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a direct link to a recent career-spanning audio intervie was removed even thopugh it follows the description on the wikipedia external links description:

"Wikipedia articles may include links to web pages outside Wikipedia, but must conform to certain formatting restrictions. Such pages could contain further research that is accurate and on-topic; information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail; or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy."

this is a direct link to the radio show, all rights reserved to the radio station, yet the direct link is to the online archive.

The interview is career spanning, recent, and includes a lot of vital information missing from the article.

cheers,

-O. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.229.30.117 (talk) 02:23, 16 March 2009 (UTC)Reply

I wasn't the one who removed it, but I can probably tell you why it was removed. We generally discourage linking to interviews in external links sections. This is because Wikipedia is not a collection of links, and what tends to happen (especially in articles about bands) is that people add link upon link upon link until the section is full of useless stuff, or stuff that should have been used as citations. Yes, we absolutely want interviews like this one, but we want to use them as sources, not just tack them on as an external link. We encourage contributors to read or listen to the interview, find useful information in it that isn't already in the article, then add that information to the article and use the link as a reference, providing it in a citation. Note that Wikipedia:External links says, just below the portion you quoted:

The subject of this guideline is external links that are not citations of article sources. If the website or page to which you want to link includes information that is not yet a part of the article, consider using it as a source for the article, and citing it.

And under "Links normally to be avoided" it says:

Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article.

A career-spanning interview should certainly provide information that ought to go in the article body, so we would much rather that information be added to the article and the interview linked in a citation. Chances are, if it is indeed thorough, then there's little to nothing in it that wouldn't be includable in this article in order to help it reach Featured status (and it would be linked in citations in that case anyway). That's why many editors (myself included) generally removed interviews from external links sections on sight. If the interview has any pertinent info in it, then that info ought to go in the article and the interview linked in a citation. We want to avoid allowing external links sections to turn into interview farms.
Don't worry, the link isn't lost. It's preserved in the edit history of the page. I'm going to put it here so that it can be looked at later and hopefully used as a source to add info to the article:
Hope that helps. --IllaZilla (talk) 03:10, 16 March 2009 (UTC)Reply