[WikiEN-l] links to open courses?

[Texas Guy]

Begin forwarded message:

>Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 19:49:01 -0600 (MDT)
>From: "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>

>All useful, interesting, or authoritative links on the subject of an
>article should be included in "external links and further reading",
>including important primary sources, open courses, and published books.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_mirror_or_a_repository_of_links.2C_images.2C_or_media_files

I spend a lot of time cleaning up external link sections. There's a lot of wisdom and experience in this essay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spam_event_horizon

A few good links beget more good links, then everyone starts adding their links to an article. Then we get junk and spam. At that point, some readers end up going to dodgy sites that have been "validated" in their eyes by inclusion in Wikipedia; they sign up for a course at Fastbuck U instead of MIT.

This open courseware is a great movement and there's going to be more and more of it. Which courses' links will we OK for inclusion in our "History" article? Which won't we? How much time will our editors spend adjudicating this and explaining to frustrated link-adders why their links shouldn't be added?

Several years ago, following some conference there was a movement within the museum and library world to add links to their resources from various Wikipedia articles. We had well-meaning museum staff spamming all sorts of stuff. A museum in some small town with a lock of Oliver Cromwell's hair adding links to our English History article (not just our Oliver Cromwell article). This wasn't really spam in the classic sense but it added clutter and wasted editors' time. 

I hope to take one of these courses so I'm very positive about the development -- I just don't think these links are good for Wikipedia.

These links come whether we want them or not, time will be wasted and people will get frustrated. Let's not add to this by encouraging the phenomenon.

Thanks,

A. B.
User talk:A. B.

PS The Oliver Cromwell's hair bit was an exaggeration but we had a lot that was just about as silly, off-topic, well-meaning and unhelpful. There really was a small town museum with some obscure Cromwelliana spamming all over.