On 5/28/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/27/06, Seth Price seth@pricepages.org wrote:
I've been working on an outdoors website that has a focus on parks. The idea is I can add photos, reviews, scores, and other information to a given park. The site is Wiki-like, in that people can correct and add information that is listed (like admission fee info and lat/ long). I think that I have many pages that would be of interest to a person browsing related Wikipedia articles.
So, I would like to edit a number of articles to add links to my pages. For example, I would link to my Yellowstone National Park (http://www.unearthedoutdoors.net/parks/140 ) from Wikipedia (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_National_Park ). Would this be acceptable? Could I do the same for many other pages?
Like (for another example): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_National_Wildlife_Refuge http://www.unearthedoutdoors.net/parks/1594
Making these links makes sense, as far as I can tell, but I thought I'd ask about them first, because I'd be making a few hundred of them (at least) and I don't want to step on any toes.
G'day, welcome, and a couple of suggestions to you: *Contribute other content as well as links. People who only add links to their own site in Wikipedia are viewed with some suspicion, whether deservedly or not. *Links are of some value, but we would love it if you would actually release the photos under GFDL and upload them to Commons, our repository of multimedia content. Similarly, add information about the parks to the park articles in objective, verifiable ways. *Take it easy with the links, and go slowly. Add 10, wait a week, and see what happens. See if any get removed. See if you get any comments on your talk page. Then add another 30, and wait another week. Avoid shocking people, and avoid being mistaken for a linkspammer. *Only add links if they are among the most informative on the web for a given article. I imagine Yellow Stone Park probably has mountains of info on the web, but maybe a more obscure park doesn't. Use judgment on each link, don't add them all blindly. *Remember that Wikipedia is inherently egotistical - it does not accept that better sources of information can or should exist. That is, people will probably want to add everything informative that there is to know from your site, then cut off the link. To put it differently, Wikipedia wants to be the most informative site in the universe on US national parks, and will not respect the right of your site to be more informative than it.
Hope that helps!
Steve
I think these are great suggestions. I found another one at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spam.
"Contribute cited text, not bare links. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a link farm. If you have a source to contribute, first contribute some facts that you learned from that source, then cite the source. Don't simply direct readers to another site for the useful facts; add useful facts to the article, then cite the site where you found them. You're here to improve Wikipedia -- not just to funnel readers off Wikipedia and onto some other site, right? (If not, see #1 above.)"
Anthony
(by the way, should I be attaching the text of the GFDL to this derivative work? It's not a real question, so don't answer it.)