar Museum of Art". However, you are permitted to use a username that contains such a name if it identifies you personally, such as "Sara Smith at XYZ Company", "Mark at WidgetsUSA", or "FoobarFan87".

Please also note that Wikipedia does not allow accounts to be shared by multiple people, and that you may not advocate for or promote any company, group, organization, product, or website, regardless of your username. Please also read our paid editing policy and our conflict of interest guideline. If you are a single individual and are willing to contribute to Wikipedia in an unbiased manner, please request a change of username, by completing this form, choosing a username that complies with our username policy. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. Thank you. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:13, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Paid editing
Hello Bournsmarcom. Your edits look as if you are being paid. Paid promotion is an especially egregious type of conflict of interest (COI). Paid articles should be submitted through the articles for creation process. If you are receiving or expect to receive money for your edits, you are  required by the Wikimedia Terms of Use to disclose your employer, client and affiliation. You can post the disclosure on your user page at User:Bournsmarcom. The template Paid can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form:. If I am mistaken – you are not being directly or indirectly compensated for your edits – please state that in response to this message. If you are being paid, please provide the required disclosure. In either case, please do not edit further until you answer this message. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:13, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you for requesting a username change to one that is specific to you. Please be aware that regardless of your username you must read and (if case be) comply with the above warning. Further, regardless of your username, we ask you to abide by our conflict of interest guideline. If you have questions, please let me know. Thanks, --Hammersoft (talk) 15:26, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Help please!
So, I am obviously new to Wikipedia editing. We noticed some of the info on our company page is out of date. Who better to bring it up to snuff than the Marcom department? So, how do I best go about making sure the article is accurate, without breaking Wikipedia rules? Thanks for your help! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomrust (talk • contribs)
 * Hi! Ok, first off, in the future you can sign your posts (adds your username and a timestamp) to your talk page edits by adding a " ~ " to the end of your edit. Second, since you are editing on behalf of your company, you need to read and abide by the paid editing warning I gave you above. This is not optional. Third, if you wish to see changes/additions to content about your company, I invite you to do so on the article's talk page. Directly editing the article from a person with such a direct conflict of interest is strongly discouraged. We are happy to work with you to update information. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:56, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you
Okay, submitting proposals on the Talk page sounds good! On my user page I put the paid tag, but I am not sure if I filled out the "client" part correctly. Please have a look. Once I make a proposal on the Talk page, do I sit back and wait to see what happens? What is a typical procedure? How do most companies do this? Tomrust (talk) 16:04, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Your declaration on your userpage looks fine. Good work. Yes, you sit back and wait. For some less well known companies, this may involve waiting for a while. Alternatively, you can "ping" people to the conversation. You use the ping template, in the format of (for example) (if you type this, it needs to be typed like "  ", and your post MUST be signed for it to work properly. See template:ping for more information) to alert people to a conversation. This results in a notice to the editor you pinged being placed on the top of their interface to pages on Wikipedia. For the people you wish to ping, you can look at the edit history of Bourns, Inc. at here. Be aware some people who have edited the article are very likely long gone from the project. I have no personal interest in this topic, but if you need some input on the changes and can't get others to contribute to the discussion, ping me in and I'll have a look as time allows. Be aware; while it is possible to write about your employer, it is very difficult to do so without bias. This is why following the conflict of interest guideline is so critical. This is also why posting suggested changes to the talk page is the correct path forward. Thanks for signing your posts by the way! --Hammersoft (talk) 16:25, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you very much!
I really appreciate your time and effort, as well as your offer to possibly help with edits. I hold Wikipedia in the highest esteem, so I want to do things by the book and keep it real. Oh, and what about the edits I already made? Reverse them, or just let them get peer reviewed? Tomrust (talk) 16:31, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
 * By the way, you asked what do most companies do; most companies ignore our guidelines and policies and attempt to force their promotional materials onto the project. There's an apparent belief that we are some sort of digital Dun & Bradstreet listing, and any business is permitted to get a listing here. To date, we've blocked 173,724 accounts for having promotional usernames, as you began with here. That's a lot of companies. There are some companies that have worked productively with us. While I don't have a hard number for you, I can tell you based on anecdotal experience that it is a very tiny fraction compared to the companies who do not. Kudos to you for trying to work with us productively. You're one of the few. --Hammersoft (talk) 16:34, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I reviewed the edits. While not wildly out of line with our expectations, they are at least mildly problematic as being (a) primarily sourced (see WP:PRIMARY) and (b) are trivial to the summary style we attempt to use here. We are an encyclopedia, and as such we do not have every detail about every subject (see WP:NOTEVERYTHING). If a particular acquisition was important such that it received press coverage (see WP:SECONDARY) (and not press releases, but actual press coverage) then its inclusion would be warranted if such secondary sources could be provided. For example, while we do have List of mergers and acquisitions by Microsoft, we do not include every such acquisition at the main article. In this case, we do comment on major acquisitions; see Microsoft, but not every acquisition the company has done (and of course it has done many). In my opinion, the best way forward is to remove the Bourns,_Inc. section and instead write it in a prose style, including only those acquisitions which attracted reporting in secondary sources. --Hammersoft (talk) 16:47, 14 September 2017 (UTC)