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

[Ryan Wetherell]

On 1/4/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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
>
> DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
> the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

IIRC allmovie is a sister site of allmusic.com, which seems to be our
external link of choice when it comes to musical release-related
articles.  It seems that we have no problem trusting them.

--Ryan

-- 
[[en:User:Merovingian]]