Joelee
Thank you for your contributions, you seem to be off to a good start. Hopefully you will soon join the vast army of Wikipediholics! If you need help on how to title new articles see the naming conventions, and for help on formatting the pages visit the manual of style. For general questions goto Wikipedia:Help or the FAQ, if you can't find your answer there check the Village Pump (for Wikipedia related questions) or the Reference Desk (for general questions)! There's still more help at the Tutorial and Policy Library. Plus, don't forget to visit the Community Portal. If you have any more questions after that, feel free to ask me directly on my user talk page.
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Link spam to havoscope dot com
editPlease do not add commercial links (or links to your own private websites) to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or a mere collection of external links. You are, however, encouraged to add content instead of links to the encyclopedia. See the welcome page to learn more. Thanks. OhNoitsJamieTalk 21:23, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
Questions on SPAM?
editI guess this is where we ask you questions. Here's my situation. I'm a college student, and I wrote a paper on Counterfeit Goods. I found a site that I liked, and it had a lot of information. I noticed Wikipedia didn't have a lot of the information that was listed on that other site, so I started linking to them on various articles. Now, is the problem linking to them and not writing in the article, or is it linking to them in general?
I hope that you could talk to me about this, because I really am upset that you are accusing me of being a spammer. I can't begin to tell you how upset I am to see that everything I linked to was deleted as spam.
So, my questions are this: 1. How can I link to a website that contains information about the article topic without it being considred spam? 2. Should I just source the website, write a brief paragraph using the information from the source, and then just source the website instead of doing an external link? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.234.95.40 (talk • contribs) , presumably Joelee (talk · contribs)
- Response Your contribution pattern was suspicious; when a single user adds links to a number of articles pointing to a site that has Google ads, it suggests that the individual could be trying to drive traffic to that site via Wikipedia. While you did add some content, most of the content was just a sentence or two quote from the site. The quote that you later deleted after I deleted the source link could easily be sourced at the Department of Justice's site.
- Spam-hunting isn't an exact science, and there are occasional "false positives" where good-faith link additions are deleted. In this case, the site in question appears to be an "aggregator" of information publically available, so I'm not too keen on restoring all of those links. On the other hand, I don't think it's necessary to ban all links to that site, but I was able to easily find a public-domain (.gov) source for the same information. OhNoitsJamieTalk 00:07, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
- Response to your response. I was looking at my contribution pattern and I guess it does look suspicious. I guess I wanted to contribute without having to put in the effort to write anything worthwhile. So here's what I'm going to do. In the articles that I contributed before, I'll write up more information then simply linking to a site and writing one or two sentences. If I use only one type of source,then I'll do what you did and site the original document from the site. If I utilize several sources from that site, then, to be fair and to keep it simple, I'll source the site. Does that sound okay to you? If you have problems with what I just wrote, then please tell me and hopefully we can figure something out. From the looks of your page, you seem very busy, so I hope this won't take up too much of your time. Thanks Joelee (talk · contribs)
- Hi Joe; given your explanation, it seems like your contributions have in fact been been in good faith; I apologize for not interpreting them as such. Understand that there is a massive effort by some to use Wikipedia as an SEO tool, so it's easy to become overly suspicious. OhNoitsJamieTalk 04:18, 25 April 2006 (UTC)