Amanda.nelson12

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Hello, Amanda.nelson12, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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Your edits

Instead of linking to transcripts, please try to write the relevant content that they contain into the article, and they you can cite the transcript as a reference. See our page on citing sources to see how that is done. Generally adding links in bulk is classified as external link spamming and considered a form of undue promotion. If you continue to add external links, they may be removed by spam-conscious editors. ThemFromSpace 21:54, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Your edits

It appears you may have a conflict of interest in your link additions. Please read this: Wikipedia:Advice for the cultural sector. It would be good if you would introduce yourself, perhaps by leaving a note on your user page, and attempt to contribute something other than links to the encyclopedia. Also note that per the Wikipedia Manual of Style, in the heading "External links" only the first word is capitalized. It would also be very helpful if you would start using edit summaries. Thanks, Katr67 (talk) 07:52, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

January 2010

This is the only warning you will receive for your disruptive edits.
The next time you insert a spam link, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Spammers may have their websites blacklisted as well, preventing their websites from appearing on Wikipedia. WuhWuzDat 16:04, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

• I wish to say that the links do not appear to me to be spam, but rather to be useful additions. I believe the warning to be wrong. DuncanHill (talk) 16:15, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree - the "only warning" was very hasty and rather bitey. – ukexpat (talk) 16:25, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Agree with DuncanHill and ukexpat. If you need help and/or support (moral and/or physical), drop me a line on my talk page. Cheers, Pdfpdf (talk) 16:52, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I deplore the "warning" and dissociate myself from it. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:21, 15 January 2010 (UTC).

Thank you. Is there a way to get this revoked or someone to talk to as we have approximately 500 transcripts we were hoping to link to? Amanda.nelson12 (talk) 16:27, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Currently being discussed at Wikipedia:Help_desk#External_Links_2. Hope this helps, and welcome to Wikipedia. Do not worry about the warning, it will not be held against you as you acted in good faith. --Taelus (talk) 16:35, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

(ec)I agree, and I don't agree .. I have answered on the help desk as well, but I'll repeat something similar here.

Amanda, your links are not spam, but the way you are adding (while several editors in the last days have already left you messages along the same lines) is considered spamming here. I also believe that there is better use for the links you are adding (as one editor above also suggests), or that your links are maybe sometimes superfluous, and I do want to say that you did continue while others did show concerns (which does not 'help' in terms of 'assuming good faith'. (I'll examine your additions a bit further in a bit).

May I suggest you to read through some of our guidelines:

• the external links guideline, some external links are welcome, but it is not the aim of Wikipedia to link to everything that is available, and especially not if there are better things one could do with the information linked to.
• the spam guideline, which does explain why we do consider this 'behaviour' spamming, even for 'good' links.
• the conflict of interest guideline, you do have a conflict of interest, but that does not have to be a problem.
• the 'Advice for the cultural sector', which does explain about linking to this type of information.

All in all, I do think you have a good resource, and that you could help us improve several documents here, and I do think that on some it is indeed just OK as an external link, but not everywhere.

I hope this explains, if you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask. And please, when other editors show concerns, or have questions, please reply to them first (and be sure that their concerns are gone) before proceeding. Thanks. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 16:37, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I thank you for your responses. I am new to wikipedia and did not know many of the rules about editing articles. I did take into account what was messaged me and did begin to add edit summaries and also added information to my user page so that the editors here could know who I was. After the comments were made at the beginning of the week I made the aforementioned changes and did some more links as test cases to see what would happen. As of this morning I had no new messages from any other editors about the changes I had made, so I believed everything was fine. It was not until I received the warning message above that I realized that the linking would still not be allowed. This is a task that I was given at work since I was the one who digitized all 500 transcripts and would like them to be shared with as many people as possible. I also just wrote back on the help desk stating that many of these transcripts are hundreds of pages long and I do not have the time nor responsibility to read through and summarize them all and do the same with the wikipedia articles to see what information is missing. If there is a way to continue adding the links we feel they would be beneficial to the wikipedia community and researchers as that is their intended use, but if they will continue to be thought of as spam then we will have to reconsider posting any links to wikipedia in the future. Thank you for your help and comments and I hope this can be resolved and that our situation is understood.Amanda.nelson12 (talk) 16:46, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

You might want to consider contacting e.g. the WikiProject Biography, and give them the whole list. There may be other editors who want to help you in using the information, instead of only linking to it. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 16:52, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I am sure that many editors would like the opportunity to use the information, and they are most likely to be able to do this if it is linked from the relevant articles! DuncanHill (talk) 16:58, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

At the risk of sounding like a parrot, I agree with DuncanHill. The links are far more useful on the relevant pages, and are far more likely to be "used", than if they are absent or removed, or are accumulated in some other unconnected place. Pdfpdf (talk) 17:10, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

(ec)Sorry, Amanda, this answer is to Duncan and Pdfpdf: Oh sure, Duncan, Pdfpdf. I was just looking at Edoardo Amaldi, where Amanda added the third interview (there are already 2 linked there). Reading through them, they are very, very useful to attribute some of the assertions in the (unreferenced!!!) article. I was actually reading one of the interviews which is already there for more than 2 years. I am sure that people could use it, I can show the statements where it could be used (yes, he does confirm that his father was Ugo Amaldi, a professor of mathemathics at Padua, but your argument should contain 'not that that will happen'. Duncan, WP:EL, our guideline, contains in the intro '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.', not just linking, as, although it might help, it actually shows it never does! --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 17:13, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, since we seem to need a longer discussion on Wikipedia policy here, can we at least compile all the links on say, a userpage, so that we have the information? I apologise for being so abrupt, but I simply cannot fathom why we would want to chase valuable information off from Wikipedia. Sure there are discussions to be had about how to use the links, but can we not compile a list of them? --Taelus (talk) 17:16, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

(Additional note): We do seem to have agreed on this already, by contacting the WikiProject, but I just wanted to make it clear that we do want this information. Sorry for any misunderstanding, hope this helps. --Taelus (talk) 17:19, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Taelus, indeed. In most of the cases, we really do want this information, as there is very useful information here. And I don't know if we need longer discussions on Wikipedia policy/guideline here, those policies and guidelines have been discussed over and over, and I do think we agree on those. The way forward: we want the info, work together with us! --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 17:23, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

So from your study of one article you can conclude that no-one ever uses external links to improve any article. Great. We should be over the moon that an organization of the calibre of the AIP is trying to make its archives available for editors and readers to use, but instead all that admins and admin-wannabees can do is to put obstacles in their path. I'm sorry Dirk, but as an editor I am angry about this (having seen it too many times before), and as a reader I find the utility of Wikipedia undermined by this over-zealous link removal. DuncanHill (talk) 17:23, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

'So from your study of one article you can conclude that no-one ever uses external links to improve any article.'. Where did I say that? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 17:28, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Above, your post timed at 17:13. DuncanHill (talk) 17:34, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, it was not the first article I went through, but this was a specific example at hand. And I know that it does not happen a lot, many external links stay external links. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 17:36, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

OK, just for the record: second example: Anthony J. DeMaria (Wikipedia is even wrong there!). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 17:31, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I should say: Anthony J. DeMaria, it would have been nice that the article was corrected .. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 17:32, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

• Anyway, this is going off topic, and can be taken to another user talkpage, as I am sure we have already confused this poor new user enough. In summary, thank you for your contributions Amanda.nelson12, the links are definately of use to us here at Wikipedia. Could you perhaps compile a list of them so that we can use them as citations, and as external links as appropriate, in order to avoid any accusations of spamming and conflicts of interest again? Feel free to list them here, on a user subpage, or even on User:Taelus/List if you wish, as they can easily be moved and copied to each location at which they are useful. Hope this helps, --Taelus (talk) 17:37, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Here is the webpage where there is a list and links to the oral histories, [[1]]. As long as you cite that AIP is where you obtained the information, feel free to use it as you will. It would be helpful if on the site somewhere there was a standard policy when it comes to digital projects for archives and libraries as more and more across the country are finishing up digitization projects of relevant material and many would probably like to post links or information regarding it here as so many people use the website. Until these issues are resolved, I'm sorry to say that though we would like to share our other projects with researchers through wikipedia we will more than likely not post anything further. Thank you for your help in understanding this issue. (Amanda.nelson12 (talk) 19:54, 15 January 2010 (UTC))

I'm very sorry that you have been treated so badly, and fully understand your organization's reluctance to spend time and effort attempting to help Wikipedia. DuncanHill (talk) 20:13, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

The links to AIP oral history of physicists are valuable and should be retained. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:57, 15 January 2010 (UTC).

Thank you for your efforts to improve wikipedia, Amanda, and I am also sorry that your contributions were not been received in the way that you should expect. Please don't be discouraged, since wikipedia is an evolving project, and is capable of righting wrongs (even if it takes a while). The issue of digital repositories is not yet fully discussed here (as far as I am aware). At the very least, your problems have raised the issue, so that we may yet agree a clear statement on their use. I hope you understand that wikipedia is vulnerable to misuse by the addition of multiple external links by those wishing to advertise their website for commercial reasons, although I know that was not your intent. Perhaps you can see how another editor (however misguided) could mistake your contributions, and forgive their actions? The AIP repository is appreciated and I expect much use of it to be made in the future. I sincerely hope you will feel able to continue to contribute to wikipedia. --RexxS (talk) 22:44, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I just wanted to say thank you to all of the editors that have been very helpful with this whole situation and I'm sorry we were not able to come to a better conclusion. I completely understand the fear of a commercial entity adding multiple external links. As I stated before, this issue will more than likely occur again in the future as more nonprofit entities such as archives and libraries put more collections online. If or when Wikipedia has a policy in place to ensure that something of this sort will not happen in the future then I am sure AIP will begin to post again. We had no that this would have become such an issue and we meant no harm in posting the links, but simply thought this was the easiest way to get our scholarly information across. Thank you all so much for your help.Amanda.nelson12 (talk) 00:25, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

I, and I'm sure most of the other editors here, have been embarassed by the way you have been treated. I wish to thank you, and encourage you to continue to contribute to wikipedia. Best wishes. Pdfpdf (talk) 01:59, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

For those interested: http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/transcripts.html

Read Oral History Transcripts Online

This is not a comprehensive list of the oral history interviews held at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives. You can do a comprehensive search in the International Catalog of Sources, as well as search for other kinds of sources and sources held at other locations. This list was updated on December 18, 2009.

Pdfpdf (talk) 02:02, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Amanda, I've opened a request for comment on Wuhwuzdat, in which I've mentioned you by username. Please feel free to let me know if I've misrepresented your position or actions in any way. You also have the right to participate either on the page or its talk page, if you so wish. A guide on how to participate can be found WP:Requests for comment/User conduct/Guidance2#Guidelines at this link. --RexxS (talk) 08:15, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

After reading over the Request for Comment page I feel that you accurately portrayed what happened and I thank you very much for being so understanding and trying to make sure that something like this doesn't happen to another archivist or librarian in the future. Thanks again. Amanda.nelson12 (talk) 19:34, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to echo what Pdfpdf said above. Frankly, I'm appalled that this happened to you, and I sincerely hope that you change your mind and contribute here once again. Regards, —Ed (talk • majestic titan) 03:42, 18 January 2010 (UTC)