Talk:Frances McCue

External Linking

I made a major copy edit of this article to remove extraneous external liking and promotion, most of which had been added by User:Creativeclaire (nb this user has a possible COI per this talk page notice).

I believe per WP:LINKING this article needed a major edit to remove the external links. WP:LINKING states: "An overlinked article contains an excessive number of links, making it difficult to identify links likely to aid the reader's understanding significantly." This article contained 12 external links in the lead section alone.

Almost all of those links were to pages from which you could purchase copies of poetry anthologies (eg 123 etc). This blatantly violates WP:ELNO "What to avoid: Individual web pages that primarily exist to sell products or services, or to web pages with objectionable amounts of advertising. For example, the mobile phone article should not link to web pages that mostly promote or advertise cell-phone products or services." and "Websites of organizations mentioned in an article". Per WP:ADV "Choose which pages to link based on the immediate benefit to Wikipedia readers that click on the link", and the large number of external links advertising books do not, in my opinion, constitute immediate benefit to Wikipedia readers.

The volume of link addition to this page, while I assume was in good faith, likely constitutes WP:LINKSPAM. Furthermore the external links fail point 1 of WP:LINKFARM and point 5 of WP:PROMO. Indeed per point 2 of WP:ELPOINTS: "With rare exceptions, external links should not be used in the body of an article.".

In the case of external links which I could easily adapt into wiki-links, I did this. In the case of external links which appeared to be intended to act as sources, I added them as inline citations.

I was disappointed to see the entirety of my editing was undone, without any discussion or explanation. I have therefore re-instated my edits, but would welcome comment or discussion (especially from @Creativeclaire:) if you feel I am not correctly interpreting Wikipedia Policy or Manual of Style. Thanks, Mxtt.prior (talk) 19:51, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Additional Comment: I believe in the process of re-adding external links, User:Creativeclaire also (I assume accidentally) removed my multiple cleanup templates, which I have also since re-added. (per WP:BRD and WP:TC "please provide a similar rationale for removing a template, unless your preceding edits have clearly fixed the announced problem") Mxtt.prior (talk) 19:55, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

The works list has external links to all the books, including some links to publishers' sites, and includes a list of every essay or poem she's ever written on the internet. I'm thinking it would be good to remove the non-books from the list of works and remove the external links to the books. None of the essays or poems seem particularly noteworthy. NightS H I F T (49) (talk) 13:42, 14 May 2021 (UTC)