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WP:REDLINK edit

Please read this guideline. Red links are not "dead links", so please stop removing them from articles unless there is good reason to believe that the red linked article should never exist...but that judgment takes quite a bit of experience here to make reliably. Thanks. postdlf (talk) 21:53, 14 January 2014 (UTC)Reply

February 2014 edit

  Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a collection of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include, but are not limited to, links to personal websites, links to websites with which you are affiliated (whether as a link in article text, or a citation in an article), and links that attract visitors to a website or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Because Wikipedia uses the nofollow attribute value, its external links are disregarded by most search engines. If you feel the link should be added to the page, please discuss it on the associated talk page rather than re-adding it. Repeatedly adding the same link to multiple articles is considered as a form of spamming. See WP:REFSPAM. SFK2 (talk) 01:06, 11 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Response, February 14, 2014 edit

To User:SFK2: Thank you for your message. I respect and appreciate your work to protect Wikipedia.

However, your message insinuates that I am adding inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. That insinuation is false for two reasons.

First, your insinuation claims that the external links to Bank Credit News within a citation are "inappropriate links." Hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles include text that is cited to a news source. Bank Credit News is a news source (I'll get into that in the following paragraphs). Within the citations on the hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles I mentioned a few sentences ago, under the Reference section of those pages, is a hyperlink within the name of the article. The proper format for a news citation is author name, name of article with hyperlink to article, name of publication, publication date, date retrieved. You can verify this information at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_news#Usage.

Second, your insinuation claims that the links are "inappropriate", and in your comment above you provide a list of examples of links that would be inappropriate. Let's examine that list: - "personal website." No. Bank Credit News is not my personal website, nor is it anyone's "personal website." - "links to a website with which you are affiliated." No. I don't work for that newspaper. If you have evidence that I do, please provide it. (But you don't, because I don't). - "links that attract visitors to a website." No. If indeed I was trying to attract visitors to a website, I might put the link to "bankcreditnews" or whatever link in the "external links" section of any Wikipedia article. - "promote a product." Nope. I don't recall ever promoting a "product" for sale in any Wikipedia edit. Nor would I. I've seen pages that do that and it's awful.

Why do I cite Bank Credit News? Because I am interested in the financial industry, and I enjoy editing Wikipedia. On many other edits I've made, I've cited other sources.

If you would like to challenge "Bank Credit News" as a reputable news source, that would be a separate discussion. But I can save you time and point you to Google News. Go to Google News and enter the search query "bankcreditnews" (without the quotes). As you'll see from the results, it's not a blog, personal website, or a product. It's an online industry journal.

If my writing seems harsh, my apologies. I do like to provide responses to allegations that are false or unfounded. Respectfully, Carpalclip3 (talk) 23:59, 14 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Disambiguation link notification for February 15 edit

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Feedback needed on using special characters edit

Hello. Thank you for using VisualEditor! Having editors use it is the best way for the Wikimedia Foundation to develop it into the best tool it can be.

While we always welcome general feedback (please report any issues in Bugzilla in the "VisualEditor" product or drop your feedback on the central feedback page on MediaWiki.org), the developers are especially interested right now in feedback on the special character inserter. This new tool is used for inserting special characters (including symbols like , IPA pronunciation symbols, mathematics symbols, and characters with diacritics). It is intended to help people whose computers do not have good character inserters. For example, many Mac users prefer to use the extensive "Special Characters..." tool present at the bottom of the Edit menu in all applications or to learn the keyboard shortcuts for characters like ñ and ü.

The current version of the special characters tool in VisualEditor is very simple and very basic. It will be getting a lot of work in the coming weeks and months. It does not contain very many character sets at this time. (The specific character sets can be customized at each Wikipedia, so that each project could have a local version with the characters it wants.) But the developers want your ideas at this early stage about ways that the overall concept could be improved. I would appreciate your input on this question, so please try out the character inserter and tell me what changes to the design would (or would not!) best work for you.

 
The "insert" pulldown on the task bar of VisualEditor will lead you to the '⧼visualeditor-specialcharacterinspector-title⧽' tool.
 
This is the ⧼visualeditor-specialcharacterinspector-title⧽ inserter as it appears on many wikis. (Some may have customized it.) Your feedback on this tool is particularly important.

Issues you might consider:

  • How often do you normally use Wikipedia's character inserters?
  • Which character sets are useful to you? Should it include all 18 of the character sets provided in the wikitext editor's newer toolbar at the English Wikipedia, the 10 present in the older editor toolbar, or some other combination of character sets?
  • How many special characters would you like to see at one time?
    • Should there be a "priority" or "favorites" section for the 10 or 12 characters that most editors need most often? Is it okay if you need an extra click to go beyond the limited priority set?
    • How should the sections be split up? Should they be nested? Ordered?
    • How should the sections be navigated? Should there be a drop-down? A nested menu?
  • The wikitext editor has never included many symbols and characters, like and . Do you find that you need these missing characters? If the character inserter in VisualEditor includes hundreds or thousands of special characters, will it be overwhelming? How will you find the character you want? What should be done for users without enough space to display more than a few dozen characters?
  • Should the character inserter be statically available until dismissed? Should it hover near the mouse? Should it go away on every selection or 10 seconds after a selection with no subsequent ones?
  • Some people believe that the toolbar already has too many options—how would you simplify it?

The developers are open to any thoughts on how the special character inserter can best be developed, even if this requires significant changes. Please leave your views on the central feedback page, or, if you'd prefer, you can contact me directly on my talk page. It would be really helpful if you can tell me how frequently you need to use special characters in your typical editing and what languages or other special characters are important to you.

Thank you again for your work with VisualEditor and for any feedback you can provide. I really do appreciate it.

P.S. You might be interested in the current ideas about improving citations, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:20, 18 February 2014 (UTC)Reply