Piedmontpg

November 2010

Welcome to Wikipedia. One or more of the external links you added in this edit to the page Haymarket, Virginia 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. You may wish to read the introduction to editing. Thank you. Grafen (talk) 16:29, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Help, I'm confused.

I've looked on numerous other town page and they all have media outlets listed along with their direct website. How is my magazines website any different when it compliments wiki's page on our two towns. We are the only lifestyle publications in the area that work only within the community to help support it's business owners, residents, visitors, and town as a whole. Adding our link to wiki would be a great resource to those researching our town and way of life.

I see other newspapers, radios, and magazine outlets all linked in.

Please help me understand.

~piedmontpg

I appreciate that it can be difficult for new editors to work out what external links are appropriate to an article. A careful reading of Wikipedia:External links should help. Particularly relevant are:

• "[external links] should not normally be used in the body of an article" - they are more usually used as references, to support inclusion of a particular fact (see Wikipedia:Inline citations), or under the heading "External links", towards the end of an article.
• What should be included: "Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that is relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject and cannot be integrated into the article..." Your magazine may provide information about local suppliers and odd bits of local history, and these may be useful for visitors to your towns. But they are not really relevant to an encyclopedic understanding.
• Links normally to be avoided includes at point 5: "Links to web pages that primarily exist to sell products or services, or to web pages with objectionable amounts of advertising. ..." Your magazine is dominated by advertising.
• and as you are seem to be associated with the magazine, have a look at the section on advertising and conflicts of interest, which includes "... you should avoid linking to a site that you own, maintain, or represent". You should probably also look at the main guideline on conflicts of interest.

I hope that helps you to understand. The key point is that your magazines do not provide encyclopaedic information about the towns. Yes, they might be interesting to someone researching the towns as destinations for visiting, shopping, working etc. But people with those motivations can find your magazine through Google or other search engines. That is not what an encyclopedia is for.

Finally, you may be right that there are other town articles that have links to lifestyle magazines. Well they shouldn't, and we should remove them unless there is something especially valuable about them. In any case the argument that other stuff exists is not one that can justify adding more stuff that does not fit the needs of the encyclopedia.

Grafen (talk) 00:25, 21 November 2010 (UTC)