Talk:ACN Inc.

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Contents 1 Archive 2 I've Added Some New Material! 3 Odd Discrepancy 4 Donald Trump 5 Reliable sources

[edit] Archive

I have archived the old discussions, since they are lengthy and no longer active. Tristan.buckmaster 08:55, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank heavens. Mike 08:11, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I've Added Some New Material!

I guess from all the above discussion that I am expecting to see Tristan.buckmaster shortly swoop in to attempt to cut to ribbons everything that I have just added. Note, dear Tristan, that I have tried my best for neutrality. And we're trying to present available facts about ACN, not display prejudices. I have more for later, but it is not yet ready for prime time. For one thing I want to get in some amount of detail about the compensation plan, but am unsure how much is enough, so ... Mike 04:13, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

I am too tired to do anything to your article, while you have added some (although limited) valuable information, your edit is littered with errors and thus I believe it should be reverted unless to its original form, unless you are willing to fix it up yourself. First you should remove all disputable information that is gathered from advertorials and ACN's website, as these sources are highly biased. Plain facts can remain. The referenced sources I am referring to are numbered 2,3,4,5,6,8,10,11 and 12. The competition section needs to be completely removed since it is ridiculous, using ACN advertising material to claim it is better than it's competitors and mentioning one competitor and saying ACN is better than them (if you want to compare ACN on a individual basis, why don't you compare it to the thousands of telecommunications companies out there?). I am also sure if you read the wikipedia guidelines you will probably find that you are unable to reference sources that are not publicly available, which you have done one numerous occasions. The stairway breakway plan wiki is a joke, as it does not properly address the serious flaws in its structure. Your article contains factual errors, such as ¨In its 14-year history, ACN has had only two court cases¨, which is wrong, asides from the two mentioned there a numerous other ones such as the Canadian case and the ones relating to ACN Energy. The article is full of opinion either unreferenced or referenced by ACN advertising, eg. 'The other appears to have been a mere technical violation', 'came together in a search for a new MLM opportunity, hoping to find a company with a more fair compensation plan, solid ethics, and a trusting environment', etc. You mention revenue figures that only numbers on advertising material and not reliable figures which come from documents where ACN are accountable for.

In short please fix it, otherwise it will need to be reverted to form where it is not just a blatant ACN advertisement. Tristan.buckmaster 10:15, 26 September 2007 (UTC).

Please read Wikipedia:Citing_sources, Wikipedia:Reliable_sources, Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view in order to see exactly why your edit is inappropriate.

Tristan.buckmaster 08:38, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

OK, maybe some of it needed trimming. "Blatant"? No, I don't believe so. I think some of it could definitely use a rewrite, but I saw what was up here a while back and that was definitely over the top, and it needed to be undone. I was trying to be informative, but I appreciate your concerns, and agree with you to a certain extent, so I'll try to do a better job. I got other things going on, however, so I'm just adding back a little you removed that isn't bloody well blatant.

As far as competition is concerned, the only ACN competitor I mentioned is the only telecommunications competitor using an MLM model, and it's at least in the same or a nearby order of magnitude. If you insist upon it, sure ACN competes with Qwest, but its globflies in comparison. Do you say that the mom-and-pop grocery down the street competes with Albertsons? Yeah, in a sense, but their real competitors are the other mom-and-pops, not a store chain so large that the smallest department of the smallest individual store has larger sales figures. Lightyear is ACN's nearest competitor. Qwest, AT&T, Verizon and whatever probably don't even notice either one. Mike 08:40, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your changes you made recently. I think you have now made an improvement on the article. I did however remove the revenue figure in the right hand box, since there is no reliable up-to-date figures on ACN's revenue. Also why did ACN report to have a revenue of 500 million, a nice round figure and not say 489 million or 512 million, it seems a figure made up for convenience, rather than something the reflects the financial performance of ACN. In regards to competition you can think of it in two ways, ACN's competition in the telecommunications market or ACN's competition in the MLM market. It does not make sense to think ACN only compete against those MLM telco companies. ACN competes for customers in the telco market, and ACN competes for sales representatives in the MLM market. In any case there is no need to compare ACN to competition, since such a comparison undoubtedly introduces some bias. If you read other companies wikis you will rarely see products of one company compared to another company. Tristan.buckmaster 00:52, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

As far as the 500 million figure, since ACN is privately held there are no publicly available figures for annual revenue beyond what ACN releases (as far as I know), and I think the "nice round" 500M figure is more in the nature of an approximation, since I have seen printed materials indicating "about $500 million" and the current About Us section of the corporate website says "...over half a billion dollars..." The thing about revenue claims is that everyone has one. If I were to characterize my salary as a computer programmer, I might say "about $50k annually", if I were trying to convey the general sense of it, and to the IRS I might get downright exact (to the penny), since by law I have to. But not necessarily to you, because its private information and I choose not to. There are other large private companies who do not disclose their exact revenues, but give ballpark figures. In such cases, do we shrug our shoulders on WP and say "it's a dime or it's a billion, nobody knows", or do we give the claimed amount and attribute it to the company itself so everyone knows what the source is? You can't give that Hoovers' figure with a straight face -- the available evidence suggests that that is waaaayy too low. Yet there is the reference in the article. I think that the 500M figure is reasonable, and in absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, reasonable to appear in the article/infobox. Anwyay, that's my 2 cents. Mike 02:46, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not about "reasonable approximations". Verifiable information is required. — ERcheck (talk) 02:54, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Noted, but the figure is verifiable; as in the verifiable statement "...over half a billion dollars..." as applied to revenue, which can be verified here. I didn't make it up. In this paragraph I was simply discussing whether the figure could be argued to be reasonable. Tristan doesn't think it belongs there because there's no independent corroboration, but my argument is that the claim itself from the company is grounds for including it. It might be wrong, it might be biased, but the half-billion figure is verifiable, at least from the point of view that the article editor (me) didn't just dream it up. That I originally put the company website as the only source of the figure should convey to anyone who cares that the figure is not obtained from a disinterested source. Mike 06:52, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

The reasons you gave are exactly the same reasons that I argued against putting financial information about this private company (read the archive). As Ercheck mentioned, approximations are not suitable for Wikipedia. One of the main reasons you seem to be putting these figures in is to correct errors in the linked Hovers article. If you do not like the Hovers article, remove it, I do not really see any information in the article that is not contained in the other references and I do not see any reason to keep the link. Tristan.buckmaster 07:41, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Jeeze, you don't think I read the archive? I wrote a good portion of it, after all -- of course, that's not a guarantee I read it all, but still...  :-) Anyway, you seem to be arguing that since ACN's revenue figures cannot be independently corroborated by a disinterested authority then we can't put the figure in the article, because the only source is the company itself, which is biased by definition if not in fact. I have to say I have a problem with this. First of all, I note that this rule isn't being followed in some significant places and perhaps somebody ought to fix these other articles: Alticor; Bechtel; Bloomberg L.P.; Sabre Holdings; and others (see Category:Privately held companies of the United States. You should get started on the cleanup as soon as possible, and pack a lunch because it will be a long day.

But what it looks like is that you are promulgating a rule that requires not mere verifiability, but disinterested corroboration in every article on Wikipedia. So in the instance at hand, to follow this rule I may not include any information in the article which was obtained solely from ACN. But Wikipedia:Verifiability doesn't say this. It says:

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed.

Now, the figure of "...over half a billion dollars..." for revenue is not something I dreamt up, it is something that can be verified as having been published by a reliable source (we can perhaps argue as to how reliable, but still...). The source happens to be ACN itsefl, which presumably knows how much revenue it had. Or it is lying through its teeth, but the threshhold for inclusion clearly is not truth. You also cited the Wikipedia:Reliable_sources guideline, but even there it doesn't require what you seem to be seeking. I quote the following from the article on the guideline:

Sources with a poor reputation for fact-checking or with no editorial oversight should only be used in articles about the sources themselves.

So the use of an ACN-sourced claim, in this article about ACN, clearly satisfies the Reliability guideline. Thus, since Verifiability and Reliability guidelines have both been satisfied, I have added the revenue figure back to the article. Mike 06:52, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Maybe the article should say something on the lines of "ACN claim to have revenue exceeding $500 million" with a reference to ACN's website... What do you think ERCheck? Since the figures are not really reliable, I believe the 'having quadrupled over the previous five years' should be removed.Tristan.buckmaster 16:21, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

For a company that does not have a public accounting of their revenues, I view the information on their website as promotional versus a reliable reference that is based on independent audits of their finances. "Claim" is best. I also think that the disclaimer is not appropriate for the infobox — specifically, the claimed number should at most be in the text of the article. The reason for leaving it out of the infobox is that the infobox is a quick summary of facts about the company. This is not a "fact", it is an approximation based on a claim on the ACN website. — ERcheck (talk) 17:10, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

If we are going to put a promotional figure on the wiki, shouldn't we also present information relating to unsuccessful loss making former subsidiary ACN Energy? Tristan.buckmaster 05:56, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Odd Discrepancy

The Hoovers reference with respect to ACN's revenue says 76 million, presumably 2006 numbers, when Inc magazine had ACN's numbers in 1998 as close to 100 million. ACN has clearly not gone backwards in revenue, so where on earth did they get 76 million from? They also leave off one of the Cupisz brothers. Mike 08:27, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Donald Trump

Donald Trump as an endorser of the company has previously been endorsed discussed. [Word corrected — ERcheck (talk) 16:12, 7 October 2007 (UTC)] Without reference that satisfies WP:VERIFY, this does not satisfy WP:NPOV. Probably more accurate to say that he is a paid spokesman. Unless a suitable reference can be supplied, this paragraph should be removed. — ERcheck (talk) 02:58, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

"Donald Trump as an endorser of the company has previously been endorsed." What? Sorry, but this sentence doesn't parse. Aside from that, you seem to be leaning towards the notion that an endorser of something must be unpaid. Check Wiktionary, and you will see no implication that endorsement requires this. It is a commonplace that if some celebrity endorses something, beaucoups bucks was spent to achieve this. Is the news that Catherine Zeta-Jones endorses T-Mobile something that cannot be noted on Wikipedia because it is POV? It is a fact that she did, and they paid her well -- otherwise why the heck would she do it? If I were to write in T-Mobile's WP article, however, that "T-Mobile is such a great cell phone company that even the great actress Catherine Zeta-Jones likes it", that would be clearly POV, and she didn't say that, either, she simply read the ad copy they gave her. By the same token, the news that Trump endorsed ACN is not POV, but a fact. Presumably they paid him something, but maybe they didn't, there is no publicly available information on this that I am aware of, so saying he's a "paid spokesman" is a speculation and violates WP:VERIFY -- I do happen to know that there is a contract of some kind covering ACN's use of his image and so on, but that's not verifiable, so its not in the article. I tend to think that Trump doesn't need celebrity endorsement contracts to support his lifestyle, but whatever. As far as WP:VERIFY is concerned, the reference at the end of the paragraph attempted to cover the whole paragraph. Do I need to add the reference to every sentence or assertion in the paragraph? There is such a thing as over-referencing things, too. No, I think the paragraph should stay. Mike 07:26, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, a typo. This was a topic of discussion - see the talk page archive. Calling him an endorser without revealing that his is paid can be misinterpreted. Being paid is akin to being a paid spokesman. There is a completely different implication if one is paid to be on a commercial versus giving an endorsement without pay. — ERcheck (talk) 16:12, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I see, thanks for the clarification. As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that he is being paid -- nor any that he is not. As I have tried to point out, the word "endorse" is neutral, by default, as to the existence of a quid-pro-quo. Despite this it is well understood that celebrities are generally paid for their words of endorsement, and an endorsement without payment is rare enough that this is generally the only time a qualification is given, i.e. "freely endorsed". What makes Trump's endorsement remarkable is that it occurred at all. Trump, after all, does not need to shill for other companies to maintain his lifestyle, and endorsing a bad product could conceivably tarnish his image (or self-delusion, whatever) that he is a cunning businessman, if the company failed spectacularly, for example. What you seem to want to do is either leave off a verifiable fact, that Trump endorsed the company, or attach an unverifiable qualification to it. Given your status within Wikipedia either is an odd ambition. And for the record, I don't particularly care whether Trump got cash for the endorsement or any other form of remuneration, or not. Mike 18:24, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

"Given your status within Wikipedia..." I have no "ambitions" on this article. I am pointing out that there was a discussion on this previously. Donald Trump is not the typical "celebrity", such as actors or athletes. He is a businessman. It is unusual for a CEO of a corporation to endorse products, other than their own. In the previous discussion(s), I believe that there was mention of whether or not the endorsement was internal to the company.

This article has at times been a battleground between ACN advocates and those who see ACN as a bad company. Occasionally, I have stepped in to moderate and try to be sure that this article remains neutral and has reliable references. (The phrases "...spoke in glowing terms" and "..extolling ACN's business" are not neutral.) I take exception to the implication that my interests are other than that. — ERcheck (talk) 18:59, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

And I apologize; that's not what I intended it to mean. I merely pointed out that when the choice is between two unverifiable assertions (Trump received compensation for the endorsement or he did not), I find myself drawn to the third way, which is to leave it at "endorsed", since that is what he has done. You're right, it is unusual for a businessman to endorse a company or products not his own. As far as the endorsement being internal to the company, the company has made no secret of it. It's possible they put out press releases about it, though I have not seen any, but in a number of public places on the company's websites you can see the face of Donald Trump peeking out saying something nice about ACN. Trump was on the cover of the 1st Qtr news magazine. Trump is featured on each rep's personal company website: ACN & Donald J. Trump. The DVD/CD being handed out like penny candies all over the US has The Donald's face and voice all over it. It's not being done in private. So, observing all that, so many want to leave him off ACN's article. Why? Mike 23:39, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

It's not a matter of leaving him out of the article. It is a matter of making the information comply with WP:NPOV. When I read "publicly endorse", it reads as if he is making public commercials, rather than internal to the sales people. Of course the company is not making it a secret; they are using it as positive press. I suggest that you propose a NPOV version on this talk page. I hope that there will be an easy consensus on the best way to write it. — ERcheck (talk) 04:42, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I am in agreement with ERCheck, any reference to Trump in the article, should make it clear that he was a paid spokesperson. The fact that he was paid and that his 'endorsements' have restricted allowed distribution mean that his comments were not made from a NPOV and this should be reflected in the article, which it clearly is not at the moment.Tristan.buckmaster 06:05, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

ERCheck's proposal to write an NPOV version of Trump's endorsement of ACN is pointless. I cannot write that he was paid to make the endorsement, because I don't know that he was paid, and there is no source I am aware of that says anything one way or another. I would be surprised if were NOT paid in some fashion, but with all the argumentation here about "reliable" sources any article that says anything about payment would not be verifiable. So, according to all these standards, no mention of Trump's endorsement is possible. So there we are. Mike 08:22, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reliable sources

I am still a little worried about the use of unreliable references in the article. Many of the referenced article are from magazines whose stated aim is to promote MLM / Direct selling companies. They seem to have little if any editorial oversight. Comments such as "ACN grew steadily during that time" should be removed unless they can be backed up by more reliable sources. If these references are to be used as sources, then I might as well use http://www.subboard.com/generation/articles/116164656490688.asp as a source, since it probably has more editorial oversight as a university magazine than the promotional magazines used in the wiki. Tristan.buckmaster 06:29, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

You take things out of the article that the company claims on its website and in its literature, because they can't be independently verified. You take things out which do have references from independent sources, because you believe they're unreliable. And they're unreliable because you think they like to promote MLM, and its one thing you've made clear here and that is you hate MLM with a passion. You even take things out of the article that are referenced by sources that haven't the vaguest relationship to MLM, possibly because the reference infers something positive about ACN, which you clearly would avoid at all costs. Even earlier you removed the sentence saying ACN's comp plan was a variant of the stairstep breakaway style of MLM, because you thought the WP article on stairstep breakaway was a "joke". I'm at an impasse how to respond to all this. If the article cannot be added to because no source is good enough for you and you seem to have been appointed arbiter of this article, then perhaps it ought to be nominated for deletion. I am not kidding. Mike 23:28, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I have given reason to believe the sources are unreliable and biased, if you disagree with me then discuss the points I made rather than write a whole lot of sentences with quotation marks around words or the use of italics, in an attempt to ridicule my opinion. By the way I have had disagreements with anti-ACN edits which I believed were unsuitable, along with pro-ACN edits, which you will find in the archive. Wikis are not ruled by any one author, be it you or me. If I had free reign over the article, I would write the wiki very differently, but I don't. In regards to nominating the article for deletion, you are welcome to do so, although you efforts may prove to be fruitless, since the article does not meet any of the criteria outlined in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Reasons_for_deletion Tristan.buckmaster 23:59, 21 October 2007 (UTC)