[WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> But I do believe that  a list of, say, 50 links tagged onto the end of
> an article typically has negative value for the following reasons:

Sometimes, if you prepare a proper bibliography for an article (those
notes people should write before they write an article, so they know
the sources they are working with) you can end up dumping 50 or more
links onto the talk page of an article for more thorough discussion
and sorting through stuff before adding it to the article. It is that
sort of helpful dumping that I think people don't want to see removed
from articles. Or at least it should be removed to the talk page. I
think what happens is that some people (those who get too involved
with sweeping through many articles looking for external link farms)
lose perspective and instead of moving the links to the talk page for
better integration to the article, they just remove them completely.

Carcharoth