Sannse,
In your email to other wikipedia monitors/admins, I would appreciate a note that CountryGuide provides a full reciprocal deep-link back to the appropriate country. And, while I understand that you may not think they are useful (no offense taken -I understand the issue of spamming a directory), the general public seems to think otherwise. CountryGuide is being developed along the same lines as StateGuide which (surprisingly to me, too) is receiving good reviews as a reference utility. See:
http://www.stateguide.com/info/workhorse.htm
Respectfully,
Bob Jordan
I haven't reviewed the site in question, so I can't make any very authoritative comment, but in general I'm very much opposed to this kind of link in the encyclopedia.
There are a lot of "gray area" issues in this area that we've never had to deal with in terms of coming up with a specific policy... it just hasn't come up yet. But in general, I think we should take a _relatively_ "hardline" approach against linking to non-free resources.
(Not _absolutely_ hardline, as it is useful and valid in many cases.)
My tiny little side-project http://www.3apes.com/ is an effort to create a free directory with a really free license (unlike dmoz.org, which has a partly free license) and a wiki-style community. But I haven't promoted it much nor worked on it much, so it's still more of a pioneer site than an actual live project.
It might be sensible at some point in the future for Wikipedia articles to include links taken from such a separate project, I don't know.
--Jimbo
Bob Jordan wrote:
Sannse,
In your email to other wikipedia monitors/admins, I would appreciate a
note
that CountryGuide provides a full reciprocal deep-link back to the appropriate country. And, while I understand that you may not think they are useful (no offense taken -I understand the issue of spamming a directory), the general public seems to think otherwise. CountryGuide is being developed along the same lines as StateGuide which (surprisingly to me, too) is receiving good reviews as a reference utility. See:
Yes, I acknowledge that CountryGuide links back to Wikipedia. I'm not sure that that makes the links any more useful or relevant, although it's nice to see.
This isn't something I feel very strongly about (although other users appear to feel more so, the links have been removed). I agree directory sites are useful, but I'm not sure that they are useful as part of Wikipedia. If a link is particulary relevant to an article it should, I think, be linked to directly - not via CountryGuide or similar.
But, as I say, I don't feel very strongly about this either way.
Regards,
sannse