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

[Charles Matthews]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Charles Matthews
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>   
>> Of your three points, I don't really find anything to agree with. Taking
>> the attitide that "External links" is the name of a "Further reading"
>> section for reading that happens to be online, what exactly _are_ you
>> arguing? That trawling through the first hundred hits on well-known
>> search engines will always produce those links? That is easy to refute.
>> For many sites of high academic value, precisely no (zero) SEO is done.
>> I can easily think of examples. Very good links can be very hard to
>> find, unless you have a good reason to suspect they are there.
>>     
>
> High value links should always be provided.  Can you provide an
> reference to a Wikimedian arguing that links to the most useful
> additional resources shouldn't be provided?   I'll gladly go and
> disagree with them.
>
>   
I have had a look around WP:EL and its Talk, and I believe it is clearly 
not the case (given the 20 reasons not to include a link, starting with 
a catchall) that the guideline is in the hands of those who have that as 
credo. See below for more.
> 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:
>   
<snip>

OK, reductio ad absurdum.
>> Given your style of argument, which is that we should be relying on the
>> utility of commercial entities over which we have no control at all, to
>> help our readers find the further information that we know (because WP
>> does not aim to give complete coverage) they will need, I would say that
>> Fred's worries are amply justified.
>>     
>
> I bothered making the argument here because I believed that Fred was
> likely mischaracterizing the nuanced position people have taking in
> trying to balance the value of additional links vs their cost as a
> simple "war on external links", when no one was likely carrying on any
> such war:  Just because someone has decided on a different benefit
> trade-off than you doesn't make their activities a "war on all X".
>   
But what I see around WP:EL is quite different. Basically it now stands, 
in relation to linkspam, as WP:N can be considered to stand in relation 
to cruft. But it has clearly gone further down the deletionist road, and 
(I presume, just as you jumped to sections of 50 extlinks) anyone who 
objects is supposed to love linkspam. It seems apparent that a working 
concept of "justifiability" has been introduced, analogous to 
"notability"; that the onus is on anyone adding an extlink is to show it 
is "justifiable", and your third point is parodied (I hope it is only a 
parody) as "Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what 
the article would contain if it became a featured article" (WP:ELNO). 
What you wrote is "I think that at its best Wikipedia should be directly 
including all the information available up to Wikipedia's coverage 
depth, linking only for citations,  then it should have links to the 
most valuable external resources which go deeper into the subject than 
Wikipedia reasonably can." 

Obviously the word "unique" is just bad drafting  - should be replaced 
by "distinctive" or something that doesn't mean if two web pages have 
the same essential content we can't have either as extlk. But "deeper 
into the subject than Wikipedia reasonably can" and "what the article 
would contain if it became a featured article" both make our criteria 
for "justifiability" be driven by a state of affairs that is not only 
hard to define, but actually in practical terms applies only to 1 out of 
1000 articles, with no prospect of this proportion changing soon.

In short, while no one can be for linkspam or including long lists of 
duplicative exlks, since "Wikipedia is not a web directory", the 
guideline has gone over to "necessary to inclusion" by a general 
criterion (so worse than WP:N) and at the same time junked good sense 
and "weaving the web" at the basic, nodal level. Not good at all. I 
don't see the trade-off. What I see is that WP:EL is now a battery of 
arguments for winning arguments about what is linkspam, with complete 
disregard for the cost on the majority of topics, which are neither 
likely to be spammed seriously, nor enjoy the  "incorporation" cycle 
whereby extlk content is written into the article in a timely fashion.

Charles