Woamaria

Mwanner email to Woamaria after removing woa.tv external links

Please 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. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. See the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thanks. Mwanner | Talk 18:55, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Please stop adding commercial links to Wikipedia. It is considered spamming, and Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising. Thanks. Mwanner | Talk 19:02, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Please stop. If you continue to use Wikipedia for advertising, you will be blocked from editing. Mwanner | Talk 21:18, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Woamaria's email response to Mwanner

Hi Mwanner-

I understand your concern, but www.woa.tv <http://www.woa.tv> is no more a commercial site than Wikipedia, and it most certainly not my private website. It is a community-oriented site of all original HD video and photo-rich, carefully-researched editorial content for active women. We created it because there is a dearth of media-rich content for active women, particularly video. If you take a look at the site, you'll see there are no ads, no subscription fees, and no registration. Out of our own pockets, we've paid for excellent writers and editors, rights to terrific photos, and video production crews to shoot HD video of pioneering women. It has taken us 4 years, over a million dollars and the work of dozens of dedicated people to create a first-rate editorial destination for women that includes copyrighted images not available on Wikipedia and HD videos not available anywhere else.

In contrast, the AskMen.com link on the Mia Hamm page, where you removed our woa.tv link leads to an ad- and promotion-saturated commercial site, whose editorial staff states that they like Mia Hamm because she is good-looking despite being a great athlete.

Here's our article on Mia Hamm: http://www.woa.tv/articles/at_hammm.html No ads, real quotes from Mia, and great photos. All carefully researched, edited and indexed. And we like Mia because of what she has accomplished in her career, not because she is pretty.

In other words, our goals in the advancement of knowledge are very well-aligned with Wikipedia's: We are a respectable, non-commercial and thoughtfully-conceived site, we are community-oriented, and we'd appreciate the right to add links to Wikipedia pages.

Would you please allow us to place our links back on Wikipedia? If not, would you please let me know what forum exists for an appeal of your decision.

Mwanner's response to Woamaria

Please read WP:EL. Basically, Wikipedia is not a link farm. Links should only be added if they have valuable information that does not belong in the article itself and if they are not trying to sell something. If the information in the link does belong it the article, it should be re-written (to avoid copyright issues) and added to the article. In general, articles should have very few links, because very few links fit these criteria. The idea is that we want our articles to be the best possible source of information on a topic, not a short article followed by a long list of links to other articles.

Generally, if a link is trying to sell something, the bar to it's inclusion gets a lot higher-- a site with advertising, or that engages in direct sales would have to be truly extraordinary to pass muster. You write "...you'll see there are no ads, no subscription fees, and no registration. Out of our own pockets, we've paid for excellent writers and editors, rights to terrific photos, and video production crews to shoot HD video of pioneering women. It has taken us 4 years, over a million dollars and the work of dozens of dedicated people to create a first-rate editorial destination for women that includes copyrighted images not available on Wikipedia and HD videos not available anywhere else."

While the site may not presently have any direct commercial content, the info at [1] suggests that this is only temporary, while a new entity is in the beta stage. That is not very reassuring.

None of this is to suggest that a link to woa might not be appropriate on an article here or there in Wikipedia-- especially in an article that is presently weak. But understand that the goal of most of our editors will be to get each article to the point where most external links are unneccessary. And understand too that if you contribute nothing to Wikipedia other than a massive number of links to your own site, every other editor who notices will consider it to be spamming, and will remove them on sight.

Finally, don't be mislead if you see a lot of links in a lot of articles that violate the above: we're being spammed pretty massively, and there is often a substantial lag in cleaning things up. And please feel free to join in the cleanup!

In short, please feel free to help us make our articles better, just not by using us as an advertising vehicle. Thanks, Mwanner | Talk 17:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Woamaria's email response to Mwanner

MWanner-

On the External Links page in the Wikipedia editing tutorial Wikipedia:Tutorial (External links) it says:

Also avoid using an external link when it's possible to accomplish the same thing with an internal link to a Wikipedia article.

We are a media-rich site about active women. We CAN NOT accomplish the same thing as an External Link to our pages with an internal link to a Wikipedia article because we have copyrighted pictures and video material that have strict restrictions on use. If we could, it would FAR less expensive for us to just copy images and videos and post them on Wikipedia. But we can't.

First of all, we are HUGE fans of Wikipedia and see it as superb repository of knowledge. That said, we recognize that because the open nature of Wikipedia it will be lacking in important copyrighted images and videos that simply can not be posted on Wikipedia. Telling women's stories through media-rich material is a core reason WHY we created woa.tv. We pay for virtually all of the images and video material on our site and virtually all the agreements strictly limit how we may use those materials, and we can't (nor can anyone else) post such material on Wikipedia.

Your Mia Hamm page has one picture with unknown rights of her during some random moment during her career. Our article http://www.woa.tv/articles/at_hammm.html has 4 AP photos with legends, and in a linked article http://www.woa.tv/articles/at_farewell.html on our site we have 3 more AP Photos with her and the rest of the US Women's Soccer team, including THE seminal photo of the team winning the gold medal at the 2004 Olympics. You can't get these photos for free, and no one can get the rights to post them on Wikipedia. Yet, these photos capture CRITICAL moments in Mia Hamm's history, the history of women in sport, and in the history of women in general.

I've been searching through the various policy pages regarding Wikipedia, and I can't find any reference that says that External Links are only allowed to a destination that not only is CURRENTLY APPROPRIATE, but is guaranteed to be PERMANENTLY APPROPRIATE. I really wonder whether anyone can make such a guarantee. And, if woa.tv does suddenly shift gears and become like, say, AskMen.com, it will take about 10 seconds for an editor to remove the woa.tv link. Better yet, it would take US about 10 seconds to remove our OWN links from Wikipedia if we felt we no longer were expanding upon the content in the articles in a) a way that could not be done internally to Wikipedia, and b) in a non-commercial way in the spirit of community. Take a look at our site. It should be obvious we are not a bunch of jerks. And, writing about women's sports and women's history is hardly the first subject area that comes to mind if you want to strike it rich on the Internet. The WNBA is barely surviving and Womens Sports Illustrated has folded. woa.tv exists because there are a bunch of people who care about making available positive role models for girls and women, and we worked damn hard to make it happen.

By your saying the effort invested in the woa.tv site "..is not very reassuring", the implication is we are being penalized for the commitment we have made to our website. If it makes you feel better, we do lots of other socially-positive activities, including donating millions to schools, donating production services for independent film, as well as doing paid commercial projects at a discount for important causes like the Museum of the African Diaspora (www.moadsf.org), where we did all of the video editing for their installations. We are socially-responsible people working hard to make a difference in the world. Not only is it unfair, but it is disingenuous to penalize us for doing a good job of it.

But, that's really besides the point. We have a right to be treated like anyone else contributing to Wikipedia, and not to be dismissed as spammers looking for free ads.

So, please direct me to the Wikipedia policy page that states that External Links are inappropriate for a well-crafted, well-researched website dedicated to a positive social purpose that is offering a cornucopia of high-quality media that is NOT POSSIBLE to post on internal Wikipedia page and is (at the very least) CURRENTLY community-oriented, ad-free, promotion-free, and registration-free.

If no such policy page exists, then please allow us to make External Links from Wikipedia articles to woa.tv. Or, please give me the name of an individual to whom I may appeal this issue.

Mwanner's response to Woamaria's email

You quote our Tutorial-- "Also avoid using an external link when it's possible to accomplish the same thing with an internal link to a Wikipedia article."

You're missing the point here: you are welcome to write a Wikipedia article about woa.tv, and in that article a link to your website is acceptable. Then, in any other article that appropriately mentions woa.tv, an internal link to the Wikipedia article is acceptable, while an external link is not.

Woamaria: This is a straw man argument. The ELs I've placed were to internal pages on woa.tv specific to the subject of the Wikipedia article containing copyrighted information that can not be added to Wikipedia. I did not place any links to the woa.tv home page, nor to a page about woa.tv. Further, suggesting that I write a Wikipedia article about my own company would seem to run contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. No doubt doing what you suggest would serve to create more traffic to woa.tv and increase its search relevance, but it would not serve the best interests of Wikipedia. So, it not something we will do.

You wrote: "We are a media-rich site about active women. We CAN NOT accomplish the same thing as an External Link to our pages with an internal link to a Wikipedia article because we have copyrighted pictures and video material that have strict restrictions on use."

Again, you're missing the point. We're not especially interested in what you want to accomplish. We are intensely interested in what we want to accomplish, which is to have the best possible encyclopedia article on each subject, here on Wikipedia.

Woamaria: You took my quote out of context. Here are the sentences in context:

"We are a media-rich site about active women. We CAN NOT accomplish the same thing as an External Link to our pages with an internal link to a Wikipedia article because we have copyrighted pictures and video material that have strict restrictions on use. If we could, it would FAR less expensive for us to just copy images and videos and post them on Wikipedia. But we can't."

My last sentence makes it clear this is a reference to improving Wikipedia, not accomplishing a self-interested goal.

While it's great that you're spending big bucks to establish a media-rich site, that still doesn't make dozens of external links to your site consistent with our aims.

Woamaria: Another straw man argument, refuting an assertion (that the amount of money spent to establish a media-rich site justifies the ELs) that I did not make. ELs are appropriate for relevant and legal copyrighted material (media or otherwise) that can not be posted internally to Wikipedia. The fact that money was spent on the copyrighted material speaks to the fact the rights were legally obtained, nothing else.

You write: "I've been searching through the various policy pages regarding Wikipedia, and I can't find any reference that says that External Links are only allowed to a destination that not only is CURRENTLY APPROPRIATE, but is guaranteed to be PERMANENTLY APPROPRIATE."

That may be, but WP:EL does say that no one should add links to sites that "you own or maintain, even if the guidelines above imply that it should be linked to." By reasonable extension, that includes sites that you work for.

You wrote: "We have a right to be treated like anyone else contributing to Wikipedia, and not to be dismissed as spammers looking for free ads."

You are being treated like anyone else contributing to Wikipedia. I can assure you that there are hundreds of people (possibly thousands?) who have each tried to add scores of external links to their website in order to gain exposure, and every one of them (that hasn't somehow escaped someone's attention) has been reversed. And spamming doesn't consist just of folks looking for free ads-- it also consists of folks trying to drive up their search engine ratings, traffic, etc. I think it's pretty clear here that your aim is not primarily to improve our articles-- I imagine you could do that easily by working on the text of our articles. "Media-rich" is nice, but it does not an encyclopedia make.

Woamaria: The last sentence is another straw man argument, refuting an assertion (that it is the media richness that makes an encyclopedia) that I did not make. It is obvious that media can be of benefit to an encylopedia if it is relevant to an article. Providing a link to relevant copyrighted media is specifically cited as an appropriate use of ELs. Also, as I detail in my response below, your accusations that I am a spammer is a guilt by association argument.

Finally, you wrote "please give me the name of an individual to whom I may appeal this issue."

You seem to have missed something important about the nature of Wikipedia. There is no one person to whom appeals can be addressed. There are some pages you could try-- Wikipedia:Requests for comment or Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct. You could also post a message on the Wikipedia:Spam's talk page (while there, read Wikipedia:Spam#How_not_to_be_a_spammer).

Cheers! -- Mwanner | Talk 22:54, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Woamaria response to Mwanner

Mwanner-

As you've suggested, I've dug deeply into Wikipedia's policy pages, studying talk pages (including yours) that discuss External Link (EL) policy and, beyond Wikipedia, I've read recent press and blogs by Wikipedia editors and users. And, I ended up concluding that I am mostly in disagreement with you. So, I followed Dispute Resolution Second step: Disengage for a while, and stepped away from this for a week, then did my analysis again. But I'm afraid that I've come to the same conclusion, and it appears that, for the most part, we will have to agree to disagree.

A. First of all, here's where I can understand where an interpretation of the EL policy supports your position:

External Links: Links normally to be avoided

3. A website that you own or maintain, even if the guidelines above imply that it should be linked to. This is because of neutrality and point-of-view concerns; neutrality is an important objective at Wikipedia, and a difficult one. If it is relevant and informative, mention it on the talk page and let other — neutral — Wikipedia editors decide whether to add the link.

My interpretation of the intent of the policy above was to avoid posting to the home page of a website I own or maintain, not to a specific internal page with a relevant article. Still, this is a protocol that is easy to abide by. The reason I posted Wikipedia ELs to woa.tv articles was because of suggestions from woa.tv users, who also read and contribute to Wikipedia. In the future, we'll let them know that a Wikipedia editor has asked woa.tv employees to not post ELs to woa.tv articles.

B. Here's where it appears we will have to agree to disagree:

External Links: What should be linked to

4. Sites that contain neutral and accurate material not already in the article. Ideally this content should be integrated into the Wikipedia article, then the link would remain as a reference, but in some cases this is not possible for copyright reasons or because the site has a level of detail which is inappropriate for the Wikipedia article.

5. Sites with other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article, such as professional athlete statistics, screen credits, interviews, or online textbooks.

woa.tv articles are highly appropriate for Wikipedia ELs. Our articles are written from a neutral point of view, thoroughly researched and fact-checked, with citations where appropriate. We have meaningful, relevant content, including poignant interviews with prominent women unavailable from any other source. And, it is not possible to integrate the material into Wikipedia for copyright reasons.

C. And here is where I must ask you again to cease your personal attacks:

You continue to accuse woa.tv of spamming and suggest we are driven by self-interest. Among other things, you wrote:

And spamming doesn't consist just of folks looking for free ads-- it also consists of folks trying to drive up their search engine ratings, traffic, etc. I think it's pretty clear here that your aim is not primarily to improve our articles-- I imagine you could do that easily by working on the text of our articles.

We are not spammers, either by the general definition of the term, or by Wikipedia's definition. Wikipedia: How not to be a spammer. To accuse me and woa.tv of such is guilt by association. I am a photo editor, not a writer, but woa.tv was created by dozens of community-oriented writers out to expand knowledge in the world. Are you quite sure they have not made contributions to text of Wikipedia's articles? And even if they had not, failure to contribute to Wikipedia hardly brands them spammers. Our writers include elderly scholars who stll use typewriters and neither know what Wikipedia is or how to contribute to it. If someone places a link to a relevant copyrighted work by them, does that brand them a spammer?

I direct you to:

1. Wikipedia: Please do NOT bite the newcomers, which among other things advises:

• Do not call newcomers disparaging names...
• Assume good faith on the part of the newcomer...
• Remember Hanlon's Razor. Behavior that appears malicious to experienced Wikipedians is more likely due to ignorance of our expectations and rules...

2. Wikipedia: No personal attacks

3. Comments I've inserted above in your last response to me.

Woamaria 08:10, 24 August 2006 (UTC)