[WikiEN-l] Allmovie.com links in movie articles

[Erik Moeller]

Hundreds of movie-related articles currently contain a very prominent
link to allmovie.com, as contained in the infobox film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template%3AInfobox_Film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Infobox_Film

This is one of two links included in the infobox. The other one goes
to IMDB.com.

Allmovie.com is an advertising-heavy site with information about
films. Its Alexa rank is consistently above 10,000.

IMDB is the largest movie information database on the Net. Its Alexa
rank is 32. There are other large databases, most notably perhaps the
meta review site rottentomatoes.com (rank 930).

I can see little reason to include a link to Allmovie.com. Its content
is not freely licensed, nor of particularly impressive quality, and
the amount of advertising is obnoxious.

A November poll on the issue concluded 10/7 against keeping the link.
Participation was primarily from WikiProject film editors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Films/archive6#VOTE

The link has been kept due to "no consensus" for removal. I think that
this issue needs a) wider attention and b) more debate in general
terms. Is it appropriate and helpful for us to prominently feature a
site like allmovie.com, which barely passes our notability criteria
for websites, when other similar and larger sites are not featured in
the same way?

I have nothing in principle against linking to proprietary external
content, but this choice strikes me as unusually selective and
arbitrary. I will assume good faith (i.e. not a case of SEO) but I
think if this link is to be kept, we need to develop more objective
criteria for link inclusion.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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