[WikiEN-l] Spam and advertising dilemma

[Steve Bennett]

I feel like a baby for coming crying to the list, but so be it.

I created [[One deal a day]], a business model used by certain
web-based retailers. I added a list of retailers that use this
model.[1] I linked them to their websites. Another user deleted the
whole list as spam, citing our "Wikipedia is not a repository of
external links" guideline.

I contend that this alleged "list of links" is distinct from a normal
list of advertising links as:
 - the list is intended to be exhaustive
 - the interest is in the retailer appearing in the list, not in
sending the user to the website for further information
 - there is genuine interest in the list for its own sake: you could
make a table and build further information about the entries, and you
could easily conceive of someone doing research based on the list

Am I wrong? Is the list just a glorified form of advertising? Or is
this an example of how we seem to throw out the baby with the
bathwater, depriving ourselves of decent coverage of electronic
commerce in our quest against spam and advertising?

Steve
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=One_deal_a_day&oldid=101273913
- the list is actually adapted from the last section in [[Woot
(retailer)]].