Benjy1966

December 2008

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Withnail and I do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. McGeddon (talk) 15:28, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

January 2009

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Human Traffic do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you.  Badgernet  ₪  17:47, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

November 2011

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Folding boat do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used as a platform for advertising or promotion, and doing so is contrary to the goals of this project. Because Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia.  
Your edit here to Folding boat was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline. The external link(s) you added or changed (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3im2cvPzKg) is/are on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. If the external link you inserted or changed was to a media file (e.g. a sound or video file) on an external server, then note that linking to such files may be subject to Wikipedia's copyright policy, as well as other parts of our external links guideline. If the information you linked to is indeed in violation of copyright, then such information should not be linked to. Please consider using our upload facility to upload a suitable media file, or consider linking to the original.
If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 22:48, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

might have made an error but I'm no vandal!

Ahoy Excirial, I confess I am somewhat confused and quite new to editing in wiki. I apologise in advance if I do not follow protocol 100%! I tried to add some useful info to the page 'folding boat' as I consider the current version extremely bias to the point where it is a diatribe about Porta Bote which is by no means the only folding boat on the market. I sell the Origami and Fliptail dinghies on line and they are extremely popular so I do not understand why my added paragraph about them was removed. Perhaps you could explain to me why I am not allowed to post useful information when the current article might as well be an advert for Porta Bote with half a dozen direct links to their site! I tried to cite a video which gives visual evidence of a claim I made in my paragraph, that of the speed attained with a 3.3hp engine. When my paragraph was first removed, I though maybe it was the You Tube link (although I checked first and was informed that it was OK to link to You tube) so I removed it and tried again but then you took it down. It seems that the page as it stands is acceptable but I can't for the life of me see why. I feel that it is poorly written, bias, one sided, lacking in useful facts and certainly could include information about many more folding boats. Cheers Benjy (Benjy1966 (talk) 23:17, 3 November 2011 (UTC))

Hiyas there Benjy!

Before saying anything that is a bit more related to the above let me just say: Welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you enjoy your stay! As for the above, let me first say that i wholeheartedly agree with your statement that Wikipedia can be quite confusing at first. If not for the editing syntax and the "What does that button do?", then for the policies and rules that are in place. Don't let that discourage you though! One of the most important policies is that you should be Bold when editing - if something goes wrong that can easily be reverted, so don't be deterred by a feeling that something might not be entirely in line with policy. Having said that - if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. You can ask them on my talk page right here (I may be a bit slow to respond due to out of wikipedia work trough), on the new contributers helpdesk or the regular helpdesk. Alternatively The help pages may provide some assistance, though it may require a bit more reading.

Now, on to the folding boats that caused the above question. First off you are entirely right that the page itself was quite a blatant promotion for Porta Bote, and i see that another user already went in and cleaned it up rather well. As for the links, there are a few policies to be aware off - First and foremost pages need to be neutral in tone, with as little opinions as possible. At the same time advertising links and Advertising are not allowed as well. Pages that are linked should follow a similar format - a neutral technical description might be a fine link, but a link to a page that is selling and promoting is not. There is actually a page going into this in detail, but it is a rather long read.

I hope this helps, and if you have questions, you know where to ask them. Excirial ^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 23:42, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Ahoy Eccirial, thank you for your detailed explanation and welcome to Wiki. I confess that I am not really any the wiser. I appreciate that direct links could be seen as advertising but surely the site where the dinghy originates is the best source of information. If not, then please can you suggest where to go for such sources? I mean, does someone's blog count? If one of my customers built one and wrote about it, does that count, or is that too opinionated as well? I just don't see where these sources are? I thought that the you tube link that I put up was no more than visual proof of, not only the existence of the boat but also proof of a claim made in the text yet it appears not.

I have to be honest, I am finding the whole thing far too difficult to use and understand. I see that the folding boat article has had the Porta Bote links removed but it is now as good as useless and tells the reader nothing of any use whatsoever. At least when Porta Bote was there, there was at least one folding boat mentioned. Now there are none. I would be happy to write a non bias article about folding boats but I have very little interest if someone can just come along and change it when they feel like it. This experience has made me doubt the validity of much of the info on Wiki.

I thought Wiki did not allow businesses so what is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Seacraft If this is valid, can I write an article about woodenwidget? After all I am a valid and genuine Internet presence and have been for about 6 years.

Perhaps if you have time you could explain this to me in layman's terms. Thanks Benjy (Benjy1966 (talk) 08:22, 4 November 2011 (UTC))

Ahoy Excirial, Have been doing some research and it seems that no one takes much notice of the Wiki rules. No wonder everyone is so confused. Apart from Pacific Seacraft, there are the following pages which (as far as I can tell) are out of order and full of links to companies selling products. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folbot for example. And again here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_(dinghy) there are list of manufacturers. Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinghy under references are a list of manufacturers of dinghies. It seems to me that the whole Wikipedia is a bit of a mess! Please confirm that these are all illegal entries. Thanks, Benjy (Benjy1966 (talk) 20:53, 4 November 2011 (UTC))

Hiyas Benjy,

Sorry for not being able to get back to you sooner. I am incredibly busy outside Wikipedia so I have little to read or even reply to any questions I receive. I will try to reply to the above tomorrow evening, when i hopefully have some time to write a decent and non-hurried reply. Excirial ^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 10:25, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Talk pages etiquette, links, and "product pages"

For future reference, new messages go at the bottom of talk pages, not above previous sections.

To link to an article, all you have to do is place the article title [[in double brackets like this]].

Regarding pages mentioning products: The prescence of mistakes in some articles does not justify more mistakes. There are many more articles than there are editors watching the articles, so not everything is going to be perfect. Wikipedia is not to be used for advertising or promotion of any sort, but may neutrally summarize what reliable third party sources (which excludes self-published sources like pay-to-print books, press releases, blogs, or the subject's own pages) say about notable subjects (basically, it has to have received national or international attention from multiple sources which do not profit from the subject in any way). WP:EL describes what should or should not be linked to. I have removed the entire "manufacturers" section from the article Laser (dinghy) because it violated WP:ELNO #14. I have done what I can to remove the spam from Dinghy and Folding kayak as well. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:51, 4 November 2011 (UTC)