Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:33:36 +0100 From: Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck? To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Matt Jacobs wrote:
Anyway, the point is not that external links are systematically persecuted (they may be patchily persecuted); but that they now have few actual rights.
Charles
And why should links have any particular "rights"? External links should
be
justified in the same way as any addition to the article. They may not require the same verifiability standards, but they should be judged to be
a
recommended place for further reading. In some way or another, they
should
add content the editors judge to be useful, and not simply be about the subject. Considering that for every good link I've seen inserted, I've
also
seen one that was useless or even misleading or libelous, why would they need any special protection?
The point would be no different from (say) unreferenced content: there the distinction between "may be removed" and "must be removed" is quite important. And there is the "right", not of the link but the editor adding it, to have "good faith assumed": other things being equal, assume that the link was added to help develop the encyclopedia. The onus is not always on the editor adding to an article to "justify" additions: that is a very unwiki-like attitude, if I may say so.
I see no reason why we need additional policy and bureaucracy
specifically
for links.
For one thing, the page WP:EL is very bureaucratic as it stands; the good part of it is the "maintenance and review" section, where templates for tagging links regarded as potential problems are mentioned.
Also, this discussion thread reveals fairly clearly that there are differing views on the matter.
Charles
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.
Sxeptomaniac
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Matt Jacobs sxeptomaniac@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/Arch...
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&a...
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
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