Miserablyeverafter

Spam?

In your edit summary of recent changes to SYS Linux you wrote "A link to an external page with the links to the operating system.iso (which is free as in "free beer" and free as in "freedom") was added as they were seen as spam(?) and removed." The question mark implies to me that there should be some clarification. In the AfD for this article the primary editor keeps telling people to download his software via those links. Additionally, my interpretation of the external linking guideline leads me to believe that the links were a conflict of interest and inaccessible to a large portion of the wiki readership due to the technical nature of iso files. The guideline specifically says no external links that require third party software and an iso file needs to be burned or emulated. My primary concern was the conflict of interest and the shear volume of direct iso files. I personally feel this user is using wikipedia as an advertising medium for his/her distribution of linux. Before I deleted the links I visited some of the major free linux distribution articles and checked to see if they had direct download links and they did not, so the practice is not commonplace among peer articles.--Torchwood Who? (talk) 15:56, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, because I'm not familiar with Wikipedias the policy on spam in relation to distros licensed under GNU (just GPL, not GPLV3). I found many documents in relation to promoting companies,bands,videos products and even software/OSs for profit. However, I didn't find anything that quite fits this case. That's why I worked around it with an external link instead of undoing it. I think he felt that if english speakers would try it, it would save him a lot of time trying to explain exactly what it is. Obviously, there is a language barrier here. Even more obvious is his frustration with it and I think his requests were a result of that. Again, please excuse my ignorance of policies, but now I'm even more confused. Is not any link to any file (html included, but especially .pdf) in contravention of that policy? Tee hee,the point is though, I'm not too good at this policy stuff :) I recognize that I'm not and hopefully the external link (what the other articles have) is a solution that suits everyone :)Miserablyeverafter (talk) 16:39, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

No worries. I know there's a language barrier at work, I think I was the first one to point the editor to an alternate language wiki's guidelines so he could better understand what we were talking about. I believe the guideline on links not requiring a third party software is mean that they should be accessible in the browser without having to open a helper app. It specifically says that external links requiring plugins like Flash and Acrobat need to specifically say so... I'm just making the small leap in logic that if there's all this pomp around files requiring a browser plugin that an iso file falls far from the tree of an acceptable link. But your solution is a good one. I assumed he had links on his home page to the iso files, which was already a link, and that's why I didn't bother fudging around on killing the links.--Torchwood Who? (talk) 17:39, 20 March 2008 (UTC)