Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Of your three points, I don't really find anything to agree with. Taking the attitide that "External links" is the name of a "Further reading" section for reading that happens to be online, what exactly _are_ you arguing? That trawling through the first hundred hits on well-known search engines will always produce those links? That is easy to refute. For many sites of high academic value, precisely no (zero) SEO is done. I can easily think of examples. Very good links can be very hard to find, unless you have a good reason to suspect they are there.
High value links should always be provided. Can you provide an reference to a Wikimedian arguing that links to the most useful additional resources shouldn't be provided? I'll gladly go and disagree with them.
I have had a look around WP:EL and its Talk, and I believe it is clearly not the case (given the 20 reasons not to include a link, starting with a catchall) that the guideline is in the hands of those who have that as credo. See below for more.
But I do believe that a list of, say, 50 links tagged onto the end of an article typically has negative value for the following reasons:
<snip>
OK, reductio ad absurdum.
Given your style of argument, which is that we should be relying on the utility of commercial entities over which we have no control at all, to help our readers find the further information that we know (because WP does not aim to give complete coverage) they will need, I would say that Fred's worries are amply justified.
I bothered making the argument here because I believed that Fred was likely mischaracterizing the nuanced position people have taking in trying to balance the value of additional links vs their cost as a simple "war on external links", when no one was likely carrying on any such war: Just because someone has decided on a different benefit trade-off than you doesn't make their activities a "war on all X".
But what I see around WP:EL is quite different. Basically it now stands, in relation to linkspam, as WP:N can be considered to stand in relation to cruft. But it has clearly gone further down the deletionist road, and (I presume, just as you jumped to sections of 50 extlinks) anyone who objects is supposed to love linkspam. It seems apparent that a working concept of "justifiability" has been introduced, analogous to "notability"; that the onus is on anyone adding an extlink is to show it is "justifiable", and your third point is parodied (I hope it is only a parody) as "Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article" (WP:ELNO). What you wrote is "I think that at its best Wikipedia should be directly including all the information available up to Wikipedia's coverage depth, linking only for citations, then it should have links to the most valuable external resources which go deeper into the subject than Wikipedia reasonably can."
Obviously the word "unique" is just bad drafting - should be replaced by "distinctive" or something that doesn't mean if two web pages have the same essential content we can't have either as extlk. But "deeper into the subject than Wikipedia reasonably can" and "what the article would contain if it became a featured article" both make our criteria for "justifiability" be driven by a state of affairs that is not only hard to define, but actually in practical terms applies only to 1 out of 1000 articles, with no prospect of this proportion changing soon.
In short, while no one can be for linkspam or including long lists of duplicative exlks, since "Wikipedia is not a web directory", the guideline has gone over to "necessary to inclusion" by a general criterion (so worse than WP:N) and at the same time junked good sense and "weaving the web" at the basic, nodal level. Not good at all. I don't see the trade-off. What I see is that WP:EL is now a battery of arguments for winning arguments about what is linkspam, with complete disregard for the cost on the majority of topics, which are neither likely to be spammed seriously, nor enjoy the "incorporation" cycle whereby extlk content is written into the article in a timely fashion.
Charles