--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I certainly do not consider that a single link to a company's website in an article about the company should be treated as advertising.
Nor do I. This has nothing to do with the subject at hand. To alleviate possible confusion, this was not a link to a company's (or person's) Web site from an article about said company or person. Nor was the link for a citation.
The practical: What could work is a bot that identifies external links inside main articles (but outside the citation/external space) and auto-removes them, or at
least
lists them so admins can easily identify and check. I don't know why a policy abolishing external links within the content of the article hasn't already been set.
That's easy Because there's no rational basis for such a policy.
The policy already exists; it's purely a matter of application. Is stopping promotional links and SEO bombing for fan sites related to an article and serving no referential or citational purpose irrational? If the link shifts the NPOV weight of the article by pointing to a "fan" site or fake blog promoting the company, including advertisements for products, is it irrational to remove that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wp:npov#Undue_weight "This applies not only to article text, but to images, external links, categories, and all other material as well."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wp:npov#Bias "Commercial advertisting...."
Outside of making it a little less user friendly in a
few
instances, it would mostly eliminate a lot of tedious
labor
and get rid of "fan" bombing. How do you know the
"fans"
are not shills working for an athlete's contract agent?
How do you know that they are? The good faith assumption is that they aren't.
And the "rational basis" for assuming "good faith" is? FYI, the same way you "know" something else is spam or an ad or a bomb. The point is not to let any link to be added for any reason simply because you want to feel good. As noted above with regard to NPOV, it needs evaluation just like any other addition or change. Do we assume that everything is NPOV based on "good faith"? How do we know it isn't NPOV?
In this case, where they attend or are alumni of the same university they are a "fan" of, they by definition have
a
[[conflict of interest]] and shouldn't be contributing [[WP:OR]], whether in the form of external links or
otherwise.
A preposterous proposal. For that to be effective you would need to make it mandatory for everyone to state where they attended university or where they have worked.
No, just if they continue to be a stakeholder in the organization where they worked, such as a retiree or stockholder. By definition, alumni remain stakeholders in their university. The reputation of the university affects the value of the degree. Besides, there are sites for inside, anonymous [[WP:OR]], of which Wikipedia is not one.
~~Pro-Lick http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (Wikia supported site since 2006)
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