Jgervais118
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Can I suggest you pause for now just adding external links to http://www.uptodate.com/patients . Wikipedia is not a directory for links to external sites, else we could just go linking every topic to the corresponding page of say Encyclopædia Britannica. Now http://www.uptodate.com/patients does have verifiable authors and cites its own sources I agree, but I doubt just adding externasl links to multiple pages is that helpful (possibly risks being seen as spaming), there again 3600 medical writers is impressive... I'll set up a discussion thread at the Medical Wikiproject discussion area, see WT:MED#www.uptodate.com/patients links on multiple pages :-) David Ruben Talk 18:29, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
April 2008 edit
Welcome to Wikipedia. Your contributions are welcomed, however, one or more of the external links you added in this edit to Rheumatoid arthritis 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. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thanks. Thingg⊕⊗ 19:01, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Reply and COI edit
Hi thanks for the response on my talkpage. As per WT:MED discussion, clearly my US wikipedians have heard of you and think it is a really useful resource in their clinical practice :-) However, subscription requirement (vs. eMedicine which is just a free registration) counts against using as an external link, and critically not being able to reference a specific version of your pages prevents its use as a confirmatory reference - the dynamic nature of your site constantly updating as new EBM becomes available is clearly a major good point for doctors using your site, but means that Wikipedia articles cannot reference a historically stable version. Of course were the Wikipedia pages to be updated as soon as your own site was, then there might be less of an issue; but Wikipedia will always lag behind journal publication. Also Wikipedia is not just a web medium, but also produced as DVD or printed forms (to encourage the widest possible usage in areas of the world where internet access may be limited). For these formats readers must be able to later follow-up on references to verify information; and a dynamically changing reference is problematic.
So UpToDate can't be used as a reference for the material within Wikipedia articles (i.e. not appropriate for {{Infobox Disease}}). As for use as an external link, the WT:MED discussion points out WP:EL guideline that sources should generally provide more information than it would be appropriate to have in the article itself were it at Featured article level. Hence only some specific topics might be appropriate to have as an External Link (rather than all 370 topics that you mention).
Last point is that you should read our WP:Conflict of interest, as your involvement with UpToDate means that your role in adding external links should be limited to proposing in an article's talk page, but then allow other editors to decide whether or not to add the link :-) I'll post the standardised COI information advice below:
If you have a close connection to some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:
- editing articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
- participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors;
- linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam);
- and you must always:
- avoid breaching relevant policies and guidelines, especially neutral point of view, verifiability, and autobiography.
For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have conflict of interest, please see Wikipedia:Business' FAQ. For more details about what constitutes a conflict of interest, please see Wikipedia:Conflict of Interest. Thank you. David Ruben Talk 00:31, 23 April 2008 (UTC)