Scott Ellis Daon

July 2024

Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username, "Daon Marketing", may not meet Wikipedia's username policy because it appears to imply shared use for an organization. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. As an alternative, you may ask for a change of username by completing the form at Special:GlobalRenameRequest, or you may simply create a new account for editing. Thank you. SPF121188 ^{(talk this way) (my edits)} 19:14, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

July 2024

Your account has been blocked from editing Wikipedia because your username, Daon Marketing, does not comply with Wikipedia's username policy. Your username is the principal reason for the block. You are welcome to continue editing after you have chosen a new username that complies with Wikipedia's username policy, which is summarized here.

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Thank you. ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 19:16, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

This user's request to be unblocked to request a change in username has been reviewed by an administrator, who accepted the request.

Scott Ellis Daon (block log • active blocks • global blocks • autoblocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

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Requested username:

Scott Ellis Daon (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Request reason:

I didn't realize I needed to be so specific

Accept reason:

Renamed so unblocked. We expect you'll refrain from writing about your company and its clients, and that you'll declare your conflict of interest prior to editing further. WP:COI and WP:PROMO give the specifics. Welcome back, happy editing! Yamla (talk) 20:02, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Yamla.

So talk me through what I need to do here. I am the Director of Brand and Creative for Daon. The current Wikipedia page has a number of errors, lists clients who do not want to be publicly named, and includes a fair amount of outdated data. This is a huge problem because tools like ChatGPT are using it as a source of truth. Changes need to be made, but I'm gathering from your guidelines that the people who actually know the most about a topic aren't allowed to edit that topic. Scott Ellis Daon (talk) 20:19, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

First, a very sincere thank you for declaring your conflict and then asking how to proceed. Not enough people do that. What you should do instead is suggest edits on the article's talk page, noting you have a conflict of interest. Ideally, you want to provide reliable sources (WP:RS) for your suggested edits. Interesting that the page lists clients who do not want to be publicly named. Here, the way Wikipedia works is that the information should stay if-but-only-if there's a reliable source for it. So, imagine you have two clients. MegaCorp and BusiCorp. Neither wish to be named. However, the New York Times, a reliable source, has noted that MegaCorp uses your company and that citation is in the article. There's no such source for BusiCorp. In that case, the information about MegaCorp should stay even though you and even though MegaCorp wishes it wouldn't stay. However, the information about BusiCorp should be removed. You could simply suggest "Please remove BusiCorp as a client as there's no reliable source for this". Then, either the information should be removed or a reliable source will be found for it. If you are thinking to yourself, hey, this is weird... neither MegaCorp nor my company want that information there... well, now you are discovering the "joy" of Wikipedia. It's an encyclopedia, not a business directory. I'm not meaning that to be insulting, just pointing out that Wikipedia works very differently from other sites. --Yamla (talk) 20:29, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the detailed response.

Am I correct in understand that Daon, itself, is not considered a reliable source? For instance the article continually references founding in 1999, but the offically recognized date of founding is 2000. Sites around the web say anything from 1999 to 2002. Since Daon is a privately held company, and therefor not required to make many things public, there is a lot of misinformation. I could, however, easily point to our website as a reference to that fact.

Other things are, for lack of a better phrase, hard to prove. For instance the article mentions DaonEngine, DaonEnroll, DaonAnalytics, and Credential Connect. All of these applications were end of lifed years ago and have been replaced with other products. There are certainly no third party sources that say a product no longer exists. The best I could do is show there is no reference to them in official Daon content, which isn't really proof and, again, I feel like that is against the rules.

As for the customers listed. Mastercard and Visa are no longer customers and USAA will not be happy about being listed, but as you said, there is a supporting article, so it's out there.

So... where do I suggest edits? I've never been in the COI zone before, so all I've done in the past is just edit... and that, admittedly, was probably 10+ years ago.

Thanks again. Scott Ellis Daon (talk) 21:01, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

The correct place to suggest edits is the article's talk page, Talk:Daon, Inc.. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean the changes will happen, but that's the place to suggest them. It's not a highly actively edited article so it may take a while for the changes to happen. You are absolutely free to suggest changes cited to Daon itself and then it'll be up to the editors whether to make the change you suggest, reject the change, or make a slightly different version of the change. It's helpful but not mandatory that you have quality independent reliable sources for your suggested changes. For example, you say Mastercard is no longer a customer. My guess is that you have no source for that at all. That's okay. Suggest the edit, note that you know this because you work there. Maybe the change will be made. Maybe someone will edit it to say Mastercard was a customer in (hypothetically) 2014 without indicating that they are currently a customer. Maybe they won't make the change at all. I'm sure you know, other articles for which you have no conflict of interest, you are absolutely free to edit directly. WP:5P is a good place to learn our policies, by the way. Frankly, you are already doing a much better job of this than most new editors. --Yamla (talk) 21:09, 10 July 2024 (UTC)