Cheney Shill wrote:
This is a better response. Deal with the potential
extremism and practical issues rather than try to claim it as a non-issue when WP claims to be free of advertising, which, whether intended or not, suggests that WP is not serving as a promotional tool of any kind. That and [[conflict of interest]].
I get the impression from this thread that there is a lot of confusion about what constitutes advertising. I certainly do not consider that a single link to a company's website in an article about the company should be treated as advertising.
As to extremism, we can't have everyone running around trying to spot every external link that pops up in 1.8 million pages, even though there seem to be a fair number of admins dedicated to just that on user pages. User pages (I'll leave the counting to you) have 0 bombing impact, though they may contribute to [[astroturfing]] with or without external links, which, as a reminder, is the subject. So, maybe we can if we can convince the admins derelict'n "duty" on the user page external links to check external links on main pages, regardless of whether they are explicit (in the external section) or planted elsewhere in the article.
If a user wants to put external links on his user page, that's entirely his own business.
The practical: What could work is a bot that identifies external links inside main articles (but outside the citation/external space) and auto-removes them, or at least lists them so admins can easily identify and check. I don't know why a policy abolishing external links within the content of the article hasn't already been set.
That's easy Because there's no rational basis for such a policy.
Outside of making it a little less user friendly in a few instances, it would mostly eliminate a lot of tedious labor and get rid of "fan" bombing. How do you know the "fans" are not shills working for an athlete's contract agent?
How do you know that they are? The good faith assumption is that they aren't.
In this case, where they attend or are alumni of the same university they are a "fan" of, they by definition have a [[conflict of interest]] and shouldn't be contributing [[WP:OR]], whether in the form of external links or otherwise.
A preposterous proposal. For that to be effective you would need to make it mandatory for everyone to state where they attended university or where they have worked. Your definition of Conflict of Interest goes well beyond anything that might be expected in the real world.
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