Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:16:48 +0100
From: Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher
Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Matt Jacobs <sxeptomaniac(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
<snip>
?I see nothing unwiki-like in suggesting that a
person should defend
their
additions to an article when disputes arise.
?That's a pretty standard
expectation in any collaborative environment. ?There's no lack of
assumption
of good faith involved in an editor removing an
addition if they have
reason
to believe it is not beneficial to the article.
But what if the editors can't agree on whether the link benefits the
article?
To get specific, I found a resource and was getting ready to add links
to lots of articles, but pulled back after others didn't seem as
excited as me about the resource:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28miscellaneous%29/Arc…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links/Noticeboard/Archive_2…
It now has 359 links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=250&…
Back in January, there were 130 links (you will have to take my word
for that, as posted in that discussion, as I didn't take a
screenshot). So it seems the use of such links (to archived news reel
clips) can spread without too much pushback or people worrying about
spamming.
But if someone had added 200 links in just a few days, that would have
worried some people.
Should they have been worried?
Carcharoth
When a high volume of links to one place are inserted, I can understand why
some people would tend to take a close look: spammers are a major
annoyance. However, a spammer is usually not going to be able to make a
solid argument for why those links belong, and it will quickly become
apparent if the link offers little in the way of benefit to the articles.
The slightly panicky anti-spam response seems to be more of a problem with
poor judgment, and not easily addressed through rule changes.
Sxeptomaniac
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:57:25 +0100
From: Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher
Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Matt Jacobs wrote:
I see nothing unwiki-like in suggesting that a
person should defend
their
additions to an article when disputes arise.
That's a pretty standard
expectation in any collaborative environment. There's no lack of
assumption
of good faith involved in an editor removing an
addition if they have
reason
to believe it is not beneficial to the article.
But if they remove it from a generally anti-spam ideological point of
view, or on the grounds of "conflict of interest", then there is such a
problem of good faith being disregarded. Quiddity has now gone into this
in greater detail, and WP:EL is _very clearly_ drafted from an anti-spam
perspective.
Charles
WP:COI is the most-abused of all the guideline/policy pages on WP, in my
opinion. It should never, ever be used to win a content disagreement, yet
it frequently is. Spam is a problem when the links are misleading, not
directly relevant, duplicate more well-known or less commercialized sites,
direct to very unreliable sources, etc. However, if an editor can't argue
why the link is not useful, then they shouldn't be labeling it spam/COI.
Perhaps WP:EL could stand to be edited, but I consider it more a matter of
poor judgment than anything else.
Sxeptomaniac