User talk:Mdyk

Comparison of wireless site survey applications

The purpose of this message is to stop the edit war. You keep on reverting the edits regarding Visiwave, sometimes providing misguiding information to the readers. I would like to draw your attention to the following facts:

1. All of your four contributions to WP since 2011 are related to Visiwave. This means that you probably add information about your own product/service. Such activities are in violation of the WP rules.

2. Your latest edit of the article in question contains a reference to the Visiwave FAQ entry that was added to the Visiwave web site just a few hours before you edited the WP article. In other words, the FAQ was updated for the sole purpose of being used as a reference in WP, and the person who edited the FAQ and the person who edited the WP article are either the same person, or they are closely associated.

3. All references should point to independent sources. You cannot reference a page on the product vendor web site to substantiate a claim regarding the product. This is against the WP rules. Give a reference to a book. Give a reference to an article in a reputable online magazine. Don't give references to yourself. Without independent sources of information, your contributions are "original research". Original research should not be used in WP articles.

4. Speaking of the technical side... This has no bearing on the article in question, as this is my original research, however, as someone who has been working Wi-Fi networks for many years, I have a vast experience with many site survey tools, including Visiwave (in fact, I originally created this article and I included Visiwave.) In my opinion, your statement regarding passive and active surveys in Visiwave is misguiding. Active surveys are used to measure actual throughput; Visiwave has no such functionality. And, of course, using the same adapter to measure data throughput on one channel and capture beacon frames on another channel is science fiction; an adapter has only one radio. Trying to do a background scan of other channels while measuring throughput on the working channel will produce totally wrong results. Using a single adapter, it is possible to perform an active and passive surveys consecutively, one after another, but even that is not currently possible in Visiwave; it just doesn't measure throughput. The Visiwave manual doesn't contain any references to passive and active surveys. There are no occurrences of the words "active" and "passive" in it.

Considering all of the above, I kindly request that you refrain from editing articles related to your own products and, most importantly, from providing misleading info that is not based on any independent sources. If you disagree with this request, please follow the dispute resolution procedure so that we could invite more experts and discuss this issue openly.

WiFiEngineer (talk) 13:13, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your prompt reply. FYI, replies are normally posted the same page where the discussion was started, so the correct place is your talk page, not mine. So let me quote it here:

WiFiEngineer:

"I'd just like to explain myself. I didn't see this as an edit war. I saw that you had undone my edits and listed that my changes weren't verified by any references. So, I simply redid my changes and listed references. There wasn't anything malicious in my intent. I thought I was doing what you asked.

I'm actually not trying to hide the fact that I'm the owner of VisiWave. I simply had no idea that being linked to the product made it so I couldn't contribute what I believed to be useful information to WP. And I didn't/don't see anything wrong with listing a reference to a product's website as a valid source. I don't understand how that is different than a reference to a product's user's guide.

Obviously this whole "conflict" is because we differ in our definition of active surveys. To be honest, I hate the terms active and passive surveys. They confuse customers all the time. Unless AirMagnet has ingrained their definitions into their heads already, technical users assume an active survey uses active scanning and a passive survey uses passive scanning. This isn't the case. Most importantly, passive surveys use active scanning (clients send probe requests). It's just confusing. To be honest, that is why I have always chosen to ignore those terms in my product. And why you don't see any references any where to the terms.

I re-read several definitions of active surveys before making my changes yesterday. They usually say that you are associated with an AP, provide performance information, and additional things like packet loss and retransmissions. VisiWave does all of those things, albeit the performance testing is fairly limited (it lists how long it takes to send a small packet of data to the AP). Maybe a footnote saying "limited performance testing"?

I actually tried to go to your "talk" page yesterday first to discuss this, but it looked like your talk page was disabled (now I see I simply didn't know how to add something to it). So I just made the changes and tried to explain my reasoning in the limited space in the change comment.

No hard feelings. We just have a difference of opinion and I have admittedly very limited knowledge of WP."

I understand that your edits were made in good faith, and you simply were not aware of the WP rules. No hard feelings from my side either. I can only suggest that you read the policies, especially the ones related to writing about your own company and conflict of interest. There is no direct prohibition, by the way, but here are certain procedure to be followed. And, like I said, the references should be independent and verifiable. If your product is notable, someone will add and/or correct the information. Certain edits, like your edit about 802.11ac support, are totally ok, in my opinion, as they don't leave grounds for dispute. WiFiEngineer (talk) 21:06, 17 December 2013 (UTC)