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

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Matt Jacobs <sxeptomaniac at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

>  I see nothing unwiki-like in suggesting that a person should defend their
> additions to an article when disputes arise.  That's a pretty standard
> expectation in any collaborative environment.  There's no lack of assumption
> of good faith involved in an editor removing an addition if they have reason
> to believe it is not beneficial to the article.

But what if the editors can't agree on whether the link benefits the article?

To get specific, I found a resource and was getting ready to add links
to lots of articles, but pulled back after others didn't seem as
excited as me about the resource:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28miscellaneous%29/Archive_24#British-Path.C3.A9_news_clips_archive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links/Noticeboard/Archive_2#British-Path.C3.A9_news_clips_archive

It now has 359 links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=250&offset=250&target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.britishpathe.com

Back in January, there were 130 links (you will have to take my word
for that, as posted in that discussion, as I didn't take a
screenshot). So it seems the use of such links (to archived news reel
clips) can spread without too much pushback or people worrying about
spamming.

But if someone had added 200 links in just a few days, that would have
worried some people.

Should they have been worried?

Carcharoth