Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard/Archive 4

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bobbinis-kitchen.com

Can others please weigh in on this link?

  • bobbinis-kitchen.com: Linksearch en - meta - de - fr - simple - wikt:en - wikt:fr • MER-C Cross-wiki • Reports: Links on en - COIBot - COIBot-Local • Discussions: tracked - advanced • COIBot-Local - COIBot-XWiki - Wikipedia: en - fr - de • Google: search • meta • Domain: domaintools • AboutUs.org • Live link: http://www.bobbinis-kitchen.com

I initially removed it due to the site appearing to be a personal blog, as well as the SPA behavior of Bonzothedog (talk · contribs). My primary concerns about the link are:

  • Related to ELNO#4; to date, the only edits to article space by Bonzothedog (talk · contribs) have been to add links to this one site. This is common behavior of single purpose accounts who exist to promote a specific URL. Although to the user's credit, they have stated a willingness to work with the community and have now started a discussion about a different issue in an article.
  • For ELNO#11; I fail to see where this blog site is created or maintained by any expert in the field of German cuisine. The site's own "about" page makes clear the site is written by amateur cooks. The links being added provide no context, no historical information, not even nutritional information - it's simply someone's recipe blog presented with photos.
  • For articles where existing recipes exist, WP:NOT#REPOSITORY can also be an issue. In some additions, there are already links to recipes that have only slight variations from the new one being linked, so the new link was redundant.

Please note, I am not saying that recipe links do not provide value; but I saw potential issues with this specific source as well as the initial behavior of the user adding it. In some cases, where no other recipes are linked, this site could be useful until a better recipe link is found - although I think it would be best if an established editor who did not have the appearance of being an SPA were to be the one to review and re-add the link in those cases.

I have attempted to encourage discussion on the individual article talk pages, but I'm not going to start those discussions myself. Especially in cases where existing links to very similar recipes exist, I feel that the addition should be discussed individually on the article talk pages in order to weigh which is the better currently available site(s) to link rather than having a directory of very similar recipe links. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 15:33, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

I ran across the same problem recently. It isn't often that we should have links to recipes, and when we do, there needs to be a pretty convincing reason why the link is exceptional. I have a huge collection of recipes, recipe books, and recipe sites, and pay subscriptions to several and have RSS links to a number of recipe blogs, and I've never run across this one. I am curious if there has ever been a discussion about links to recipes - and if we do have them, I'd think we'd link to some of the more famous sites like epicurious.com, etc. Dougweller (talk) 16:33, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

@ Dougweller: How famous a site is should be a criteria to link to it??? As far as the info that you find on that site is important and famous isn't the popularity of that source unimportant? Please, ask yourself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bonzothedog (talk • contribs) 17:52, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

You need to sign your posts. I said there needed to be a pretty convincing reason why a site was exceptional, and asked if there had ever been a discussion about linking to recipes. Thinking more about it, you'd also want the recipe to be exceptional, that would be part of the reason you'd link, and I'm still not convinced about a link. After all, most recipes you can find easily enough on the web. Dougweller (talk) 17:56, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
FYI: I've also posted a notice about this discussion at WT:FOOD, as it's a relevant WikiProject. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 19:04, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
I am astonished that the matter of links to recipes hasn't been discussed and resolved before. Maybe www.dmoz.org is the answer to providing visitors with information without opening floodgates to commercial sites. After all, almost all recipe sites are commercial. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 20:31, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
As for popularity, given the Alexa rank, I would say it is very modest for now [1]. Also the site says : "We are amateur cooks and like to present you Germany from it's culinaric point of view". At present there are only 6 main dishes and 4 desserts, so the coverage of German food looks pretty low. Their plum tart photo is yummy, but that's not enough.
Given the number of cooking websites (and books), I agree with Dougweller, very far from being a must link. --Anneyh (talk) 20:34, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
I have checked the edits by Bonzothedog and the link in question. That link is clearly unhelpful for Wikipedia and should be regarded as linkspam. The site is just another recipe collection with no evidence of particular merit (it might be the world's best, but there is no evidence of that). Googling for quarkkeulchen recipe finds over 10,000 hits, and we are not going to add them all to Quarkkäulchen. Johnuniq (talk) 04:49, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

@all: What or who is an authorized source for recipes? Do you know any agencies or institutions that certify recipes? Is a cookbook authorized enough?

Please, have a look at the links in the stuffed cabbage article for example: We all just move in a circle as long as on the one hand links to bobbinis-kitchen.com/ are declared as useless but on the other hand websites that have the same qualities like bobbinis-kitchen.com are denoted as valid links. e.g.: External links from stuffed cabbage article 

   * "kåldolmar" recipe
   * Stuffed Cabbage Rolls - Kåldolmar
   * Kåldolmar - Stuffed Cabbage Roll
   * Cabbage Rolls – “kåldolmar” Recipe #230100
   * The ultimate Russian comfort food Irakli Iosebashvili, October, 28 2009, Russia Beyond the Headlines, article with a recipe
   * Sarma Recipe


The bobbini-Url I linked to gives an empiric example for a/several german recipe/s. A recipe that you can find 10000+ times on any searchengine but not one time on wiki: Does that make sense?: Talking about something but having no example for it?

I've chosen bobbinis-kitchen.com/quarkkeulchen and 3 or so other pages because I'm convinced about the authenicity (after I've compared and cooked several of their recipes) and that is absolutely enough. Don't you agree instead of quoting any web statistics about the url? Completeness of an example, how famous a site is or how many recipe books you have at home aren't the criteria that count, are they? But an article without an example is dead and not vivid.

@Anneyh: Is the coverage important? @Johnuniq: And all the other 10000+ recipes you have found about Quarkkeulchen are unhelpful and unimportant, too? Please, don't judge emotional about other users' behaviour.

Please, forget about a catalogue of wiki-rules that is so big and intransparent that noone can fullfill all requirements unless becoming a pseudoscientist for a moment.

Do you believe in my peaceful intentions when you read about someone that supports what I linked to?? Do you understand what I mean? I would appreciate your honest answers.

Thank you to all of you, best regards and a good night. Bonzothedog (talk) 21:56, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, there are a lot of poor or inappropriate links in food-related articles. We're discussing this one at the moment. If you'd like to help clean up others, feel free to do so.
I'm against the link or anything similar. I tend toward removing external links to recipes, unless it's from an expert (a notable chef, or an expert on the dish or cuisine), per WP:ELNO#11. --Ronz (talk) 22:40, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Here is an example of www.dmoz.org. As this site is used for many external links at Wikipedia, why not for articles about dishes? Bonzothedog: Is this recipe suitable? Assuming good faith, I presume that you are not promoting any single site, but rather just looking for a good recipe in external links section to help visitors. Is that correct?

Again, I ask other editors here to comment on the suitability of dmoz for dish article external links. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 22:50, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

On the first sight the dmoz articles seem to differ in just one point from the bobbinis-kitchen.com-Articles. You can find them over dmoz.org. That's all. Other differences? Does it really matter where the example article links come from as long as their content is a correct example for the wiki-article? More or less an example link should give a more vivid view on an article, I think. What do you think?

Thx. for the efforts.Bonzothedog (talk) 19:55, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, but who knows if it is credible? It is a commercial link. You might be promoting it.
For articles that have no external link, or a dubious link, dmoz is useful in a number of ways.
  • It makes an immediate improvement to the article, as it gives something in external links to click to find a recipe for the article subject. That is better than nothing.
  • It provides a number of results, giving a choice from which visitors can compare.
  • It avoids battles by users promoting a commercial site vie for placement in external links.
  • It can be replaced when an alternative link is found (and shown to be an improvement).
Ideally, one or two credible, verified recipes at non-commercial sites would be best. In lieu of that, an external link to a google search, example: apple pie recipe -com (showing non-commercial sites) would actually be my choice. No ads in your face. No agenda. No promoting their brand of butter.
As a visitor to pages about dishes, I am always pleased with the convenience of some sort of external link, and dmoz, like Wikipedia, is a volunteer project that tries to provide decent content. It is widely used across Wikipedia external links for a reason. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:26, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Amazon overlinking tool

Check out this tool at Linkypedia, it is noting all the links to Amazon and rating pages by number of links to them, it could be a great way to fight overlinking to Amazon as a reference in Wikipedia! Sadads (talk) 16:02, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Inclusion of a fansite where no official site exists and it is (claimed) to be fairly unique, but it is slightly commercial

This conversation does exactly what it says on the tin.

The site www.greymansland.com claims to be the single best information source out there for all things Andy McNab, and currently there is no official site online it seems. But it is for the purposes of WP:ELNO an unauthorized and unofficial fansite not written by a recognized authority (infact, author/owner details are completely unavailable it seems). It also has a commercial aspect, with an Amazon shopfront on it, but it is not too intrusive, and you could hardly say that selling appears to be the primary purpose of the site (although it comes close imho).

So, is this sort of linking acceptable, or is it still barred per WP:ELNO? I ask this as a general point, because I can see this situation existing for many potential articles, and see no reason why there should be an exception just for this site.

MickMacNee (talk) 23:31, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

I think, from Wikipedia:ELNO#Links_normally_to_be_avoided - the keywords here are 'normally' and 'generally'. Mick's commentary above centers around point 5 and, like him, I see the Amazon Rewards linking too, but would dispute that this site contains "web pages that primarily exist to sell" (my emphasis). - Alison ❤ 23:43, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
Note WP:ELPOINTS says "Links in the "External links" section should be kept to a minimum. A lack of external links or a small number of external links is not a reason to add external links." Unless you can justify this under WP:ELYES, point 3, I don't think it should be included. This site admits it is a fansite, which normally should be avoided. Vyeh (talk) 01:06, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
Thanks all for discussing this. WP:ELYES point 3 'Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that is relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject and cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues, amount of detail (such as professional athlete statistics, movie or television credits, interview transcripts, or online textbooks), or other reasons.' I think our site is exactly that. Neutral might be debatable since we are a fansite, but that doesn't mean we're not critical or allow others to place critical comments (you will find examples of that on our News Page). We do feel we give a lot of information about McNab that cannot be placed on the page (such as news about book signings, but also photos, videos, exclusive interviews etc) but would still interest people who are looking for more information about McNab. Basically we are one-of-a-kind on Internet, at least at the moment. Slightly commercial..we only try to cover some of the expenses we make to be able to maintain the site. We are a long way from making any profits, and I doubt we will ever do!! Main goal (sorry if I repeat myself) is to provide accurate and up-to-date information about McNab that we feel (know!) people are very interested in. ACatharina (talk) 21:16, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
The fansite in question is certainly not unique, as exhibited by this alternate Andy McNab fansite. If one fansite is allowed, then so should the other, and I personally believe that neither are of a reasonable, unbiased standard to be included in any article. 144.140.22.4 (talk) 23:46, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
If there is no official site then inclusion of dodgy fansites is not right. The EL policy is quite clear so it it should be followed. This is an encyclopaedia, not a link farm. Jezhotwells (talk) 02:25, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
With all respect Jezhotwells and 144.140.22.4 - I know who you are - I'd like to hear the moderators/administrators opinions on this one. We are not dodgy and therealist.. is not a fansite, quite the contrary. Also for the mod/admins: I had nothing to do with adding the Greymansland link to the McNab page again, I'd like to conclude the discussion first! ACatharina (talk) 12:17, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
At WikiPedia, admins are simply editors who have additional privileges (e.g. being able to block users) because they have the support of the community. What you are looking for is the opinion of neutral uninvolved editors. Start with the introductory material in WP:EL: "Some acceptable links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy." Clearly it is on-topic since it is only about Andy McNab and there is more detail (in particular the gallery and the videos) than can be included in the article. I took a look at www.greysmansland.com and I noted the interviews with Andy McNab. I believe that clearly meets the criteria of WP:ELMAYBE, point 4. (Who is more knowledgeable than the subject of the article?) Going down the list of WP:NO, I think the only points that need to be discussed are 5 and 11. Looking at the site, it does not exist primarily to sell products and it does not contain an objectionable amount of advertising. Point 11 applies. I don't see a reason to make a general exception for cases where no official site exists. (By the way, I looked at the references and it seems there used to be an "Andy McNab Official Website". Is there a reason the archived version of this site isn't listed in the External Links?) If it is included, it should be because there is a consensus among the editors involved in editing the article based on common sense. For what it is worth, I do have some tangential questions: (1) Why isn't the archive of the "Andy McNab Official Website" included as an external link (is there some issue of whether this site was authorized by Andy McNab)? (2) Why are the existing external links there? (They all look like reliable sources, which can be integrated into the article; and the Quick Reads link contains very little material related to Andy McNab - a picture of a book and a link to a short excerpt from the first chapter.) Vyeh (talk) 14:06, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

........Hi Vyeh, point 5: 'Links to web pages that primarily exist to sell products or services, or to web pages with objectionable amounts of advertising.': Both Alison and MickMacNee already said (see above) that Greymansland doesn't seem to a site with primary purpose to sell - and it isn't! Point 11 'Links to blogs, personal web pages and most fansites' definitely applies, I never stated anything different. The question is whether our link would be allowed despite the fact fansite links are 'normally avoided'. Keyword 'normally' - this leaves room for exceptions and I think we would qualify to the exception :-) ACatharina (talk) 17:35, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

What additional reliable information about the subject would the addition of a fan site bring? Answer - none. So leave it out. Jezhotwells (talk) 23:57, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

..Additional reliable: interviews with McNab himself, photos, videos, the latest news on projects..Can't make those up (so reliable)and can't be placed on the Wiki page. I'd say that's a lot 'additional' Just because you obviously hold a grudge against our website/Andy McNab doesn't mean your opinion should be followed.ACatharina (talk) 12:16, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

No-one is holding a grudge against you or your website, however your admission of a conflict of interest in making this edit doesn't help your case. A fansite of this sort is not a reliable source - for all we know all of teh content could be made up. Now if someone could demonstarte taht this site is regarded reliable by other reliable sources then it may have some more validty. Wikipedia policies are achieved by consensus of the editing community and it appears that the consensus here is againts including the link as it is not in accordance with our policy at WP:EL. Jezhotwells (talk) 00:55, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
You know, when people admit a conflict of interest, we really should assume that they're trying to do the right thing.
Also, external links do not need to be reliable sources: See WP:ELMAYBE #4. So all of that about being regarded as reliable is completely irrelevant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:27, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
What I think is that this discussion is leading nowhere but thanks for your support (Alison/others). I know that Greymansland would be an excellent external link. The information there IS reliable no matter what (some) people may think. Even McNab calls us in an exclusive audio interview on our website (no, was not a hired actor) a 'great website'. But I'm not going to discuss this for weeks or months. Regards ACatharina (talk) 13:46, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

As a neutral uninvolved non-admin (taking part in discussion elsewhere on this page), it seems to me greymansland.com is a useful source of information about its subject, which would make a useful External link. Lumping it with "dodgy" fan sites is unfair. It seems to me that the people arguing to keep a link, including ACatharina, are making good points based on citing Wikipedia policy and how best to interpret it. Questionic (talk) 15:16, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

For me, when I remove fan sites from articles, my rule of thumb is where it lands in a Google search. If it's the top fan site, I almost always keep it unless it's a blog or forum. If it's not the top fan site, I try to figure out why the others aren't listed and figure out whether to keep, replace, or remove the link based on that. If it's not in the top 10, I tend to just default to removal. --132 16:03, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Thanks both!! Now we're getting somewhere. If you would be so kind to Google 'Andy McNab official website' you will find Greymansland on NR 1 place on Google. Not the nr 1 FANsite, just NR 1 site!! :-) ACatharina (talk) 21:44, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

I am not Pohick2!

A while ago I added a link to an interview with Mark Ford (poet) on the wiki page on Mark Ford. At the time it was the only available interview with him online, indeed it was one of the few places you could find any information on him online. It still remains one of only two interviews with him online and the only text interview with him. Furthermore this interview is longer and more detailed. However as I edit the magazine which published the interview it was deleted by MrOllie. This magazine is totally non-profit and I can't think of any gain, monetary or otherwise, that I may receive from a link. Although I thought MrOllie's action was an overzealous and bureaucratic application of a rule which deprived users of useful information, I did not put the link back as I could see that it was technically in conflict of interest.

However someone with the username Pohick2 put the link back in as it is useful and was (at the time) the only interview with the subject. But MrOllie deleted this link that someone else who is totally unrelated to The Literateur put in. He has since accused me of being Pohick2 despite the fact that this is the only link (as far as I know) to The Literateur that he has made. Pohick2 has created (according to his userpage) 1376 pages on Wikipedia. MrOllie seems, strangely, to think I created 1376 pages under a new name solely to avoid accusations of conflict of interest! He accuses me of being Pohick2 and requests I cease to add the link.

Please can someone give their opinion on this matter? He will not listen to me and this is my last resort. He seems to be bent on deleting this link.

This matter is slightly complicated by the fact that after accusations have been levelled against me, I did some digging and have discovered that there is an IP address that has justput up links to The Literateur (I put up other information as well.) I do not know who this is and it is certainly not (as MrOllie has accused) me. I have sent an email around asking some people who work with the magazine whether it is them but I have not had a reply as yet. I imagine it must be either a very enthusiastic reader or one of our many contributors. It is galling, though more understable, that MrOllie keeps deleting these too and falsely accusing me of creating the links.

However this matter should bear no influence on the matter of Mark Ford and Pohick2. For in this case it clear that Pohick2 has contributed to hundreds of articles and MrOllie's accusation that we are one and the same is ridiculous. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Youngpossum (talk • contribs) 20:09, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

I have never accused you of being Pohick2. - MrOllie (talk) 20:15, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
|I think saying 'Kindly stop adding links to sites you are affiliated with. - MrOllie (talk) 23:35, 7 August 2010 (UTC)' after Pohick2 has added the link is an accusation that I am Pohick2. If you don't think I am then why did you delete his link? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Youngpossum (talk • contribs)
That was a reply to a post that you made stating that 'I have undone your deletion'. - MrOllie (talk) 20:26, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
Right so why did you delete Pohick2's link in the first place if you acknowledge that Pohick2 is not me? Not that you have acknowledged it mind you.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Youngpossum (talk • contribs)
Ok, I'm game. I do not believe that you and Pohick2 are the same person. - MrOllie (talk) 20:38, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
But why did you delete his link then? Or are you saying that you will stop deleting the external link to Mark Ford's interview if I were to revert your deletion now? It might help to remember that I'm not British Petroleum wanting to net another billion, I am merely a literary enthusiast who thinks that it would be of huge benefit to wiki users if they are alerted to a detailed interview with this man on his subject page. This is why I am so insistent that you don't override the fact that someone else unaffiliated with the magazine has realised this too. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Youngpossum (talk • contribs) 20:44, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
I removed it because I don't think it meets the guidelines on external links, particularly links normally to be avoided points 4 and 11. The link came back to my attention because a new single purpose IP had just added a new wave of links on various pages. Pohick2 had disagreed on that particular page, but I judged it to be unlikely that he cared any more. - MrOllie (talk) 20:52, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
Point 4 is countered by the fact that I did not put up the second link, someone else did. Point 11 is countered by the fact that the magazine is self-evidently not a 'fan page', a blog or a 'personal web site' but a magazine that has published interviews with a Poet Laureate, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, a Booker Prize winning author and two leading academics in English literature who have both received titles as well as running a competition in conjunction with an organisation funded by the Arts Council and publishing articles by Oxford academics. Pray tell me what this magazine is a 'fan' of or how something with a huge team of contributors is a personal web page or blog. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Youngpossum (talk • contribs) 21:00, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps some other people on here (more than one) could give their opinions to decide the matter? --Youngpossum (talk) 21:41, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
One problem is that Special:Contributions/Youngpossum shows that the first few edits of this account were to add links to literateur.com (I did not check more than the first few). Please understand that hundreds of external links are added every day, and most of them are for some form of promotion, so firm removal of links is frequently required. The best way to handle a useful and reliable source is to use it as a reference for text added to the article (but please make sure that such text is really helpful for the article). Another way to proceed would be to pick one article which you think would benefit from an external link, then post a message on its talk page with an outline of the information at the link (mention a couple of points that it includes which are not in the article), and suggest that the link be added. Do not talk about other editors (do not refer to a disagreement you may have had with someone who removed the link – it's not relevant, and it frames the discussion in a manner that almost ensures that the result you want will not occur). Wait at least three days for any replies. Johnuniq (talk) 00:49, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for your advice. I'm unsure though as to how I could allow the other editor a defence of his actions without mentioning his name? Otherwise won't it just be me presenting my case without the case for the opposition as it were? (I'm not trying to pick a fight with you! I'm genuinely confused as to why it is better not to mention his name and thus deprive him of a chance to respond.) Of course I will abide by your advice if this is standard practice. I once tried to use The Literateur as a reference for useful information which I felt was needed. Namely, to add the information that Will Self started off as a newspaper cartoonist and a stand-up comedian. (Something he talked about at some length in an interview with the magazine.) This information was not on the 'Career' section of his page and yet is clearly directly relevant so I openly added it with my account. Unfortunately the above editor deleted this information as well. I have put it back without the reference to The Literateur. This is not ideal since there is now nothing to back this information up as fact. However I felt that the information itself ought to be there and it seemed daft to throw the baby out with the bathwater and delete this evidently useful information because I used an interview with Self on my magazine as a source. Do you feel this should have been kept, reference and all? I'm afraid that personally I can't understand why one should delete something evidently useful in order to abide by a rule which was obviously not created for such cases.Thank you for your response and thank you to Questionic for giving his opinion below too.Youngpossum (talk)
Frankly the best thing to do now would be to edit some articles without even thinking about the website you want to use. At the moment, there is a very natural tendency to regard someone who concentrates on adding links to a particular website as a spammer (as I mentioned, we have to take a hardline approach to avoid having ten external links in every paragraph of every article; have a look at WT:WikiProject Spam to see the most extreme cases). Sorry, but while what you say is very reasonable, other editors are not going to forget a history. I strongly advise you to give the links a rest for a few weeks. After that, you might look on the talk page of articles of interest and see if there is a WikiProject that looks applicable (see the boxes, if any, at the top of each article talk page). On the talk page of the WikiProject, you will see if it looks as if there are active members (i.e. if there has been recent discussion). If so, you could ask a question there. Johnuniq (talk) 11:46, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for your advice. I would still appreciate your enlightening me on why it is better to not mention another editor's name in dispute resolutions since surely it is better that the editor have a chance to respond? I would also appreciate your opinion on whether it was justified to delete my addition of referenced information on Will Self since, as I see it, it complies exactly with advice in your initial response that "The best way to handle a useful and reliable source is to use it as a reference for text added to the article (but please make sure that such text is really helpful for the article)."
I would also like to point out that I haven't actually added any links for months. The only 'linking' I've done is to reverse the Mark Ford deletion. I am not a frequent contributor to wikipedia but I have occasionally contributed (without reference to the magazine) on writers where I feel the information given is inaccurate or when there lacks an obvious piece of information that should be added.
I find it hard to understand why there is so much tolerance for editors who are incapable of using their common sense and judgement about whether a link is spam or is useful. The Literateur example is actually relatively trivial but here have been other instances such as a link to a useful leading website giving practical advice and links to resources for a disabled person which was deleted because it was added by the editor of that website. Surely editors ought to be under more pressure to start exercising some common sense and really consider whether deleting something actually furthers the wikipedia project. I don't believe that depriving people of a link to a leading non-profit site giving very useful information for disabled people is some sort of heroic defence against promotion and I find it hard to understand why this is tolerated as much as it is. Similarly I have seen instances of someone adding an official website about themselves as an external link on a page about themselves (started by someone else) and this is deleted because he should not self-promote. This is patently ridiculous.--Youngpossum (talk) 13:06, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
The primary question is whether the Literateur link is appropriate to the Mark Ford article. In my opinion it is, and since this is Wikipedia, I would add it to the article myself -- except that somebody has now put Literateur on the Wikipedia spam blacklist, which is in my opinion an excessive response. Youngpossum has been commendably open about his connection to the Literateur; MisterOllie's initial response to the link was understandable, the continued deletion of the link when it is added by others does not benefit Wikipedia or its users. Questionic (talk) 13:39, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
Oh for goodness' sake this is ridiculous and petty. Thank you Questionic for putting to my attention that the magazine has been blacklisted. This is absolutely ridiculous. Ever since MrOllie told me about the conflict of interest rule, I have not added any links. I cannot be held responsible if someone else adds links. And this is what happens. I can't believe that someone has blacklisted the magazine despite the fact that it is approved of by leading academics, prize-winning writers and publishing professionals. Just look at our interviewees - Andrew Motion, Sir Frank Kermode, Sir Christopher Ricks, Will Self, Hanif Kureishi... We get review books sent to us by Penguin, Faber, Little Brown. We publish articles by Oxford fellows. I'd appreciate it if you could help me to get it taken off this blacklist. Had I known that wikipedia was seriously impeded by such petty bureaucracy, I might never have bothered getting involved. And with all due respect I do know more about some writers than the average person as I am a PhD student in English literature and have just graduated from Cambridge.--Youngpossum (talk) 14:46, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

To an uninvolved passerby who has done a bit of Googling, the Literateur magazine website looks much closer to being a respectable WP:RS than a podcast interview with the poet, which has been allowed to remain as an external link. The initial objection to having a link placed by someone with a potential conflict of interest is understandable. There is, however, no evidence that others who want to link are trying to spam for the Literateur -- it is entirely possible that with information about the poet being scarce on the internet, they have independently Googled this item and wish to add it. We should assume good faith here. Questionic (talk) 00:25, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I did not blacklist this site to be "petty". I blacklisted it because we have had a problem with several IPs and user accounts adding it in spite of repeated requests not to do so. I believe this site is a high-quality, self-published blog not generally recognized as a literary magazine (which it claims to be). I note that a Google News Archive search turns up zero relevant media references when I search for   "The Literateur" magazine;   a Google News Archive search for   "literateur.com"   is equally fruitless. Google Scholar and Google Books searches also return nothing.[2][3][4][5] I don't think this site meets our requirements to be a reliable source.
The one possible exception: interviews with the subject of the article in which the interview is used as a reference. This might meet the requirements of Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources#Self-published and questionable sources as sources on themselves. Even then, I think any decision to use an interview from such a site should be only made by trusted, established, neutral editors after a talk page discussion as to how that source uniquely benefits the article in providing information not otherwise available.
Finally, note that we have a whitelist specifically for the purpose of allowing trusted editors to use specific pages from otherwise blacklisted domains. --A. B. (talk • contribs) 15:54, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
I am sorry if I have caused offence, I was not suggesting that "you" were being petty, but that the action of requesting to blacklist a site after one editing dispute without giving any notice is petty. I was given one request at the very beginning to stop adding links to the magazine and I have done so. As I have said before and will say again, I have not added links since the first request. I do not know about the others.
It is not a 'self-published blog' since there are many, many contributors and a large proportion of these writers are professional academics and journalists who have contributed to publications such as The Guardian, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement. It is only a year old so it is hardly surprising that there is little reference to it out there yet. However I note that the magazine has already been referenced in academic dissertations about individual authors.
Its youth and whether it's on some news archive does not affect the fact that there is a great deal of quality information about writers on the site that is unavailable elsewhere. An example would be that Will Self started out as a stand-up comedian. I could give many other examples if you care to hear them. Another point I wish to add is that this magazine is totally non-profit and there is no financial gain from links. All it does is link wikipedia users to information given by the authors themselves in interviews. Often these interviews are by far the most recent, the most detailed and sometimes the only one freely available online. I also note that no articles or creative works have never been linked, it has always been interviews. I find it difficult to understand why the writer himself speaking to someone is an unreliable source for information about that writer. --Youngpossum (talk) 16:16, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
Regarding your first statement about it being petty to blacklist a site after just one dispute, I just wanted to let you know that many sites are blacklisted before there's even one dispute, sometimes before they've even been linked on the project. It's the quality of the link and the likeliness of it being spammed that matters, not how many times it's been disputed. I won't comment on the rest of this though as I'm not involved and feel too under-the-weather right now to read the wall of text above to become involved. --132 16:32, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
I hope you feel better, 13. If you develop a masochistic desire to read more, there's additional discussion at MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist#literateur.com (personally I'd go back to bed).
As to excessive blacklisting, I know I try to be careful as do the several other admins that do most of the blacklisting work. If you see something you object to, by all means raise it MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist. --A. B. (talk • contribs) 16:51, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
The text is rather intimidating isn't it? I hope you feel better soon 13. A.B, thank you for your informative responses, I suggest that we either carry on the discussion here or at the Spam Blacklist section rather than both. It would also be good if you could respond to my reasons for saying it is not a personal blog and to my pointing out that two people have voiced their opinion that the link is justified. --Youngpossum (talk) 17:00, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
The fact that you are working so hard to include links to what appears to be your website is a very bad sign. You need to work with the community here, and I have given you some good advice above (take a break, do some other editing, approach a WikiProject, proceed slowly). You are being polite and debating well, but there are literally hundreds of people attempting to link to their site every day, and the community here does not like being exploited. We want to think you are here to help Wikipedia and not to promote a website. Johnuniq (talk) 23:28, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
Youngpossum, you might want to read WP:PROMO. It doesn't all apply, but it's the standard advice and some of it might give you insight into what we're dealing with. (Wikipedia:Spam event horizon might amuse you.)
AB, if the problem is primarily IP-based spam, don't you think that putting it on XLinkBot's list would have been an adequate response? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:12, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Our guiding principle here should be what benefits Wikipedia, not what experienced editors are usually quite correct in assuming about spamlinks. The online magazine Literateur is a unique source of interviews with respected literary figures, and we should be letting our readers find those interviews whether the initial suggestion was made by the journal's editor, a new IP, or Godzilla on a rampage.Furthermore, quoting from WP:BITE "The principle "Ignorantia juris non excusat" (Latin for: "ignorance of the law does not excuse") is incompatible with the guidelines of not biting and assuming good faith. You yourself violate Wikipedia's guidelines and policies when you attack a new user for ignorance of them... If you exclude editors without "Barnstars" and the like from your circle you probably diminish the final product." Was the best response here to escalate personal conflict with insulting edit summaries and a secret Blacklist request? I do not think the errors here have been entirely on Youngpossum's side. Questionic (talk) 15:10, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Although the disputed links were I think primarily external links, others here have suggested the interviews might also meet the self-published criteria for biographical reference material, so I have requested an evaluation by experienced editors, if others who have spoken here wish to participate. I think a discussion there makes more sense than requiring each article's editors to request piecemeal permissions.Questionic (talk) 17:39, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Sunday drive

A series of IPs beginning with 71 (but mostly likely the same person) keep adding spam to the article "Sunday drive" pertaining to a seemingly non-notable band that just happens to share the name of this article's title. The spam includes information and external links about this band. I keep reverting the additions of spam, yet I revertions keep getting reverted. I tried requesting temporary semi-protection, and this was declined on the basis there was "not enough recent disruptive activity." Tatterfly (talk) 01:08, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Try proposing it to User:XLinkBot. That way, a bot will automatically remove it if it's added by an anon, but let autoconfirmed editors add it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:02, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

External links to political parties

The article The American Left describes the history and current status of left-wing organizations and publications in the United States, i.e., socialist, communist and anarchist. It includes separate sections on all notable existing left-wing political parties and included a section providing external links to those parties' websites. An editor removed them because they duplicate internal links (WP:ELNO#19): ""official website" means the official "The American Left" website, not related websites. The internal links in the article are sufficient and preferred." Is that a correct reading of the guideline or is the guideline applicable? Here is a link to the contested section "External links". TFD (talk) 14:38, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

It looks like (I only checked two) that the notable parties also have separate WP articles and the external links are there. In addition to WP:ELNO, #19: "Links to websites of organizations mentioned in an article – unless they otherwise qualify as something that should be linked or considered, there is also WP:ELNO, #13: "a website on a specific subject should usually not be linked from an article about a general subject." WP:ELOFFICIAL, #1 requires "The linked content is controlled by the subject (organization or individual person) of the Wikipedia article." so it looks like the justification for removal was WP:ELNO, #13, with a note that WP:ELOFFICIAL did not apply. Vyeh (talk) 15:33, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

External links and references to former GeoCities sites

There has recently been some discussion over at the Administrator's Noticeboard regarding links to pages formerly hosted by the now-defunct GeoCities. An automated process of redirecting GeoCities links to a partial archive has raised a number of red flags with various editors (including me). It is apparent that a consensus needs to be reached on the best way to deal with these links.

The problem

  • There are currently 11,000+ articles which link to GeoCities URLs, whether through references or external links
  • There are currently 5,000+ articles which have had their GeoCities redirected to oocities.com (a partial archive of GeoCities pages which by [http://www.oocities.com/geocities-archive/faq.html its own reckoning] hosts only 2 million of the 38 million GeoCities pages.
  • Given the nature of free web hosting services, many of these links are of dubious value. However, many of them are useful sources.

A solution?

User:Moonriddengirl suggested establishing a working group here to deal with this problem, so here I am. Based on discussion at WP:AN, I propose:

  • Manually reviewing articles (to be clear, explicitly NOT talk pages, archives, etc.) which contain links to GeoCities or oocities.com
  • Where these URLs appear as external links only, either a) point to an active site which serves the same purpose; b) redirect to a Wayback archive; or c) remove the link entirely if it falls under an WP:ELNO category.
  • Where these URLs are cited as references, either a) point to a currently-available resource which supports the same claim; b) redirect to a Wayback archive; or c) remove the reference and the text it supports. Obviously c) would only need to happen if no archive of the page exists and there is no other reference for the information available, and it's what we should be doing anyway in line with WP:RS.

On the face of it, this looks like a big job, but it is achievable. If 10 people tackled 10 articles a day (or 30 people did 3 a day), it would be done in under 6 months. That's not such a long time considering these links have now been dead for nearly 10 months.

So: thoughts, comments, objections, suggestions, and perhaps volunteers? Katherine (talk) 15:42, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

I'll raise my hand. :) Most of these pages are unreliable and unusable, anyway, but some of them are valid content. I can easily average 10 articles a day, although with my usual work approach I'll probably cluster more than that into every few days. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 16:06, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
Excellent, thank you. Once consensus is clear that this (or some variation) has the community seal of approval, it would be good to start a little project page to keep guidelines in place and track progress towards the ultimate Geo-free goal. Katherine (talk) 17:44, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
  • As said before there probably werent 38Million geocities pages available at a time but only 38 Million user account (both inaktive and aktive ones) a better impression gives the following fact: Geocities when it was alive was visited about 5 Million times a day.
  • OoCities stated that they specially collected all pages linked at wikipedia and indeed a part of about >90% out of the pool of these 34.000 pages are available there.
  • As iam already done with a lot of research on the topic and have a complex Regex and handmade lists in AutowikiBrowser i will of course volunteer and be able to change effectivly semi-automated all geocities.com links to archive.org/..../geocities.com/ one's which will work there, which will as said before only be about 50% because they only have about 50% avaialable. at least this will already solve half the issue within weeks and within consensus.
  • please note: i strongly suggest just to stick to the question how to update but not declare each and every single free webhost link an outlaw. i assume that most contents on wikipedia are linked with a good reason by people who actually had knowledge about the single topics and i think so do you also. Thus to decide which are worth to stay at wikipedia even available or which should better be removed just because geocities was a freehost is a whole other question. and please, its not right to make it something which everyone can decide on his own neither you guys just while updateing some links. there must either be a general discussion about wikipedia's view on free webhosts - which would be a much more striking bigger thing - or there should be a discussion/consensus about every single link deletion which occurs. Thus i strongly suggest again to seperate both issues, which will only make this updateing issue easier. if wikipedia had strict general prejudices against freewebhosts there were no links to geocities (orginially 34.000 links, angelfire 5000, tripod (10.000), sites.google (40.000) and so on. Furthermore, if you delete any reference links you will even more definitely harm Wikipedia.

--Updatehelper (talk) 16:43, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

There's been plenty of discussion. We have policies and guidelines regulating external links and what constitutes a usable resource for Wikipedia at WP:V, WP:RS and WP:EL. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 17:13, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
of course. iam pretty aware of those discussions and i noway tryied to question your expertise - what i said before is just resonably not to decide to delete parts of wikipedia "just by the way", okay? its simply reasonable not to mix both things up. Talking about geocities there are a maxiumum of 34.000 links, which just can be updated - talking about quality of free webhosts as well as private tiny pages which both are rarly most liable. But there is no connection between both issues because this applys probably to millions of links within wikipedia and probably noone would agree if anyone came here and ask to delete a majority of all those links, depending on his personal view, whereas the updateing process can be done with less human work but semiautomated or even fully automated. Thats what i tried to point out. Also in general i see certain sources of mistakes to remove important links, which were made in the first decade of the web and do just no more look like lieable on the first impression, as long as taking nowadays view because they have a primitiv layout and lots of blinking gif animations which are today seen as dubious. But in the 1990s they were a standard. Thus it would take probably years to decide which to delete and which to update wherease it only will take weeks to update them all proberly. Long story short, it just makes no sense to mix both issues and only complicates the discussion on updating them. i hope you agree.

--Updatehelper (talk) 18:11, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) No, I don't. If the links are inappropriate, either for sourcing or as ELs, they should as a matter of course be removed. Any editor is empowered to remove content that doesn't belong; that's the way Wikipedia works. Automated work cannot be approved here. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:24, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
Of course it can be an automated task to replace every "http://geocities.com/" with an "http://web.archive.org/web/*/geocities.com/" and there isnt any source of mistakes. But you are clearly mixing up two seperatable issues and i dont see why in the world you think they need to be mixed up?

--Updatehelper (talk) 18:39, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

You misunderstand me. It cannot be approved here. User:Xeno has already instructed you where to go to get approval for automated tasks. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:54, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
sorry, ok, i just did not even ask "how to approve" --Updatehelper (talk) 19:03, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
for references its even more striking because of the nature of references, if you define a reference dubious then you also define the fact writen in the article dubious and you have to delete this also, and if you possibly do any mistake because you are working on a list of 34.000 links without possibly haveing any personal relation to all the single articles than the damage will not just be to lose a external link but also to make the whole wikipedia article less liable

--Updatehelper (talk) 18:39, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

We have a template for this; {{fact}}. But most of these links are ELs, and their removal will create no additional issues. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:54, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
however, once again: why dont you just stop mixing up both things. once again the facts: updateing 1000s of links "at once" was reasonable. checking every single link on wikipedia for deletion was also reasonable but need necessary to be done carefully by a human who knows about the specific topic or better a consensus on every single deletion. --Updatehelper (talk) 19:03, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
There is no reason not to mix things up. Human volunteers can do both things at once. If you get approval for an automated conversion process to wayback, that's fine; but the appropriateness of the links still needs to be verified. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 19:04, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
In terms of updateing there its clearly an automisable take and thats why its just contraproductive/complicateing to try to mix both things, because geocities is totally dead, whereas archives grow and even links which are not available now can possibly become avaiable later, thus this step can only improve things even if done automated. every further improvments by human work are optional and completely seperatable --Updatehelper (talk) 19:17, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

....

Getting back to the original idea of updating Geocities links, it appears that Archive.org has a substantial collection of Geocities material not yet online, material that was collected for them by many people during the same shut-down window when oocities was creating its 2M page Geocities collection[6]. And according to Archiveteam, "There have been other parallel projects also mirroring GeoCities besides Archive Team. These include Archive.Org, Reocities, Oocities, geocities.ws, and Internet Archaeology. All groups appear to have gotten different amounts of the GeoCities collection, and most are now sharing data to track down gaps and share copies." betsythedevine (talk) 03:48, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

¶ I've added this thread to Template:Centralized discussion. —— Shakescene (talk) 04:43, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

  • I don't like tedious manual work checking links, and I probably won't help out if that's the result (sorry!), but I think it's the only way we can accurately get this resolved. I don't care too much which archive we use, but I think archive.org should be a good one to check first. Having a list of dead GeoCities links generated, and then a list of pages in an archive corresponding to the deadlinks, should help greatly at first. —fetch·comms 15:48, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
  • You're looking at this all wrong. The best approach to this would be to go to the list that Kuru asks for below, find some articles on topics which interest you, read them, then determine whether the dead GeoCities link is salvageable. And while you are doing that, fix any spelling & grammar mistakes which annoy you, do some fact checking (either adding sources or that {{fact}} tag), & maybe add some content. Or even simply add a suggestion or two on the Talk page about how you'd like to see the article improved, like asking questions you had which the article did not answer. Maybe we won't reach the 10 articles a day quota Katherine proposed above, but doing that will drag a large number of articles at least one step towards respectability. -- llywrch (talk) 06:09, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I'd be happy to help, but it would be preferable if someone could generate a scratch pad page with all of the affected pages so we can cross them off or annotate them there instead of working from the linksearch list. I had not been following the ANI discussion, but now that I've read it I'm a little surprised. Quite a few of the oocities links were an empty page with nothing more than a reference to archive.org and some google ads - that's completely unacceptable. I'm also a little fuzzy on why we're entertaining geocities sites as reliable sources - what are some examples of an acceptable reference from those kinds of sites? Subject created or official sites, I suppose? Kuru (talk) 19:22, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I've looked at a bunch of Geocities pages since this started, and very few of them are reliable. "Very few" may be overstating. The only one that's immediately coming to mind is a school I saw that used to use it as their official site, but since Geocities went off they've evidently ponied up for a real website anyway. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 19:33, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
I agree that the main value of archived Geocities pages is historical -- they mostly demonstrate how some entity chose to represent itself at a particular point in time past. Here again, the time-stamp information preserved by the Wayback Machine adds context that is missing from a naked page mirror. betsythedevine (talk) 20:13, 16 August 2010 (UTC)


Quite a few of the archived pages I've looked at have links through to live sites hosted elsewhere. Seems like many people prepared for the shutdown by setting up new sites and updating their Geocities accordingly. That should be useful in cases where we want to retain a site as an external link. Archives are going to be useful in some cases (references, maybe), although I would guess in the majority of instances the appropriate action will be to delete the link. Katherine (talk) 13:43, 17 August 2010 (UTC)


I would be interested in taking part in this project. The amateur-published material in Geocities is a significant resource of information about our common past; it would be a shame for Wikipedia to lose those connections. I notice that there are already guidelines and even a template useful for linking to archive.org. Also, there is now a slightly different proposal on the original ANI concerning ways to treat Wikipedia's Geocities links. Should further discussion take place here or there? Questionic (talk) 12:58, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

I've just left a note on Colfer2's talk page about the discussion here. Katherine (talk) 13:36, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
I am happy with this proposal also. In addition I really think the geocities-to-oocities edits on Talk pages should be reverted sooner than later. They make the discussions inaccurate and were edits of other editor's comments. And in article space, I think every single oocities link could be changed to geocities except on the article Geocities, so that simple regex could be completely automated. Uh-oh now I'm just recreating my proposal! The other thing I advocate is marking all geocities links {{dead}} soon, another task that could be fully automated without causing too many problems. (That simple way of marking dead has the advantage of triggering SmackBot, which cleans up other problems.) And... I think we should be clear about whether we are going with Archive.org only or leaving room for other archives. Either way is OK with me, since this is a already a big project. -Colfer2 (talk) 13:56, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
Remove them all - the usefulness, and more importantly, the reliablity of those links/site isn't that great. Important facts can be sourced from better third party places. Lugnuts (talk) 17:39, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
In most cases, Geocities pages were linked as per the policy on "official pages: "to give the reader the opportunity to see what the subject says about itself," in this case, at some specific time in the past. Pages that have been linked to as if they provide a neutral, reliable source of factual information should indeed be replaced if possible. Questionic (talk) 21:30, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Article Talk space: done! I have completed reverting Updatehelper's geocities-to-oocities edits in Article Talk space. I just did a simple search on "oocities" and made about 330 reverts. I will double-check it tomorrow or whenever the space is re-indexed and reflects the edits I made. There were only a few exceptions where I left "oocities" in the space, when it was intended by the editor. -Colfer2 (talk) 03:49, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand why you are doing this. The oocities cites are necessary in order to see what people were referring to in those talk page discussions. The compromise you came up with, where you separately list the oocities cite is OK, though. -- Ssilvers (talk) 04:39, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
I can see your point. It might be a matter of policy over practicality. At least the Article Talk space is a better place to work this out than Article space. All geocities links are dead and won't be coming back. Ideally each one that we keep should at least be marked {{dead}} and given a parameter that links to archive.org or to a choice of archive links. Your example is great, because oocities has it, but archive.org does not. But the oocities edits caused a lot of problems, and not just policy problems (linkspam, copyvio, do not edit comments, etc.). They often made a Talk discussion into nonsense, for instance when people were discussing whether to allow geocities links, or describing a search pattern.
The Talk pages should not have been converted geocities-to-oocities. Instead dead/archive links can added ad-hoc by interested editors. Or use a responding comment, which is the clearest way, and completely legit. Here is the responding comment I used, restoring oocities and keeping geocities, after Ssilvers reverted me: diff. -Colfer2 (talk) 05:14, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
On the general subject: Archived "dead" pages are generally not suitable external links. They should be removed (or re-pointed to a live page, if the page has moved to a new URL) per WP:EL#What_can_be_done_with_a_dead_external_link. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:29, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
I really should have left edit summaries on my 330 edits. People do not like seeing goecities reappear on pages they are watching. -Colfer2 (talk) 11:43, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
Even when done in good faith, one should typically not edit the comments of others. So I fully endorse Colfer's returning them to their original form which linked to Geocities. –xenotalk 13:17, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
  • A workspace was requested, above. I've just used my major work 'bot to make the external hyperlink search, for namespace 0 only. The list of pages and contained URLs is rather large, it turns out. I can create a series of workspace pages with tables for noting cleanup actions taken so that people can collaborate and check things off as they are dealt with. Do you really want these, Kuru and Fetchcomms? Uncle G (talk) 13:57, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
    • I'm afraid that checking things off is going to massively slow things down. What about just creating a divisible list where people can take chunks to work on? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:29, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
      • Already created. It didn't all fit on one page and didn't render as a single table. It exceeds MediaWiki size limitations. So I broke it down into 52 groups of ~250 rows each. But I'm not going to the fuss and bother of uploading multiple pages unless such a worklist is actually wanted. Uncle G (talk) 16:38, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
        • Maintaining lists seems like a lot of extra work to me. A simple search in the article namespace for geocities would allow progress to be tracked, maybe a table showing the number of hits remaining each day/week. Just run a search and note the number each day? Just to show progress, doesn't need to be accurate. Example below. Katherine (talk) 09:28, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
          • Kuru and Fetchcomms both asked for it, above. I'm waiting to hear whether they really want it. Uncle G (talk) 11:56, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I think a list of pages is easier to navigate than the search menu (for me, at least), and I can easily see what needs to be done. I don't care much for the "checking off" part, but if a user volunteers to do numbers 1–10 on whatever page, then I don't see any issue with having the bot update the listings every day or two, depending on how fast we can resolve these (most would be removed, anyway). If you can get this listed, I think it will save time, if even a little, but the bot does the grunt work and I might even work on it some in my spare time (which is unfortunately very little right now). Thanks, —fetch·comms 21:38, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Geocities links in article space
Date Number
19 August 2010 11,978
20 August 2010 11,978
21 August 2010 11,978
  • This table would probably do for a good long while, but eventually we'll run into redundancy of labors when people start evaluating the same links, not knowing that others have already checked them. Any way we can flag a link as checked? Or perhaps encourage null edits with comments in edit summary? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:07, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
I was going to say that once an article has been checked and the links removed it shouldn't come up in search anymore, but of course if a link is changed to the Wayback copy, it's still going to have the G word in the URL. Although a search for www.geocities.com/* will only return those that still have the old Geo-links. Hmm. Is there a case you can think of (that is obviously completely escaping me) where a checked article would retain those trigger words? I like the idea of leaving a note in the edit summary, or a commented-out comment next to the link, if there is a case where we'd retain it. Katherine (talk) 13:05, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Nope. If it won't show up on the list as its compiled, there's no issue that I know of. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:08, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Actually, a couple of the Wayback Machine redirects I did have www.geocities.com/ as part of the new URL. See for example this page where some of the archived versions were saved with www.geocities.com in the url and others were not. Questionic (talk) 00:35, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I remove geocities on sight. I have never found anything there that was wikipedia reliable, its the past guys, this is a totally different time, forget about geocities and move on. Redirecting any of them to oocities.com is a further waste of space. I would go to them and attempt to cite the content to a WP:RS and add that citation if there is no available reliable source then delete the addition, or add a fact tag if it is totally non controversial and not related to personal detail about living people.Off2riorob (talk) 14:11, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
    • I started a small test-project on my talk-page to look at a small but random selection of geocities links, to identify common themes and problems. Having worked on just a few so far, it seems to me that such articles tend to have other problems as well. Questionic (talk) 17:07, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
    • Having now worked on 12 different random articles with Geocities links, here are my impressions regarding the task ahead:
  • Old Geocities pages should not be factual references; move to "External links" if they are retained.
  • Some geocities.com links already redirect to a new website, but they may not redirect to the appropriate page in the new website.
  • Only one page of these random 12 was not found at archive.org; said page was also not found at oocities.com.
  • Only one of the 11 pages re-found was uninformative; previous Wikipedia editors have done some quality control already.
  • Articles that link to geocities pages may do so because the article contributors found few other sources of information on a fairly obscure topic.
I hope this experiment will help people with organizing this larger Geocities repair project. Questionic (talk) 22:39, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
That sounds right on par with my own checks of random selections. Most are deletes, some should point to a new site, a very few are a source that needs to be re-references. Katherine (talk) 09:28, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

hello, just droping some notes on the recent posts:

  • i am working on a full spreadsheet with colums: article/geocities URLs/available archive locations. (does anyone want it?)
  • archive.org contents in general go online within 6 month after archival
  • Like said before. At least a million of links from wikipedia go to free webhosts of similar or less average quality as geocities. Thus its seems plausible to either define the subject of discussion as expanded to the whole list of all free webhost or to keep it simple and talk only about updateing geocities links which can be a bot task, dont it? --Updatehelper (talk) 13:22, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
  • We don't improve Wikipedia on an "all or nothing" basis. If a Geocities link doesn't meet policies and guidelines, removing it is improving the project even if it doesn't remove a link to some other equally unsuitable website. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:25, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

It seems like there's enough kind souls willing to get their hands dirty with this, so I'm going to set up a project so we can coordinate and track progress in whatever way (or ways) people find useful. Does anyone have thoughts on a name? Two ideas: WikiProject Geocities is rather specific; WikiProject DeadLinks has longer-term potential if this needs to be repeated with another defunct webhost. Opinions: yes, no, better suggestion? Katherine (talk) 13:36, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

  • The problem with "deadlinks" is that there are really two issues here: in addition to the death of links, we have the unsuitability of links. :) Maybe a geocities subproject organized under the umbrella of Wikipedia:WikiProject External links is a good idea? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:48, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Is that project still active? Does it matter that it looks rather asleep? How do we go about setting up a sub-project? Could I possibly fit any more questions in here? =) Katherine (talk) 15:14, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
LOL! I don't know; they're listed at the WikiProject Council as active, but for all I know the WikiProject Council is also asleep. :) I bet they are still active, but just rather gnomish. I certainly see some familiar names on their talk page. To set up a subproject, we would place a note at their board and say, "Hey, we're doing this thing, and it looks like it's connected to your thing. Do you mind if we create a taskforce under your project to do it?" If they agree or don't say anything at all, somebody makes a subpage and off we go. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:36, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
  • If they're wanted, I'm going to put up the external link worklists at Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam/LinkSearch/geocities.com and sub-pages, alongside all of the other 'bot-obtained external link lists that are already there. Uncle G (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Apologies for the slow response - no excuse. The reason for having a checklist would be to avoid having ten people evaluate the same 'good link'. Evaluating bad links is easy; just delete it and it drop from the linksearch list. If we're going by the Off2riorob "scorched earth" method, then this checklist is pointless; if there are a large number that are still useful, then it may be helpful to avoid duplication of effort. Splitting the list and 'assigning' chunks to individuals would work fine as well. If the only possible positive outcome is a change of a dead link or a oocities link to and archive.org link, then that also indicates a positive and would drop them off the linksearch lists. From what I'm seeing after looking at a good number of the links, I'm leaning to Off2riorob's version of things - I just don't see any valid reliable sources, and 'external links' should be live. Based on that, I don't think the list is needed and I'll start diving in today, unless I'm missing something critical. Kuru (talk) 14:32, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

what iam pointing out is also simply that we are currently touching three differnt possible efforts :

  • 1."deadlinks" in general is a big thing. already about 500.000 links from en.wikipedia.org go to at least 10 differnt archives (most archive.org).

--> wikipedia is missing a sophisticated, high performance bot task to do this. exsiting deadlink lists seem by far smaller than the amount of links which could indeed be deleted/updated

  • 2."poor quality of freewebhost contents" - also at least a million links (dead & alive ones)

-->requires a enormous amount of human(team)work and would - once done - have a giant effect on wikipedia.

  • 3."updateing of a few 10.000 dead geocities.com/ links"

-->requires either boring human work for a 100 hours, or a bot task, which needs to run only once, which can easily be done with the list i made. afterwards they literally move into the pool of "2." --Updatehelper (talk) 14:12, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Item 3 is the only concern I have at the moment; I'm sure we can visit 1 and 2 under a different effort. Boring re-evaluation of thousands of geocities links does indeed seem to be course - I do not see an automated way of doing this. Clearly, the oocities links are inappropriate, and should be re-evaluated and/or removed at the same time. Kuru (talk) 14:38, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

I think that the checklist could be helpful in avoiding waste effort; I think the database that Updatehelper has offered to share could also be useful. One more caveat -- for 12 randomly-chosen Geocities links I updated, there were two whose owners had already set them up to redirect to a new "official site" of their own choosing. If we now redirect those links to the Wayback machine (as the disputed set of bot edits redirected them to oocities) we are going against the owner's intent and violating the spirit of linking to an official page, when there is one. So we should check for an authorized re-direct before changing any geocities.com link, IMO. Questionic (talk) 00:45, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Updatehelper, that doesn't address the fundamental problem pointed out above with oocities sites. Why would we want to run an automated bot that does something that is harmful to the project? You keep insisting that you just want to fix the deadlinks, but replacing the deadlinks with links to a site which may not be acceptable per numerous policies is arguably worse.Qwyrxian (talk) 01:59, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
Qwyrxian, my impression is that Updatehelper has stopped his oocities-linking bot and offered to share his Geocities data with this project. Is this project converging yet? Is there a list of Geocities websites somewhere public, or is there going to be one soon, or should we each just dig in and try to find something relevant to this project to do? Questionic (talk) 22:32, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
I've been plugging at it on my own time. I'd be happy to propose organizing a task force at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject External links. Barring objections, we could open a subpage there to keep up with counts and whatnot. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 22:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
Moonriddengirl, would you please do that? And can I help? Wikipedia Copy Editors have a September project planned, which they are organizing now, and their project organization page is impressive. Maybe we could get something like that in place for an October 1 start for our own project? Questionic (talk) 12:54, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I will go ahead and whistle in the wind: this entire discussion is a waste of everyone's time, and for goodness sake, going through all the Geocities links one by one, by hand, would be an epic waste of editors' extremely valuable time. Geocities is a byword for the most unreliable flotsam and jetsam of the Internet. Even if, say, a reliable 2% or so could be salvaged, they would still carry that odor of unreliability. Do what's best for our encyclopedia – delete them all now, via bot, sight unseen, and be extremely grateful for the opportunity to do so... The reason I am speaking strongly is because this.. really.. is... a no-brainer. Find one – even one! – quote from a Geocities page in an SCI or SSCI indexed journal used as a reference (and not some sort of link to the author's personal website, though even that would be surprising), and I will be stunned. If those respectable sources uniformly shun them, why oh why do we accept a lower standard? They are stuff of the Wikipedia:Randy in Boise set, and their presence reinforces Wikipedia's Randy in Boise stereotype/reputation. Delete them. Now.• Ling.Nut 10:27, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
Another reason not just to bot-eject Geocities: Of 12 random Geocities links I checked, 2 were being redirected by Yahoo to the owner's new official page. Furthermore, all but 1 of the 12 ultimately (via Wayback in the other 9 cases) had useful relevant information about the topic. It is clear that Wikipedia editors have already been doing a good job removing useless Geocities links; bot-killing them all would not benefit Wikipedia. Questionic (talk) 13:19, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

I've been playing with a bot to do something along these lines (fix the geocities outbounds). I think it would be pretty beneficial to at least replace some of the links with working ones (that way at least the link *does* work when people come to check the content). I've only done initial work as of now but my general proposal is to check each and every geocities link in the article and handle it as follows:

  • Where the geocities url redirects to the users new site replace it with that
  • Otherwise check the archive sites for a direct URL to use and link to that
    • Normal EL's would be replaced and a comment left url in it
    • {{cite web}} links would have it added as archiveurl= (if one doesn't exist already)

I also had a vague plan to record each change and work up some simple web interface to help with checking the links and removing the dead ones (so we can manually sit there and check them) but that was not really the focus. Thoughts? I don't want to push forward with this if the general feeling is not to bother :) --Errant [tmorton166] (chat!) 22:09, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

tmorton, the origin of this discussion was a bot created by Updatehelper that was redirecting thousands of geocities links -- he ran into problems on a number of issues so if you want to try a bot, he should have helpful info. Also, of course, any bot task needs consent from some committee whose name I don't know. Aside from that, your project sounds like a good one. Questionic (talk) 22:37, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
WP:BRFA. –xenotalk 22:49, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
Well it looks like ThaddeusB is resurrecting WebCiteBot, so I'll let him handle this. Good result --Errant [tmorton166] (chat!) 08:16, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

WebCite

Sorry I don't have time to read everything about at the moment (will try to tomorrow), but I thought everyone should be made aware that I created WebCitation.org copies of every single Geocities link before it went down (and Encarta also). My bot never updated the Wikipedia links because of my own slacking, but the archives definitely exist. I have a database of all Wikipedia page links and the associated archive numbers.

I've been awoken from my summer long slumber and will try and get WebCiteBOT back up within the next few days. Don't know which I should have it attack first - regular links or these - but either way it should be able to help out soon. --ThaddeusB (talk) 02:24, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Taskforce

In the absence of any opposition, I've opened the task force page at Wikipedia:WikiProject External links/Geocities with some preliminary text. Should we be updating the links or leaving this to WebCiteBOT? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:02, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

Did interest in this lag in the interim? :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:23, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
I've been chugging away at it as time permits. I think I've removed about 200 oocities links so far; the vast majority have been replacing the link to the "new" official sites that people moved off geocities before the crash. Others have simply been to remove really crappy "external links" from obscure pages. I'll review and watchlist the task force page you created. Kuru (talk) 14:12, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Thank you.:) I'm not sure yet how we can use it to coordinate efforts, but at least we know who is working on it. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 14:19, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Returning from an unwanted and entirely unplanned break, I'm so glad to see this. Thank you very much =) Katherine (talk) 11:55, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

i just need help..

can someone actually answer a question for me by email rather chasing posts all over wikipedia, why is it made so difficult to get any help on here to do a simple thing? If you are not person not savvy with all these boards that is why most dont bother with it, its way too tricky to get help , please take a look at my links as they are banned and not commercial or selling anything but factual , interviews with artists lited on wikipedia, —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rouens (talk • contribs) 17:08, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Going to the talk page and looking, it appears that the xlinkbot deleted links to 70smusicbios.bravehost.com. I looked at a couple and they appear to be written by Jason Humphreys. It looks like this violates WP:ELNO, point 11 which prohibits links to most fansites except those written by a recognized authority. Is Jason Humphreys a recognized authority? Vyeh (talk) 19:14, 25 August 2010 (UTC)


ok yes it is written by me, can you speak in some kind of basic language form anyone can understand as no one has so far please? i would understand in many cases its not a fan site but actually from interviews with artists , all of them are legit. How is it some are allowed and some not, if they are factual. and non biased,. I basically interview the artists for the full story and thats about it, there are many websites like "all music" whioh is misleading and incorrect 9 times out of 10. Mine is straight from the horses mouth, how can it be violated if i am interviewing the artists or its not one artist on my site but say 20 artists, as most of these do not have a website as is? Thank you, i dont think why i would even bother if it is this hard, no wonder people dont bother with wikipedia as a true source . All my sites are non profit i am not selling anything etc or gaining anything by it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rouens (talk • contribs) 10:01, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Rouens, the question is not exactly whether you are Jason (although the potential for conflicts of interest exists), but whether Jason is an expert.
Wikipedia is a complicated place, and a lot of people abuse it to promote their own websites. So I hope you'll forgive the community if there are some people with a bit of a hair-trigger where possible spam is suspected.
For the standard advice, let me suggest you read WP:PROMO and perhaps the longer WP:External links guideline. As a suggestion, you might consider not adding the website directly to the article, but instead leaving a friendly note on each article's talk page with a request that someone else add the links for you. On unpopular pages, it might take a while (weeks, even) for someone to notice your message, but, if the pages seem valuable to someone else, then it's likely to be effective in the long run. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:36, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Cooking for Engineers

What is the current opinion on Cooking for Engineers? From what I can figure out, it's just a popular blog created by some bored engineer looking for a way to organize his adventures in cooking. The author of the site has no formal training in cooking and rarely sources any of his information. A linksearch shows 41 hits on the English Wikipedia, about half which link to recipes and the other half to cooking knowledge posts which, again, rarely source anything and seem to be filled with his personal opinion on the subject. Further, within many of the posts, he links products to his Amazon referral link. It also has a storefront for Amazon and Cafepress and he also gets money from Google Adsense. While I do like the site, I think it's a bit spammy and probably less appropriate than The Pioneer Woman, who is notable, but which we still don't link to outside of her article. I just wanted to get some outside opinions before going through and removing the links. --132 21:32, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

You know, I was going to agree with you, but I've done a search. It's mentioned in several books - just one line usually (with praise), but a bit more detail here "cooking+for+engineers"&hl=en&ei=lUF-TLaFLMXN4AbayNyHBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22cooking%20for%20engineers%22&f=false and here "cooking+for+engineers"&hl=en&ei=lUF-TLaFLMXN4AbayNyHBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22cooking%20for%20engineers%22&f=false. More interesting is Google Scholar, "cooking%20for%20engineers"&um=1&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=ps with the mention of his measurement work in the Journal of Muscle. His blog is mentioned in the news media "cooking+for+engineers"&cf=all. My conclusion from this is that it warrants an article, and judicious use of his blog - not just for any recipe however, it would have to be for one where his site offers something unique, either in the use of measurement, discussing the structure of recipes as is done in this pdf [7], etc. That probably wouldn't be very often. So, remove any links where it's just a recipe that could be drawn from anywhere, keep if there is anything special that his blog offers. Dougweller (talk) 12:21, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
More about his recipe structure here [8]. That wouldn't be likely to be relevant for a recipe article, but might be for an article on cookbooks, for instance, if the structure of recipes was discussed. Dougweller (talk) 12:23, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
That idea might make an interesting new section at Recipe. It could include information about advent of photo-based recipes, changes to the order (listing ingredients at the start was once a novel innovation), changes to what the writer thought was common knowledge, and the increase in precision (e.g., from "a hot oven" to "exactly this many degrees"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Hell-on-line

The apparent owner of [9], Egardiner0 (talk · contribs) is adding her website to various articles. However good it may be in principle, it is her own original research and also links to at least one book by here, eg of the Earth here, a book which she is also adding as further reading (and using as a reference, but those are issues for another board). I'll bring her attention to this discussion. Dougweller (talk) 12:16, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

You should provide an example so that editors can comment on whether the inclusion of these links is consistent with policy and guidelines and why. TFD (talk) 22:52, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Would qualify as SPS I suppose as far as book content is concerned, but , as SPS, can really only be used as a source for her opinions. Collect (talk) 23:05, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

railways

I ran into a template which was quite much invested with links to an external wiki, in stead of trying to link to internal pages (or no pages at all). Looking further, there was a lot of that. See this diff for a removal on Template:Festiniog Railway Company and this diff on Template:Festiniog_Line_diagram (note that the wiki removed is the new webpage, there is an old webpage as well). I went on and removed a whole set of these wikis from a lot of pages' external links sections. The Wiki has 14 active users, and IMHO does not qualify as stable, but since it was contested (note, by the editor who updated the links, ánd by the editor who created a lot of the content and the templates), I'd like a second opinion on the appropriateness of such external links (to wikis, or to other pages) in templates. Thanks. --Dirk Beetstra T C 14:16, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

A Response

The template is only used within the section "See Also" of any page, and as such seems to comply with the relevant Wikipedia:MOS#External_links WP:MOS section on external links

It was created following an initial attempt which was deemed unsuitable for Wikipedia policy. see here

The edits made now make the panel look ludicrous:

  • Line Header "Company WebSites" now directs them to back to the company relevant WP site
  • Line Header "External Wiki sites" now directs them to back to the company relevant WP site
  • Line Header "Support Groups" now directs them to none existant pages

This means whereas thousands of other pages may link to relevant external sites, these inter related sites cannot

Why has this now become a problem?, as said above, this seemed an acceptable answer. As for 14 active users, this is an extremely limited and dedicated wiki, and is advertised within related websites. For reference it usees "mediawiki" software, which I beleive is reasonably stable. --Keith 14:38, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Update, since he realised the Company Websites and External Wiki links now duplicated the Current operator line, they have both been deleted! In doing these edits, he is restricting the sources of information available --Keith 15:21, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

As the person who inadvertently kicked this off, this is my perspective (with a little explanation for the benefit of those users not familiar with the subjects under discussion). The Ffestiniog Railway (FR) is a heritage railway in the UK. Like most such railways it relies on various groups of supporters without whom it could not continue to survive. One such group is the Festiniog Railway Heritage Group of which I am a member and, amongst other things, the webmaster. We set up a wiki in 2005, initially (and unimaginatively) calling it the "FR Heritage Group Wiki" but changing that to "Festipedia" after a short while, with the objective of making it the definitive source of information on the history of the Ffestiniog Railway and associated railways in North Wales. As a specialist "encyclopedia" we can give coverage to many subjects which are notable in an FR context but would not meet the notability requirements of Wikipedia.
Festipedia has been more successful than we expected. Recently we moved it from our main website to its own domain - www.festipedia.org.uk - upgrading to MediaWiki in the process (we previously used a heavily modified version of UseMod - if anyone looks at the site statistics please note that the number of page views only reflects views since the start of this month). I was aware that there are a number of pages with links to Festipedia on Wikipedia. These links redirect to the correct page at the new domain but it would obviously be better if they linked direct to the final destination. I therefore started to modify them today, initially tackling two templates. I was surprised to find that User:Beetstra immediately lectured me about Wikipedia policy on my talk page and edited the templates so that all links were internal, classifying the links as "spam" in his edit comments. I was unhappy with the lecture as I didn't create the links. I was also unhappy with the mention of spam in the edit comments. I am not a regular Wikipedia editor so it may be that spam has a different meaning here to the accepted usage elsewhere, but I do not think these links were spam. I should also note that I shared Keith's concern that, on one template, User:Beetstra had modified a line of links labelled "Company web sites" so that they pointed to pages within Wikipedia, another line labelled "External Wiki sites" also now pointed to pages within Wikipedia and a line labelled "Support Groups" was now all red links instead of linking to the web sites of these groups. On another template a large number of external links to appropriate pages within Festipedia had been modified to become red links.
On his "User talk" page, Beetstra has said:
  • Linkfarming, there are on all of these articles a handful of external links. Most of them similar or the same in content as here.
I believe the templates in question linked to Wikipedia where there was an article available, only linking to Festipedia where appropriate. I don't think anyone is engaged in link farming.
  • A lot of wiki links, Wikis are 'to be avoided' per our external links guideline, especially if they are not big, widely edited wikis. There can be everything there. And anyone can edit it (I just created a test account). And Wikis are by nature vandalised. OK, a small wiki is easier to keep clean, but when a vandal comes in at 12:00, and someone from Wikipedia comes in at 12:02 .. it may still be there, a completely wrong page.
Wikipedia suffers far more vandalism than Festipedia. Indeed, our content pages have suffered no vandalism at all since we moved to MediaWiki. This argument could equally be applied to suggest Wikipedia should not link to itself! I would also point out that a number of the pages on Festipedia are ranked very highly on Google for relevant searches - a testimony of sorts to the quality of information we carry.
  • I have removed quite some links from the body of the wikitext. Those are really not in line with our WP:MOS.
I can't comment on this.
  • Then, e.g. on Rhyd Ddu railway station, I find external links to the homepage of the wiki (in the template). Links should be directly related to the page, now I have to, from the homepage, find the information I may be looking for. So yet another reason why these links should be avoided.
I really don't understand what the problem is here. Before Beetstra attacked this article it contained a link to the Rhyd Ddu page on Festipedia under "External links". It also contains a link to the front page of Festipedia from the template which appears under the "See also" heading.
  • The company that keeps the track, that one can have a wiki article (and they all do), and that wiki article can have a reference to the homepage of the company. There it is direct. Not on Rhyd Ddu railway station
I can see the reasoning here but I am not sure why it is important to make it harder for people to find information.
  • On the other template, quite some of the villages or remarkable points have Wiki articles. Yet they were all pointing outward to the external wiki. That just does not make sense.
On the template referred to, 7 out of 28 links could be replaced by Wikipedia articles by my count. I have not, however, checked to see if they are all appropriate and as informative as those on Festipedia. I note that Beetstra has replaced a link to a specific article about Dduallt sidings on Festipedia with a link to sidings (i.e. the generic subject) on Wikipedia thereby significantly reducing the value of the link.
  • Now, I did not touch references, but Wikis are by definition an unreliable source (maybe a totally closed wiki with editorial oversight might be, but then it is not really a wiki .. and this one is not one, I just made an account). Those references should be replaced, all of them, with something reliable.
Nothing to add here, really.
  • Then See also / External links sections were mixed up.
So fix them!
I am not an expert on Wikipedia policy and am happy to comply with whatever is decided. My only concern is that links to Festipedia should go to our current URL, not the old one. However, my personal view is that the edits by Beetstra should be reverted. Prh47bridge (talk) 18:48, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
The work carried out by Prh47bridge and Keith should be commended. The recent edits by Dirk Beetstra have had a detrimental effect to the Ffestiniog Railway / Welsh Highland Railway articles, and have removed links to a valuable source of information contributed by people who believe passionately believe in recording the heritage of both railways. I support the response by Prh47bridge and suggest that the edits undertaken by Dirk Beetstra should be reverted. --Stewart (talk | edits) 21:41, 31 August 2010 (UTC)


Full disclosure - I came here after ManstarUK (Keith) sent me an email about it. However, I have not always been a supporter of FR people on wikipedia, and have been labelled a vandal by them in the past for working to move all FR images to Commons, and in return I must say I often find them somewhat insular and concerned only with their own subsection of the encyclopaedia rather than considering the project as a whole.
I agree that navboxes and line diagrams should primarily be for internal links. I don't think that having a link to say the mainpage of a company website on the company's navbox is necessarily a bad thing, but I wouldn't encourage it. However, I do think that considering how the navbox has been neutered, it should, for now be reverted to the pre-ruckus version while we discuss things.
Furthermore, to the redlinks, I say this is a call to action - if there's a redlink, it should be made into a bluelink. Create a stub article, and add an EL to Festipedia. If these are places, they're probably notable. The groups are certainly notable. Heck, Festipedia could probably get its own en.wp page. Let's use this as an opportunity to improve Wikipedia.
On that note, I'm buggering off back to Commons. -mattbuck (Talk) 23:27, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
These links are unwarranted. Outside of providing links for referencing purposes (such as in the PROD template) we shouldn't link externally in templates. This would only serve to promote the sites in an undue manner. This is especially the case when the external links fail the WP:EL guidelines, as these do since the wiki isn't stable and doesn't provide any information that we can't host on Wikipedia. None of the textwalling above by canvassed parties has convinced me that this is acceptable. ThemFromSpace 02:26, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

The templates should not link externally, and they do not need to. One of the two I 'cleaned' was almost exclusively linking externally, and that one appears in the body of the text ({{Festiniog_Line_diagram}}). There, we do NOT link to an external page if the internal page is not existing, WP:MOS says not to link externally in the body of the article, external links go into the external links section (or references, etc.). And they are links to wiki pages, almost by definition instable, especially if there are only 14 editors active there (vandalism will not be as big either as on Wikipedia, but with 14 active users vandalism may stay longer; this edit stayed there for over 7 hours, and it was the first case of vandalism that I found on that wiki; see the history of that page for more cases which stayed in many cases several hours (more than 4 1/2 and more than 6 hours, to be a bit more precise).

Now the other one, {{Festiniog Railway Company}}; that template is mainly in the external links section, and there were more links to the wiki in external links sections. First the template: that is e.g. transcluded on Dduallt railway station. The template, in the external links section, linked to the wikipage of the company. Now, the page is about Dduallt_railway_station, not about the company. The link might be suitable on the wikipage of the company, but certainly not here. Moreover, it is a wiki, which is discouraged anyway. Most of such links are removed on sight, maybe EXCEPT if it is the official wiki of the subject of the page (but even then, if there is an official site of the company, then we don't link to its wiki, myspace, facebook, twitter, etc. etc. We are not a linkfarm). Now the other ones, the links to the wikipage on the frheritage site on the page with the same subject here. OK, that is reasonable, in terms of both subjects are the same. But still, it is a wiki that is linked to (vide supra).

Regarding the answers of Prh47bridge; 1) we don't link externally if we can't link internally, see WP:REDLINKS for more; 2) I've shown you vandalism, and indeed, Wikipedia does not link to wikipedia as an external link, nor as a reference. We only make internal wikilinks, 3) -, 4) that link does not belong in a see also, 5) we can link internally, we can absorb the information which is of interest for wikipedia, thát makes it easier, 6) as I said, we link internally, even if the article does not exist, 7 out of the 28 could be linked internally, well, those at least should have, and the others should either not be a link, or a redlink, and stubs be created from the articles, 7) -, 8) I did that at the same time where I encountered it.

Yes, the work by Keith and others on those articles should be commended. They have made a good handful of nice pages, properly templated, etc. etc. But that does not exclude that we have to try and get them in line with our policies and guidelines. It is not that I have deleted all the articles, but certain parts were in dire need of an upgrade or a cleanup since they were not in line with our policies and guidelines. --Dirk Beetstra T C 07:26, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Well given the above, the only result from Dirk Beetstra attentions to the Ffestiong articles is that it is unlikely that those who are passionate about spreading the word will leave the editting of FR articles to the likes of Dirk Beetstra and his ilke. I look forward to seeing Dirk Beetstra improving the FR articles and adding the information he has removed the links to. It is a sad day for Wikipedia when such a slavish application of the guidelines leads to the quality of articles being affected in a negative way. As for creating loads of stub articles - what a waste of effort. I wish the FR team well, however I would fully understand if they now abandon the Wikipedia articles, resulting in them becoming more insular as mattbuck believes they are, and does nothing to bring them into the Wikipedia fold. --80.176.90.9 (talk) 17:39, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

If it is a valid link, and placed in the external links subsection, or even the See also subsection, then why are they being deleted? Or is it a case of one is wrong so they are all removed, which is what has happend~? --Keith 21:12, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Where did I say it is a valid link? There is only one place where it may be a valid link, where the wiki (not a page on the wiki) is the official wiki of the subject of the page here on Wikipedia (direct link, see WP:ELNO). And even there, if there is a more official link, then the wiki is superfluous.
Regarding removal of the links, dear 80.176.90.9, we don't link to information, we incorporate it (as long as it is verifiable). And I do not think that creating all those articles on Wikipedia is a waste of time. That is what we do here, expand, create new articles, not just link to it. And you have a nice start when you look at those articles on the FR wiki. I guess we all know where it is now. And don't get me wrong, I do like the pages that 'the FR team' has created here on wiki. I did not delete any information, only the links which are not in line with our policies and guidelines. --Dirk Beetstra T C 21:33, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

And the question I have been asking myself all along is, is your interpretation of the policies in line with the base ideal of an information resource. I dont think so. --Keith 21:41, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Have you seen the response of others in these threads? The way things were linked here was also by them deemed inappropriate, and those policies and guidelines were written by a lot of editors, I do not think that my interpretation is so far off from that of the community that wrote them. And e.g. my interpretation of WP:ELNO where links to wikis are discouraged, and where indirectly linked sites are discouraged is not an interpretation, it is written there, and quite a number of links (those in one of the templates) are discouraged per both, and all other wiki links tick at least one of them. That WP:ELNO has a line about wikis is not because it happens once or twice .. it is general. That WP:MOS discourages links in the text .. similar, etc. etc. I am sorry, I feel I cited numerous reasons on a handful of policies and guidelines why most of these links should be internal, and most of the info should be incorporated, yet most arguments against my removal (from mostly involved editors, some even with a clear, an obvious, or even a disclosed conflict of interest) do seem to be more worried that they are now not linked anymore ... --Dirk Beetstra T C 05:34, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

I understand, that since I have stated that I am unable to find any relevant entries in the WP policy documents being quoted, that back up the statements you have made, you are interpreting them in a way that was not intended. Nobody has found the information, but just added to your thoughts does not mean it is right! I do beleive the words "only guidelines" and "common sense" appear in the opening paragraphs of the documents quoted, and feel you have missed the point. --Keith 08:48, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

I expect this to be my final contribution on this subject. I make this contribution with some trepediation, having already been accused of spamming and textwalling. I also hesitate to disagree with an administrator. However...
As far as I can see, there are two issues:
  1. Should these links be allowed. Beetstra initially claimed that these links were against Wikipedia policy, citing WP:NOT on my talk page although I can find nothing in that policy that bans these links. He now seems to be relying on WP:ELNO, although this is a guideline rather than a policy meaning that exceptions are allowed. By my count the discussion here (which all seem to agree should be the primary discussion) is currently 5 votes to 2 in favour of retaining the links - Keith, Stewart, MattBuck, 80.176.90.9 and myself in favour (albeit MattBuck is only in favour of temporary restoration whilst discussion proceeds), Beetstra and ThemFromSpace against. Beetstra's contention that this discussion has come out in his favour ("Have you seen the response of others in these threads? The way things were linked here was also by them deemed inappropriate") is, bluntly, contrary to the facts. We have a clear majority in favour of retaining the links, at least for the moment.
  2. My understanding is that editorial decisions on Wikipedia are made by consensus. Given that these links have been in place for some time, it seems to me that there was a consensus amongst those Wikipedians actively editing the Ffestiniog Railway/Welsh Highland Railway content that these links to an authoritative external source should be included (note that, whilst Festipedia is an open wiki, most of the active contributors are known experts in their subjects). That consensus does not appear to have been in breach of policy although it may have been in breach of guidelines. Beetstra has ignored that consensus and unilaterally removed the links, in at least one case replacing a link to an informative external page about a particular location with a link to a Wikipedia page about railway sidings. I believe it is the unilateral nature of Beetstra's actions that has caused the most distress. I doubt we would be having this discussion here if he had first gained consensus.
In view of the above I believe Beetstra's edits should be reverted, restoring the status quo ante. If Beetstra still believes that changes are required he should attempt to gain consensus on the relevant talk pages before proceeding, although the evidence of this discussion suggests that he will be unable to do so. Prh47bridge (talk) 09:15, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Sigh.

  • Per WP:MOS: "External links should not normally be used in the body of an article. Articles can include an external links section at the end to list links to websites outside Wikipedia that contain further information, as opposed to citing sources. ..."
  • Per WP:EL - 1: "Sites that are only indirectly related to the article's subject: the link should be directly related to the subject of the article. A general site that has information about a variety of subjects should usually not be linked to from an article on a more specific subject. Similarly, a website on a specific subject should usually not be linked from an article about a general subject. If a section of a general website is devoted to the subject of the article, and meets the other criteria for linking, then that part of the site could be deep linked."
  • Per WP:EL - 2: Links to open wikis, except those with a substantial history of stability and a substantial number of editors.

So, in one template they should not be, as that would place the links in the body of the article, they maybe should go to the external link section, but the external link section they should not be, a) the links in the template were not direct (point 2) and are to a wiki (point 1), the links directly in the external links section are to wikis (point 1) .. where do you see anything that is a interpretation here, Keith. I am reading the sentences, and see that these links are all discouraged in the way they were in the article. It is not that since WP:MOS does not want them in the body, that they then go to the external links without question, no, there they are also subject to the guidelines there.

Phr47bridge, no, we don't need consensus for something that is in breach of policy and/or guideline. Those policies and guidelines are based on consensus, and that is what we are working from. It is a WP:BRD type cycle, where the B has been in place very long, now it has been reverted, and now we discuss. --Dirk Beetstra T C 14:03, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I was going to avoid further contributions but...
It seems to me that you are confusing policy and guidelines, attempting to treat guidelines (recommendations, unless the word means something different on Wikipedia to its standard English meaning - as Wikipedia itself says, following a guideline is never mandatory) as if they were policy (mandatory). WP:MOS is a GUIDELINE. WP:EL is a GUIDELINE. Guidelines are, and I quote, "a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply". The particular section in WP:EL on which you rely relating to wikis is headed "Links normally to be avoided" and states "Except for a link to an official page of the article's subject, one should generally avoid...". And the sentence you have quoted from WP:MOS states "External links should not normally be used in the body of an article". The words I have placed in bold make it clear that slavish adherence to these guidelines (as you are trying to enforce) is not required and that it is sometimes acceptable to link to external wikis even if they only have a small number of active users and/or place external links in the body of an article. I am not saying that the Festiniog Railway articles were right as they stood. I am sure they can be improved. However, I do not think this is the way to do it.
I note your reference to WP:BRD, which states clearly that it does NOT override WP:CON but merely gives a method for achieving consensus. You opened a discussion here to get a second opinion so this is the D part of the cycle. You have lost by 5 votes to 2. The consensus is against you. You clearly don't agree with this outcome but I think it is time for you to accept it and try working with the people who set up and maintain these pages rather than fighting them. The pages certainly need to be improved. I would agree that they probably break guidelines too often - whilst guidelines are not mandatory that does not give editors cart blanche to ignore them. However, the consensus here is clearly in favour of reverting to the status quo ante (i.e. reverting your edits) and proceeding from there. I hope that, given a constructive approach, a way to improving these pages that was acceptable to all and addressed perceived issues can be found. Prh47bridge (talk) 15:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Prh47bridge, you might want to read about the difference between policies and guidelines. But to address your note: Yes, we're allowed to make exceptions. However, we make exceptions for a good reason, not merely whenever we feel like it. So: Please tell me your good reason why we should make a special exception from standard practice for this one small open wiki. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:52, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
I read your the difference between policies and guidelines, and having looked at the history, see that its 90% your own thoughts and words. Being a generalisation, I dont think it would be prudent to comment on it, here.
I dont think Prh47bridge is asking for any special treatment, he seems to be pointing out, in a more eloquent way than I did, that the actions of User:Beetstra were unwarrented. I have randomly checked some of the files he has edited in connection with this incident, and found the only edits done were in fact the removal of our external links (and nothing else). I now find that before any attempt at gaining a consensus, he had in fact, edited over 60 articles, (which resulted in 3 individual complaints) before posting to WP:ELN, Therefore, he couldnt claim a consensus for his actions, nor, from subsequent investigation, and so far contrary to his statements, could he claim it was policy. --Keith 18:45, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
You might also want to read WP:OWN and WP:NOTVOTE as well. And then I did not even start to look at who are !voting there. Most of those voting in favour should have a good look at WP:COI as well. --Dirk Beetstra T C 18:39, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
I have remained civil throughout this discussion. You started by falsely accused me of spamming in your edit comments and made what seems to me to be a somewhat abrupt and aggressive post on my talk page. You have also made a false accustation of link farming. You now seem to be falsely accusing me of a conflict of interest. I am not quite sure what your second sentence means but it comes across as a false accusation of sock puppetry. Throwing accusations around in this way is not conducive to a civilised discussion.
I am well aware of WP:OWN. I do not believe I own these articles nor have I in any way suggested that I do. Indeed, apart from the two edits which kicked off this sorry dispute, I have not contributed to any of these articles, but perhaps you were aiming that particular accusation at one of the other Wikipedians on this thread. I am also aware of WP:NOTVOTE. I and others have tried to discuss this matter. However, your responses have consistently rejected all points of view other than your own. May I ask what was the point of posting this discussion here for a second opinion if the only acceptable second opinion was one that matched yours?
If we remove your contributions from this thread there is a clear consensus. I have tried to be conciliatory and suggest a way forward, as have others. In my last post I agreed that the pages need to be improved and better compliance with guidelines ought to form part of that. That will certainly mean a significant reduction in the number of links to Festipedia and may result in their complete removal. I have, therefore, acknowledged that there is merit in your point of view even though I disagree with your actions and cannot support attempts to enforce slavish adherence to guidelines where the wording clearly indicates that they are not mandatory. You have rejected all attempts at conciliation, simply dragging in more policies/guidelines and making accusations against those who disagree with you. You started this discussion to gain approval for your actions. Will you now please accept that consensus that has been reached and that the consensus does NOT approve your actions? Prh47bridge (talk) 22:49, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
No, you read my comments wrong. The only editors in favour of having the links there, are editors involved in the wiki themselves, you, manstaruk, some IPs. Some are quite close to single purpose accounts. If I then see that there are a handful of non-involved accounts who clearly do not agree that the links should be there, and no non-involved who do .. then the !vote is quite different. There is no accusation of sockpuppetry there, it was one of conflict of interest. But equally, if we remove all accounts which are not involved in the fr wiki itself from this thread, then we are also at consensus.
You can't just ignore guidelines, WP:EL and WP:MOS are based on our policies and guidelines, so is e.g. WP:SPAM .. so you want to suggest that if someone is spamming, I can't revert that, as WP:SPAM is just a guideline, and the policies don't forbid spam. No, the guidelines tell how policies are here interpreted, and those guidelines are clear on open wikis, and on indirect links, and on links in the text. Those links are inappropriate as they were spread massively around the text, and that should be cleaned up. --Dirk Beetstra T C 07:15, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
My apologies if I have misunderstood you. We seem to be finding it hard to understand each other on this thread. I will admit that the tone of your initial intervention put my back up which may have coloured some of my responses.
It has become clear to me in the course of this discussion that there is considerable confusion between guidelines (where the word "guidelines" means that they are not mandatory) and policies. Wikipedia ought to tidy this up, but that isn't a topic for this thread. However, since you raise it, I note that the wording concerning external link spam ("is not allowed") is clearly compulsory and is considerably stronger than the wording concerning linking to external wikis ("normally to be avoided"), which clearly means that there are some situations where such links are allowable (unless, of course, we suspend the normal meaning of English). You cannot use the fact that some guidelines are written in a way that makes them compulsory to insist that all guidelines are compulsory even when the wording is clear that they are not. Unless and until the wording in this guideline is strengthened to suggest compulsion I do not believe it is correct to enforce slavish conformance to it. However, that does NOT mean that editors are free to ignore it completely.
Your statement that "The only editors in favour of having the links there, are editors involved in the wiki themselves" is clearly untrue. The only contributors on this thread actively involved in Festipedia are Keith and myself. Stewart, MattBuck and, as far as I am aware, the IP user are not actively involved in Festipedia (by way of full disclosure, Stewart used to be an active editor on Festipedia but he ceased his involvement over 2 years ago). I don't know which accounts you think are single purpose. Mine certainly isn't and, having looked at their contributions, I don't see that you can classify Stewart, Keith or MattBuck in that way. All four of these accounts have edited far more widely than just the FR/WHR pages (and, as previously noted, I have barely touched the FR/WHR pages). Only one of the contributors to this thread has agreed with you. I'm afraid your latest contribution comes across as yet another attempt to prove a consensus by discounting everyone who disagrees with you. That isn't how consensus works. If you want to, you can discount Keith and myself on the grounds of our involvement with Festipedia. If we discount your contributions to this thread as well that still leaves a clear consensus against your actions.
Can I repeat that I am NOT advocating that we ignore guidelines. I have already said that I think the FR/WHR coverage on Wikipedia ignores the guidelines too much and that I would be in favour of a reduction in the number of links to Festipedia, if for no other reason than to reduce the load on the Festipedia server! Since you haven't taken the hints I have been dropping, let me try being a bit more blunt. I am advocating that you beat a tactical retreat by accepting the outcome of this discussion, however much you may disagree with it, with the goal of winning the war through discussion on the relevant talk pages. Should you do so, the evidence of this thread is that you will have the support of MattBuck and myself. Who knows, we might even manage to clean up and improve some of the articles on Festipedia in the process! Prh47bridge (talk) 09:18, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Maybe I did not look at the accounts properly. But well. I did not count so black and white, and other threads also showed support for removing the links as it was in the templates (e.g. Cameron Scott), some accounts were less clear (suggesting that articles should be here anyway, though linking could be fine first). The IP only made one edit ever, which does not mean that they are not allowed to have an opinion, but some care with that might be needed

I think we should in one way or another proceed. It is certainly not the case that only I say that those links are unsuitable, and the consensus is not as clear there. And some of the linking (especially in the templates where I removed the links, and in the body of the text), I am sorry, but those links should not be there. The links that were by themselves, outside of the templates, in the external links sections are indeed debatable, they are direct, on topic, do provide a lot of info, the only problems are that they are to wikis (an IMHO unstable one (see my examples of the vandalism .. and the fact that I am able to make an account shows that , not one with a lot of users) and most of that info can be absorbed anyway. I am of the type which practically removes wikis pages linked from external links on sight without even looking at the wiki linked to (and here I did even have a look). That being said, some of the external links could for now be re-inserted (be careful with reverting, I did some other layout cleanup that I alluded to above as well). However, I do still believe that this wiki is not 'stable' enough to be linked .. if wikis ever should be linked. But well, the wording of WP:EL is much weaker than my opinion there, and I will and do abide by that, as will I if there is a clear consensus that this wiki should be linked. --Dirk Beetstra T C 14:26, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I am glad the attitude has changed, as I have already started reinserting some links. Specifically ones I found on a spam list, which I beleive you know of, being your its admin. The single line entries are either within "references", or "External Links", per previous comments, relate directly to the subject matter, and contain information not available to Wikipedia (i.e. copyrighted material).

Without repeating what has been said already, I think it is now clear that the Heritage wiki is neither a spam site, nor commercial site, as has been suggested earlier in this "discussion". However, I still take exception to the "small" and "unstable" comments.

--- Small --- As it only cvovers a narrow subject, it will be small. In fact any wiki outside the Wikipedia family will be small. But small, and narrowly focused, could well mean the subject matter is covered in more detail, than a general Wiki. I recount an example of a deceased senior personage in the railways modern history. I tried to create an article here, but it was deleted as not being "notable". It exists on FRHG, as do others who probably wouldn't qualify here, who have formed an intricate part in the railways history .

--- Unstable --- I think a previous editor,above, has also classed Wikipedia as being inherently unstable. A Wiki (large or small) can never be stable in one sense, as input is constantly being made to it. This fact should not bar its usage as an information source, or research tool. For an information source to bar another resource negates the originals value as a resource.

--- COI --- The COI angle can actually be beneficial. One editor repeatedly edited with incorrect information - it was so obvious he had misread his sources (one of our own support sites!), but "it was in good faith". He only accepted the error when his entry was proven impossible!! There are a number of editors common to both wikis, and so obviously there will be some duplication. Obviously, where we may acquire copyright for material, that cannot be duplicated.

--- Account --- The fact you were able to create a user account is not unusual - it is as easy with many wiki's, including this one, so I do not understand your citing this point, twice. There are restrictions placed on new signings, but there again, IP vandalisim and sock puppetry occurs on many wiki's, doesnt it? --Keith 15:59, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Sigh, that it is small, unstable and open is just the problem. There are a lot of small, unstable and open wikis out there, and that they are small, unstable and open is the reason that they have an own line in WP:ELNO. That it is narrow focused, that there are only a handful of people editing there .. that there are no others editing it .. whatever, is not a reason to make an exception for it.
COI does not have to be a problem indeed, and it can be beneficial, as indeed, they generally know the subject. But please do read WP:COI .. engage in discussion, especially if there is, even a minority, concern about the edits. --Dirk Beetstra T C 19:08, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Double sigh! The above comments were just that - not part of diuscussion, which I thought was ended! --Keith 20:44, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Third opinion requested

Here. --John (talk) 07:03, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

You got your third opinion on the talk page, but if you need a fourth, I agree with Jezhotwells. -Atmoz (talk) 19:43, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

John Boehner

This article has 27 external links. What is the policy regarding the number of external links? Several of them are external BIO's from various groups. I suspect most of them should go, but am not sure how best to proceed. Arzel (talk) 23:14, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

There's no limit on external links, but 27 is probably too many.
The article is has surprisingly few references considering the topic and length. If any of the external links could be reliable sources to verify information in the article, they should be used as references instead.
There appears to be a great deal of redundancy in the external links. I've tagged the section for cleanup. --Ronz (talk) 23:49, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
WP:ELPOINTS, point 3: "Links in the "External links" section should be kept to a minimum." Wikipedia:EL#What_to_link, "As the number of external links in an article grows longer, assessment should become stricter." Take a look at WP:EL and go through each link. Leave the ones that satisfy WP:ELYES. Consider the ones that satisfy WP:ELMAYBE. And eliminate WP:ELNO. In particular, note that an external link that covers only a portion of the area of the article or one that covers more are not favored (in the latter case, deep linking is suggested). Vyeh (talk) 23:54, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Wilson Combat

Resolved
 – User blocked for improper COI name. AliveFreeHappy (talk) 21:16, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

A new single-article editor User:WilsonCombatNM with probable WP:COI issues keeps restoring sales and social-media WP:EL to Wilson Combat. It would be nice to have another editor's eyeballs on it. AliveFreeHappy (talk) 20:19, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Link to petition in Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

We were having a discussion about whether including a link to the petition website http://freesakineh.org/ in the article on Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani would be appropriate, and would welcome any advice/input. The discussion so far is at Talk:Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani#The Petition. Thanks. --Joshua Issac (talk) 19:30, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

It is not an official website (not controlled by the subject of the article). I don't believe it qualifies under WP:ELYES, #3 (material can be integrated into the article) nor WP:ELMAYBE, #4 (unclear who is running the petition site). I believe the site would be disqualified under WP:ELNO, #1 as any RS material (the links to news items) should be integrated into a featured article. I am uncomfortable with labeling the petition site a "fansite" as it is likely that a RS would name it and its very existence is worthy of inclusion in the article (even then, there might be a problem as an external link under WP:ELNO, #19). Of course, if the petition site is notable enough (mentioned in enough reliable sources), it might support its own article. Vyeh (talk) 21:11, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
It was covered by the Huffington Post. --Joshua Issac (talk) 11:25, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
That makes the result from the petition notable, but it still does not qualify the link itself. The petitionsite is a primary source for the information (when used as a reference - one should use the Huffington Post as a secondary source), and as an external link it should be excluded under WP:SOAP (there is no need to draw people to the petitionsite; note that quite some other petitionsites are blacklisted (including some run by governments!), and whitelist requests are generally declined). --Dirk Beetstra T C 11:32, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
While I conclude that the petitionsite does not meet the criteria for an external link (WP discourages external links and the burden is on the editor proposing an external link or proposing the retention of an external link), the article's editors might want to look at the criteria for WP:SELFPUB. As Beetstra has noted, it is a primary source. As such, it might qualify as a source of information about itself. Note that WP favors secondary sources over primary sources and someone should check at the Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard about its suitability. Please note that the guidelines for external links says, "The subject of this guideline is external links that are not citations to sources supporting article content." I have been rereading the original talk page discussion and I think there was inadequate consideration given to whether the petition site could be used as a reference (WP prefers converting external links to sources when possible). Note that NPOV doesn't require the exclusion of a view, but it does require that all significant views that have been published by reliable sources be covered. Vyeh (talk) 13:41, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
When I first started the article, we did use it as a source for itself in the text; but when I found the Huffington Post article, I made that the reference for the sentences about the petition. So I suppose this link could go back as an additional reference, though I still feel it meets enough of the criteria for inclusion as an EL, and I'm not convinced it fits in any of the ELNO suggestions. For me, the petition organization is just the sort of EL I'd expect to find on an article like this.-- Patrick, oѺ∞ 16:13, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
WP disfavors external links. From WP:ELBURDEN, "the fact that a given link is not actually prohibited by this guideline does not automatically mean that it must or should be linked. Every link provided must be justifiable in the opinion of the editors for an article." Looking at WP:ELYES, it doesn't fall into #1 (not an official site since it isn't controlled by Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani - it would be nice if there was some info on who was running the site), #2 (not applicable) or #3 (not neutral). Under WP:ELMAYBE, it doesn't fall into #1 (repealed), #2 (not a very large page), #3 (not a directory) or #4 (not clear who the source is). There is also an undue weight issue. WP:EL states "On articles with multiple points of view, avoid providing links too great in number or weight to one point of view, or that give undue weight to minority views. " (although that would be solved by providing a link to the other point of view). In the end, it requires a consensus of the article's editors to be included. Clearly, there is no consensus. I have been thinking about how it could be included. Other than using it as a primary source, I think that if the article was viewed as the controversy rather than as a BLP (Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is only notable because of the international attention her case has garnered), then two external links - one to the petition site and another to the official Iranian Government response - would be appropriate, as Wikipedia:EL#Avoid_undue_weight_on_particular_points_of_view seems to allow (note the suggestion, "Add comments to these links informing the reader of their point of view." I think the reason you feel that the petition organization is the type of EL you would expect is that the article is really about the controversy of the stoning for adultery sentence and not about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. Vyeh (talk) 18:58, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Ciara

Is it ok to add this to Ciara - Off2riorob (talk) 17:28, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

External links

  • - Celebrity ethnicity (open wiki) - Clara

No. The site isn't a wiki. It's a discussion forum with lots of pure speculation. It would better to find a WP:RS regarding her ethnicity, or even to reference that it is a mystery she chooses not to devulge. —UncleDouggie (talk) 07:51, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, the concept is a wiki, Wiki an open to edit site with a community and they comment as to where they get there information and it is a stable site. I did look for another WP:RS already, anyways, thanks for commenting. Regards. Off2riorob (talk) 11:23, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Bob Day (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Bob Day is an Australian politician. His Wikipedia article is currently negatively biased. He has a webpage which, in addition to general information about him, attempts to respond to the content of our article. The advocate of that content, Timeshift9 (talk · contribs) repeatedly removes the link, despite being told directly that the site belongs to Bob Day, see Talk:Bob_Day#Bob Day dot Com for our discussion. Fred Talk 18:18, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Given the name and nature of the site, I think there is a strong presumption that Bob Day controls the site. This certainly qualifies as an official website and it should be included as an external link under WP:ELYES, point 1. Put it back in and if Timeshift9 removes it, let me know and I will put it back in (so you don't get into an edit war situation). An official website is the only EL everybody agrees must be included. Vyeh (talk) 19:11, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
reverted immediately despite citing WP:ELYES in the comment and on the talk page. Fred Talk 01:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
Discussion continued on article talk page. —UncleDouggie (talk) 07:57, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
Regrettably, I felt the need to file a Wikiquette alert, Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts#User:Timeshift9_in_regard_to_Bob_Day. To my fellow ELN editors, having read the talk page at the article, it looks like the dispute about whether BobDaly.com.au is an official site is part of a "scorched earth" campaign (note I am not saying that this tactic is one sided -- the originator of this section has complained at other noticeboards and I am aware that the dispute resolution mechanism can also be used to harass other editors). I think UncleDouggie does raise the point that the site doesn't explicitly state that it is authorized by Bob Daly. However, he is a prominent politician, it does have his name on it and it looks like an official site. His argument that the existence of references suggest that it is not an official site seems a bit far-fetched (references can also be used to direct interested readers to more information). Vyeh (talk) 12:41, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
You saying it so does not make it so. There is no consensus on the article's talk page to include what appears to be a page which attacks his wikipedia article, and the website has no claim of ownership of it. I am quite happy for consensus to run it's course on the talk page but so far this is not happening, instead unilateral additions are being made despite the fact they are disputed. WP:CONSENSUS is needed, but it is being ignored. I have unfortunately had to revert the addition again because of this - repeated insertion of contentious material without consensus. I have, yet again for the upteenth time, requested discussion and consensus here. Timeshift (talk) 03:34, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Timeshift9 removed the external link. I've reinstated the link and would really appreciate it if another ELN editor would look at the situation. The crux of the situation is that an editor who is involved with WP:OTRS saw complaints from the subject of a BLP complaining about the WP article. After weeks of assuming the subject was whining, the editor made a few changes which were reverted. The subject of the BLP claimed ownership of the BobDaly.com.au site through an email to the OTRS editor. Since the editor has been editing since 2002, has been an arbitrator and was not involved with the article prior to seeing the OTRS, I find the editor very credible and do not see the necessity of some formal claim on the website itself. Vyeh (talk) 03:42, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
People who don't know what whois is useful for may wish to read Talk:Bob Day#How_to_identify_a_website.27s_owner, even if they're not interested in this particular dispute. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:18, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Consensus and discussion are currently in the process of occurring on the article's talk page. Even if Bob Day does own the site, does not mean it warrants automatic inclusion if the community believes it not to be in the best interests. The site is an attack on the article, and has no claim of ownership on it. If the community believes this is reason not to list the site that is apparently owned by him, then so be it. You cannot beat that. In the end, on the article's talk page, after all is said and done, it may end up there, it may not. But it's a disputed contentious issue so you are required to allow the status quo until such time. I find it a real shame that throughout this entire process, you have shown no willingness and goodwill to engage in talkpage consensus discussion, and repeatedly reinserted disputed/contentious material that deviated from the status quo. Timeshift (talk) 00:22, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

WP:ELOFFICIAL lists only two criteria:

An official link is a link to a website or other Internet service that meets both of the following:

  1. The linked content is controlled by the subject (organization or individual person) of the Wikipedia article.
  2. The linked content primarily covers the area for which the subject of the article is notable.

****

Wheter it attack WP is of no consequnses. It is clear that you have no indication to listen to reason and you do not undertand the limits WP:CONLIMITED places on talk page consensus. Articles are limted by the consensus of the wider communiy. In this case, 'official links" are favored to give the sugject of an article (parcularly as one a ngeative as the sugject article a chacne to respond and alos to give reasers a chance to to see what the sugject has to say what he has said to himsefl.). You may have successed tp brpwstratomg mrd ( fave much more important things to do wiht my time than participate ij a talk page that I have no intrest - and for the recprd. I did state my opinion hter to help contribute to the talk page), If Fred chooses the pursue this further (and I see no reason n OTRS edito shoud, he will does have my support. Blocks are servious matters and I hope other uninvolved editors can tone tonw the demanig and contnetious tone of your talk pages and introduce you to the responsibilities primary editiors have in WP:OWN —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vyeh (talk • contribs) 18:35, 17 September 2010

Online post office - list of companies in tables

I would appreciate input from others on Online post office and Comparison of online post office. I came across the article over a year ago due to some linkspamming of a couple of the companies on the page and reviewing all the places where those links were used.

Basically, the table originally at Online post office (from Aug 18, 2009) failed to supply any inclusion criteria, so any company that simply existed was added to the table. I also objected because the table included trivial marketing variances which I didn't believe were notable for their relationship to an online post office. I tried converting the table to a more neutral overview of the subject, which was objected to by Jgombos (talk · contribs); however, he never made an effort to rewrite the wording, nor even propose alternate wording, so the trimmed version remained.

Later, the user created a non-attributed fork of the same table at http://paperless.wikia.com/wiki/Online_Post_Offices and began adding a link to that wikipage onto several articles, which I reverted per WP:ELNO #12.

Now, Gagarine (talk · contribs) has created another non-attributed fork of the table at Comparison of online post office. The attribution issue can be fixed; but it's a recreation of the same original table which still has the same issues I identified in the discussion at the original article's talk page. I've started a new discussion on the table at Talk:Comparison of online post office. I'm not against having such a table; but I view the lack of inclusion criteria as being a primary problem, with the trivial marketing variances being a secondary issue.

I would appreciate it if others can take a look, as I really am getting tired of this prolonged issue and would like to get input from others to see if my concerns are on-track with the rest of the community, or if I'm being overly concerned with the table issues on this. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 01:44, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

It looks like this article needs to survive AFD first, but in general, I think the problem is with list selection criteria, not with external links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Intention to mass-revert edits that changed geocities to oocities

FYI –xenotalk 17:45, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't get this, neither of these sources is a WP:RS can someone tell me why these links should just not be removed ? Off2riorob (talk) 18:24, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
That's not necessarily true; the planned mass reversion is one step in a large-scale effort to voir dire the links: it is a temporary measure to resolve a specific issue and pave the way for the future efforts (which may well result in a good number of the links being removed). –xenotalk 18:25, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
I had to google the French or Norman expression legal expression, I learn something everyday at Wikipedia, as for removal of the links I have yet to see one that was worth keeping, but perhaps I don't edit in the spheres where they may be valuable and reliable. Thanks for commenting, Off2riorob (talk) 18:59, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

MissionWares

I came across these two diffs from 71.170.134.84. I'm leaning towards removing them, but I wanted to solicit a second opinion first. Thanks, 28bytes (talk) 19:12, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, please revert those edits. The sections added do not assist the article, and WP:MOS#External links points out that we do not put external links within an article (except for the "External links" section, where links must comply with WP:EL; these links do not). Johnuniq (talk) 23:44, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. I've reverted them. 28bytes (talk) 17:00, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Hotel Manager @ Wickipedia

"Hotel Manager" is one of the pages on Wickipedia. The Hotel Managers Forum is the community of hotel managers with over 1800 members. The page needs update and we tried to help, believing that we as the largest community of hotel managers in the world have a say on the “Hotel Manager” Page of the Wikipedia.

  • There were couple of relatively irrelevant “Extranl Links”, that we left them alone. WE added two new links.
    • Hotel Managers Forum link www.hotelmanagersforum.org or www.managersforum.org; The largest hotel manager community in the world.
    • American Hotel and Lodging Association www.ahla.org ; The largest Hotel Operations organization consisted of owners and investors.
  • Also added some comments on the page trying to improve it. The comments are done by industry leaders.

However not only all links and nearly all of in for on hotel managers were deleted, but we go this rather rude note on the “talk” page. “I have removed the external link you put in the Hotel manager article, its not appropriate to spam encyclopedia articles. Please don't put it in again. Cheers. Dylanfromthenorth (talk) 20:25, 22 September 2010 (UTC)”

I have tried to contact the “editor” but I have received another bullish answer.

Why an external link to the Hotel Managers Forum on Hotel Manager page of Wikipedia is “spam”? I think that is the most direct link as it can be. Will you please explain that to me?

Wouldn’t this question the credibility of the Wikipedia? That the visitors to the Hotel Manager Page won’t be allowed to know that there is Forum for the hotel managers? This is outright censorship and misinforming the public. —Preceding unsigned comment added by NicholasFV (talk • contribs) 23:24, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

This concerns Hotel manager and General manager.
It takes quite a long time to learn the procedures here, and you have only been active for two days. The first point is that anyone can edit pages here, and Wikipedia has a very high Google ranking, with the result that hundreds of promotional links are added to articles every day. These links are removed because they do not assist a general reader of an encyclopedic article (see WP:EL). Wikipedia welcomes anyone who focuses on improving articles. Johnuniq (talk) 23:40, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
To add on the above, one part of WP:EL (the policy on external links), is that we never link to forums (except when the article is actually about the forum). You may want to see WP:FREESPEECH, too--Wikipedia is a private organization, and as such, is under no obligation to add any information that it does not want. The owners of the site choose to allow the community to make such decisions governed by certain rules and policies; thus, if policies/editors determine something shouldn't be on the site, it doesn't have to be and won't. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:30, 25 September 2010 (UTC)


Hotel Managers Forum is NOT a commercial entity; it is community of hotel managers. The goals was creating a mutual link from the community to the Wikipedia and vice versa encouraging the hotel managers to complete the "hotel manager’s page” in Wikipedia. The page incomplete as you could have noticed.

It is like you have a page on White House but remove the external page to the White House It is like you have a page on American Medical Association and remove the link to the American Medical association.

Wikipedia will have, and does have serious problems with credibility and is taken as joke. Now I understand why, it is solely user based in which the users can be any one, mostly with no experience or knowledge on the subject and definitely not expert on what they are editing. Those “editors” consequently compensate for their lack of knowledge with being a bully.

There should be a system in place so that the pages can be edited by experts on that business if Wikipedia want to be a real Online Encyclopedia. That apparently is not happening.

Hotel Managers Forum cannot recognize the Wikipedia as a reliable source of information on hotel management until the page is edited by the veterans of the industry. Until that happens, I am not going to waste my time to correct the page or add Wikipedia link to/from our organization.

[email protected] www.managersforum.org Saturday September 25 2010 12:26 EST --NicholasFV (talk) 16:28, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi Nicholas,
Your arguments here are a little extreme. It's not like removing whitehouse.gov from White House; it's like removing joe's-forum-about-the-white-house.org from White House (and we would). Unlike whitehouse.gov for the White House, your website is not the official website for Hotel management (because there is no official website for hotel management: it's a career, not a single organization).
So this means that any links in the article have to comply with all the usual rules for external links, which includes the no forums rule and the no disputed links rule.
And -- I realize that this is unpleasant to hear, but I suspect that none of the volunteers on this page really care if your rather small website links to or approves of Wikipedia. There are already almost half a million websites that link to Wikipedia; one website more or less just isn't noticeable.
I think we would all be (very) happy to have you improve the article content (be sure to cite the best quality sources you can, like textbooks used in hotel management programs at a university) to tell people more about the job (I'll bet that page gets read a lot by students doing reports on future career options), but if you decide to go away because you can't promote your website in that article, then that's okay, too. Perhaps the next hotel manager who sees it will be interested in expanding the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:42, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
I agree with WhatamIdoing (nicely said by the way). Furthermore, the proper way to give people more information is not to link to your website, but to instead improve the Wikipedia article directly. Most casual readers don't bother with the external links. They expect to see the content right there on the page, and this article is sorely in need of improvement. Luckily, there isn't much of a conflict of interest issue here because it's a general article about the profession. You will need to aware of WP:NPOV. —UncleDouggie (talk) 06:36, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Sysoon

Mimamax (talk · contribs) created an article for Sysoon (which was speedied as promotional), and has been adding links to deceased people's articles pointing to their records on sysoon.com. Is this useful, or is it linkspam? Thanks. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 19:38, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Sysoon is like a FindAGrave.com however its a specialized search engine for dead people. Sysoon Inc. Wins WebAward price 2010 (by Web Marketing Association) for sysoon.com for For Outstanding Achievement in Web Development. Its very helpful to find an individual's birt/death date on a vital record worldwide, such as a death certificate. Sysoon helps contributors to find the information about the dead people. Its fast and easy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mimamax (talk • contribs) 20:14, 16 September 2010
I looked at a couple added links. They are really not all that useful. Maybe they are for some...but I imagine for most there won't be. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 22:06, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
I agree. They aren't really all that useful. All of the information found on the ones I looked at can be found at other, more informative (and possibly more reliable) sources. Any extra, useful information that might be there appears to be hidden to non-registered users, which violates WP:ELNO #6. --132 22:33, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
There is more countries worldwide (many restriction are in Europe) where the law forbid to show all personal data - Its reason why the registration is required however registration is for free and after login the hidden field are displayed. If you say that that there are these hidden field which might violates your #6 why the website Geni.com (everything is hidden) apear in Wikipedia records? Mimamax (talk) 10:18, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't see anything informative in those links, and they should be removed. I do see quite of bit of useful family tree information at the handful of geni sites I poked around at; if you feel there is a problem with those, please provide specific links so you can help us manage the quality of the links we provide here. I'm presuming you have some tie to sysoon, no? Kuru (talk) 16:41, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
This is a major cross-wiki spam issue and should be addressed at meta:Talk:Spam blacklist.[10] --A. B. (talk • contribs) 06:56, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
See
  • meta:Talk:Spam blacklist#sysoon.com (permanent link)
There are >30 Wikipedia projects affected (Spanish, Italian, Afrikaans, etc.)
--A. B. (talk • contribs) 08:04, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Petition EL at Gilgel Gibe III Dam

Myself and User:Maziotis have been in disagreement over an external link at the Gilgel Gibe III Dam article. The link is to a website that serves mainly as an online petition. The article is already heavily overloaded with repetitive controversy and the only EL is an online petition. I removed the EL under WP:ELNO "Links mainly intended to promote a website". As an encyclopedia, I don't think Wikipedia should be directing readers to online petitions. The dam is highly controversial which is not without warrant. I have been trying to balance the article as of late, so it meets NPOV and covers all aspects of the dam; engineering, construction history, specifications, etc. Maziotis has expressed in one of his edit summaries that the link provides relevant information, which is true, but the site mainly serves as an online petition. In addition, there has to be other sites that can provide the same relevant information.--NortyNort (Holla) 11:41, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

It should be removed. Ignoring specific points of WP:EL, the link is highly polarized and violates NPOV policy. Unless it's the official site about the subject (which it is not) or is scholarly in nature (which it is not), it should not be included. We don't add any and all links just because they are related to the subject and might provide relevant information. It's better to not have a link at all than to have one to a POV-loaded, online petition. --132 15:10, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
The site belongs to respectable organizations and the documents are provided by notable and verifiable sources. I don't see how being POV matters on an EL issue like this. The link does provide further information from notable sources. Maziotis (talk) 19:02, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
You don't get it. Neutrality applies to the entire article and yes, that does extend to the external links. Like I said before, simply providing further information is no reason to keep it (please see WP:VALINFO, which is about articles, but the argument also works for link and info removal; also WP:NOBLECAUSE). Further, the link does not pass WP:ELNO reasons #1 (surely this is an article about a significant topic, correct? which means lots and lots of resources and sources for citations to get that valuable info onto the article), 2 (it's one-sided, period), 4, and possibly 19. Please find another link. --132 00:56, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
External links to online petitions are routinely removed on sight. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
May I suggest listing petitions under WP:ELNO.--NortyNort (Holla) 04:46, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I would have no problem with them being added to the list. The inclusion of them always implies Wikipedia supports a specific point of view, as well as a specific petition, which is never appropriate. Not to mention, online petitions are not efficient, so there's little point in linking to them anyway, even if they were somehow neutral. --132 16:03, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Please comment at WT:EL#Are_online_petitions_a_form_of_social_networking.3F. In my mind, the questions that need to be answered are:
  1. Do online petitions need to be explicitly named somewhere in the guideline (or is something we already have good enough)?
  2. If so, where and how should they be added? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:57, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I think they do and I don't think it will be difficult to word. I had suggested #11 over at the WP:EL but am not sure anymore. I think they may need their own line or just add it on to the end of #4. Something along the lines of "Links to online petitions that support a person or cause" or just simply, "Links to online petitions". I can't think of a reason to include any online petition.--NortyNort (Holla) 21:59, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Too many links

Neuromorphic#External links - Someone might want to sort through this mess if they have time, to maybe salvage something. I'm about ready to just delete the entire lot of 'em. -- Ϫ 09:46, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Wow! They have been there forever and there's not even a talk page at all. They should all be deleted. Perhaps a few could be converted to refs to expand the article. —UncleDouggie (talk) 10:35, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Yea, all the leading researchers should go as well. I think there is more EL text in there than the article itself. I'll take care of it.--NortyNort (Holla) 10:43, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Particle swarm optimization

Wikipedians familiar with computer science, please give your input on the use of external links for particle swarm optimization and whether or not to link to source-code libraries. A discussion is currently in progress for trying to reach a consensus, see Talk:Particle_swarm_optimization#External_Links_to_Source-Code. Thanks, Optimering (talk) 05:22, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

"Substantial number of editors" - External link to a wiki for TV show Victorious

Another user has suggested that a Wiki with just over 100 editors and 3 admins [11] meets the requirements for a Wiki to be included as an external link. I tend to disagree. What is the general consensus for meaning of "substantial"? Active Banana (bananaphone 20:25, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Similar situation happening on Ubuntu (operating system)‎ with reference to ubuntuguide.org. My position is it's an open wiki and changes frequently. Can't comment on the "your" wiki. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 20:32, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
It has 301 editors and 119 active users. The wiki has the same administrators it always had. --Confession0791 talk 20:36, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
At the risk of complicating the discussion, is six months[12] a substantial history? (Having a "substantial history of stability" first requires a substantial history.) BitterGrey (talk) 22:32, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
The competing, animated ads might also fall under ELNO #5 (objectionable amounts of advertising). I just had to restart my browser after viewing that page. BitterGrey (talk) 22:48, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Bible Reference linking system

I have a question about the Bible Reference linking system. (bibref2). Currently it is being link to BibleGateway. While this was wonderful several years ago, BibleGateway is now owned, and has been for the last two years, by a for-profit company Zondervan (a wholly owned subsidiary of Harper Collins).

I would like to suggest sending the links to one of a number of sites that are still non-profit or not-for-profit instead of one completely for profit.

My suggestion is to link to StudyLight.org. This site has as many Bibles and much more resources for studying the Bible. It is also for the purpose of supporting missionary work in Poland.


JeffLGarrison —Preceding unsigned comment added by JeffLGarrison (talk • contribs) 07:12, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

This was also posted at WP:EAR#Bible Reference linking system, where it has had a couple of responses. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:28, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
Bible templates (Category:Bible link templates) are complicated. For example, Jesus Seminar uses {{Bibleverse}} and {{Bverse}}, which lead to different sites (and both of which leave external links embedded in the middle of our articles, which is discouraged).
As someone said at EAR, your first port-of-call should be Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Bible. Once consensus is established there, please update Wikipedia:Citing sources/Bible to reflect the current advice (but not until then). Hope that helps. -- Quiddity (talk) 17:06, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
The fact that the website is for-profit is absolutely irrelevant. We want the best experience for the readers, regardless of whether someone's making money.
(Also, just FYI, "non-profit" and "not-for-profit" have exactly the same legal meaning [namely, that while you can pay yourself any salary you choose, you can't take home anything that's called "profits" or "net income"]. The difference between the two terms is solely a marketing choice.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:55, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Spam - I think not?

I am having an issue with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MrOllie. On the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Mary_Smith I inserted the external link http://fastpitch.tv/2009/06/11/episode-67-the-michele-smith-interview/ which is a video interview with Michele Smith. After a year of being on Wikipedia it was removed as Spam. I felt it was a very pertinent link and should not of been marked as spam. I would appreciate a third parties input. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Garyleland (talk • contribs) 19:41, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Since Garyleland has neglected to mention it, I should make folks aware that this is his website and it has been in Wikipedia for years because this lone IP has been inserting it. Garyleland registered his account immediately after the IP's latest additions were reverted. - MrOllie (talk) 19:52, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
I watched the video for a minute. I really don't see how this interview is different than all of the dozens of local television interviews out there. We don't link to amateur interviews simply because they exist, there has to be a special reason for it. Given the problematic possibility of a conflict of interest, I would agree with the removal at this time. Gary, can you please explain why the link should be considered, without pointing to how long it has been linked through Wikipedia or whether the information is pertinent (we don't link everything just because it is related)? Thanks. --132 19:59, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, obvious spamming against a coi. --Ronz (talk) 20:13, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

I registered the account, so I could have a place to get messages about this situation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Garyleland (talk • contribs) 20:44, 30 September 2010 (UTC) I felt that the information was very relevant. It is not just an interview about softball, it is an interview about her life in softball. I did not realize that if you posted a relevant topic, that you created it was Automatically spam.

Garyleland, I can sympathize with how this must feel. Wikipedia has been tightening it's standards over the years, so a number of longstanding ELs no longer match them. The general guideline is "you should avoid linking to a site that you own, maintain, or represent—even if WP guidelines seem to imply that it may otherwise be linked." In general, if you think one of your links is worth linking to, bring it up in a talk page, make your relationship to the material clear, and see if others agree. Then one of them can add the link. For this specific link, it is being discussed here. (Given how little I know about softball, I won't comment on the link itself.) BitterGrey (talk) 22:09, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
Videos are a challenge, because many readers are on the limited side of the digital divide. So editors tend to be a little stricter than average for links to videos. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:22, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

WhatAmIdoing, and BitterGrey - I appreciate your input. I guess my main problem came from the harsh way it was explained to me by MrOllie. His social skills are lacking if anything. I have done 127 shows, and about 50 of the shows are interviews. Interviews about the player, and their life in softball. I know someone said these interviews are common, but in softball they are not. I know if I personally was researching one of the people I have interviewed, I would find the interview of great interest. That is why I added them. I have not found the average softball person is not enough of a techie even think about adding items to Wikipedia. I assume there are other genres where people are not tech savvy. Your rule of not letting someone add a link they are associated with seems to hamper Wikipedia, just my thoughts. Relevant info is relevant info, no matter who posts it. I will not bother you guys with this again, nor will I add links again. Thanks for taking the time to explain, you did a good job of explaining. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Garyleland (talk • contribs) 14:24, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Glad we could help. While biting newcomers is against Wikipedia guidelines, it happens a lot. I was on Wikipedia for a whole eight minutes before an administrator picked an edit war with me. One patient explanation could have saved a lot of grief. After three years, he quit attacking me and left Wikipedia. BitterGrey (talk) 14:39, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
Bittergrey, you said I should post any links I think fit on a talk page for review. Would I do that on this talk page if I wanted to try it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Garyleland (talk • contribs) 14:15, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
You can do it either here or on the article's talk page. Here gets a little more traffic than article talk pages would so you'd get a response quicker, but the article talk pages are more topic specific and you'd probably get input from people with an interest in the topic who would know more about it, but you might have to wait a long time for a response. It's really up to you. --132 14:47, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I am going to start with this one. On the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Abbott I believe a link to the video interview with Monica Abbott http://fastpitch.tv/2010/08/10/episode-122-the-monica-abbott-interview/ is a good fit. This is a video I produced, so I am submitting it for approval. Am I right or wrong? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Garyleland (talk • contribs) 15:43, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Garyleland, it is right that you are discussing the link before posting it. (I'll leave it to others to comment on the video, since I know little about softball.) For future discussions, I'd also like to add a third option to thirteen squared's comment: The WikiProject Softball's talk page might be more active than a particular article's page, but be dedicated to softball. BitterGrey (talk) 17:36, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Lucid Dreaming

There has been a rather long winded discussion here: [[13]], talking about whether or not dreamviews.com should be allowed in the External Links.

We've been talking about it for a few months now, and we've not yet agreed what should happen.

To sum it up; the main arguments left are(from WP:ELNO): -Links mainly intended to promote a website. -Links to blogs, personal web pages and most fansites, except those written by a recognized authority. (This exception for blogs, etc, controlled by recognized authorities is meant to be very limited; as a minimum standard, recognized authorities always meet Wikipedia's notability criteria for people.)


As far as I can tell, neither of these points apply to the link we have been discussing.

It came to the point where it would be best to find out the opinion from here. I'd just like this to come to a conclusion some time.

Thanks.

Slash112 (talk) 15:30, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

I do not believe it should be included. I noticed you mentioned on that talk page that it is not a forum and that it just has a forum. The goal of the site may be to inform readers, but the community forum is a primary function of the website. In fact, according to their very first paragraph in the introduction, bolded by the creators of the site, it is "...the largest and most active community of dreamers on the web." It then goes on to discuss how to register to post on the forums. The next single sentence paragraph is about the forums as well. And this is the introduction to the entire website.
In the navigation bar, the first link next to "Home" is "Forum", not "Resources" or "Information on Lucid Dreaming" or anything of the sort. The next link over goes to the forum, the next one goes to blogs. It's not until the fourth link that it finally goes to anything resembling information on lucid dreaming and it's a wiki. The primary purpose of this site is a social community to discuss lucid dreaming. Period. It might have other uses beyond that, but that is its primary function.
There is also an issue of COI here. You may not be the creator of the site or the maintainer, but you are a regular user with strong ties to the website. In fact, you're an administrator there, who posts an average of over 5 post a day over a span of two years, and that took me three seconds to figure out. I think your view of this issue is clouded by your own involvement in the website. While the site may rank high in Google searches, this does feel very much like you trying to promote the site. I agree with MrOllie's assessment and I do not think the link should be reintroduced. --132 15:56, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
By the way, the website in question is listed at DMOZ, which is linked on Lucid Dreaming, so I really feel at this point that the continued pushing to link it is nothing more than attempts at promoting the site. --132 16:09, 5 October 2010 (UTC)


Thanks for the reply.

I understand what you are talking about, for the most part.

First thing though, the "home" of DV includes information about Lucid Dreaming. Although, fair enough, Wiki is 4th up, which may be looked over, and possibly changed. And sure, the forum is pretty much the primary function, but there are two other major functions of DV for information (The CMS and the Wiki), which in my opinion, cancels out the forum problem.


And, about the COI thing. When we first started the discussion about it, I wasn't actually Admin. I was only recently promoted, just so you know that, because I realize how bad that looks on me. I do however speak on behalf of the many people who would agree that DV's link going there would be beneficial to Wikipedia readers. And I can assure you this isn't a promotional thing. As I explained in the Lucid Dreaming discussion, DreamViews is already high up enough on Google to not need any more promotion of this type of thing. And I really don't like that DMOZ page. Although, looking at it now, it actually looks better than I remember it. So it's not as bad any more.

Anyway, my aim is to allow Wikipedia readers to get as much content from varying sources as possible. And since DV's official content always sticks to science, I see reason to allow Wikipedia readers to be able to quickly see that DreamViews' content is trusted.

Slash112 (talk) 16:29, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

We don't add links to Amazon that have product reviews because their primary purpose is to sell things. Likewise, we don't link to websites that have relevant information if their primary purpose is social communication via a forum or blogs. With DreamView, you can't detach one from the other and that's why it shouldn't be included. Further, the DMOZ link is more than sufficient, whether or not you "like" the website. It's the default link we use for articles like this. --132 17:23, 5 October 2010 (UTC)


Agreed. It's a social communication site, and we may as well scrap that bit of the guideline if we allowed this site (and I don't think we should scrap it). Wikipedia is not about getting 'as much content from varying sources as possible', that's a misunderstanding of how we work. Dougweller (talk) 17:44, 5 October 2010 (UTC)


Thanks for the input, guys. Good point, particularly the comparison to Amazon. Makes sense.

I'll leave it at that then, I pretty much agree with what you're saying. Slash112 (talk) 23:50, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Acceptability of dedicated amateur blog for Philippine cuisine article

Per the suggestion made at this discussion: Wikipedia_talk:External_links#Links provided by the Open Directory Project, I would like to ask the opinion of editors here about the suitability of linking to a site called Market Manila. It is a blog maintained by what seems to be a dedicated amateur enthusiast on the subject of Philippine cuisine. According to Alexa it is in the top 100000 websites in the world. The Philippine cuisine article currently only has an external link to the Open Directory Project page on the subject which in my opinion contain links that are all inferior. I have no affiliation with the blog. Would it be all right to add it as an external link? Lambanog (talk) 07:17, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, that daing na bangus looks pretty good. It seems to be a busy blog, no products sold from what I can see as well. But per WP:ELNO #11, no blogs. I worry that it would invite other blogs as well. Also, the poll on the top left... sorta off topic along with the 22 Sep and 03 Oct posts.--NortyNort (Holla) 08:51, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm going to say no also, and for the same reasons. Food blogs are something I know a bit about, and as with others, if we are going to make an exception it would have to be for exceptional reasons, eg having its own article (in which case we could just have a wikilink to the article). Dougweller (talk) 09:00, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
Yep, no food blogs. I love them, I run one, but they are almost never appropriate here, even if they are popular. --132 15:55, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Linking en masse by NPIC

The NPIC may be a reliable source for relevant articles, but I'm thinking the large amount of external linking to the site by the NPIC (talk · contribs) account needs to be reverted? Steven Walling 19:56, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Unless I miscounted, that's 88 ELs added to the same website over two non-contiguous days[14] by a user who's first edit was to add multiple conflicted links to that same website [15]. The user's voluntary disclosure of COI should be considered in his or her favor, assuming it was voluntary. The conservative approach would be to replace the disambiguation link above, encourage the user to add information to the articles when practical, and invite him or her to discuss the ELs collectively in one location, not necessarily here.
A more expedient approach would be to notify the user of this discussion, delete all the conflicted ELs except for any that you think are worth keeping, and discuss from there. This second option is more common: "repeatedly adding links will in most cases result in all of them being removed.
There is a total of 127 ELs to that website on Wikipedia currently[16].BitterGrey (talk) 17:11, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
Good summary by Bittergrey, and I'm glad the "... except for any that you think are worth keeping ..." was specifically mentioned.
I would add: (1) The comments made by Edgar181 in 2007, at the top of the user's talkpage, should be repeated (username policy, conflict of interest). (2) One part of the problem is the sheer number of links in each article. There were 5 NPIC External links in the Mosquito article, which is almost certainly 4 too many. Adding them to the top of the EL lists, didn't help. (3) If everything else is worked out, then one ideal outcome is the account starts to slowly add links again, with a few sentences of prose in the article itself, and using the link as a reference. HTH. -- Quiddity (talk) 18:16, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
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