[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 5/2/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Andre Engels wrote:
> >
> > I think that the solution should be to remove many more links than are
> > done now. When I read that Gregory Maxwell removed 45 links from a
> > page and kept another 45, in my opinion he has been rather reserved -
> > rare is in my opinion the page that needs more than 3 links. Wikipedia
> > is not a link collector.
> >
>
> Maybe not, but one of our Prime Directives is "cite your source". This often
> requires multiple external links because there are multiple sources.
>
> One hopes that you would class this type of link as "necessary" but there
> seem to be people to whom this kind of thing is like a red rag to a bull and
> would set upon a radical link-ectomy without bothering to consider whether
> there is any conflicting policy.
>
> Indeed a small minority of them might even consider rewriting policy to
> imply that they were correct all along.

Um.
In this case I was only talking about links in the external link
section of the page.

The main body has another 24, most of which should also be checked and
possibly removed,  and the ref section has 3.. all of which should
probably stay.

I agree that 45 externals in the external section was too many, but
removing things (even externals) on wikipedia is always a dangerous
game... I'd rather remove too few, and have my changes stand... then
too many and run afoul of a regular editor.