NifCurator1

April 2009

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Photoreceptor cell 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. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Dicklyon (talk) 03:15, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did to Stellate cell. 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 web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Since Wikipedia uses the nofollow attribute value, its external links are disregarded by some search engines, including Google. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you. Dicklyon (talk) 03:17, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Neurolex

I'm not sure what this neurolex thing is, or why you've invented a new confusing format for external links, but I'm going to roll them all back. If you'd already had a discussion some place about this, please link it here now. Otherwise, please explain what's up. Dicklyon (talk) 03:18, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Dicklyon: I hope you have some way to get rid of all of them at one fell swoop? I've just run into them, and there are many, many. Since NeuroLex is an article, I added it as a 'See also' to Giant retinal ganglion cells, but I'm not about to follow up on all those articles!

(The NeuroLex article itself is another matter, addressing itself to "you" and with lots of formatting problems.) - Hordaland (talk) 09:36, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

This is mainly addressed to Dicklyon and Hordaland: NIF is a bioinformatics project funded by NIH and being implemented at UCSD. I don't think these links constitute spam, in fact I think the idea of linking Wikipedia's neuroscience articles to a high-quality anatomical database is very exciting. However, the project is in a very early stage of development, and some of what is happening is premature. I've been in contact with Maryann Martone, the coordinator of the project, and I hope all of us can work out some principled way of dealing with this issue. Maybe Talk:NIF would be the best place for a unified discussion? In any case, let's please not war over something where everybody has good motives and the only real difficulty is a lack of effective communication among us all. Looie496 (talk) 16:32, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

A quick look at it suggests that there is a lot to be gained by cooperating between NIF and Wikipedia:WikiProject Neurology. I've asked at that project's talk page for someone to look into this. It may be we just need a new parameter in an infoboxLeadSongDog come howl 16:35, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

If a wikipedia project works out a framework for including such links, that will be great. But for the NIF curator to spam them into a lot of external link sections, in a bloated confusing format, is not OK. Dicklyon (talk) 16:38, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. There's ample precedent. {{DiseaseDisorder infobox}} is used on over 4000 articles. Its parameters include several similar taxonomy tools that greatly contribute to the articles.LeadSongDog come howl 17:50, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Neurology has been absorbed into WikiProject Medicine. WikiProject Neuroscience is de facto involved already because I've been maintaining it for the past year or so, but there aren't a lot of people contributing to it currently. Looie496 (talk) 18:39, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Hi LeadSongDog, the parameter for the infobox would be a very good way to handle these kinds of page annotations. I work with Maryann on the NIF project and I see these annotations not only coming from NIF, but other similar informatics related projects as well. This is our first venture in trying to provide this type of information to Wikipedia and we are focused on cells initially. I can continue the discussion on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Neurology talk page. Jgrethe (talk) 20:05, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

My response was not because the content nor the intent was spamming, but because of the unique, remarkable and as DL says bloated formatting of an 'External link' section where the primary link should have been in a 'See also' section as far as I could see. I never suggested this was spam.

Fine if there's a good discussion on content/intent with good result! People who know how formatting works here must also be involved. Folks like Looie496 can surely take care of that. - Hordaland (talk) 20:16, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I've been asked on my talk page to offer feedback (probably because of my involvement with {{DiseaseDisorder infobox}}, {{Infobox Brain}}, {{Drugbox}}, and {{Chembox}}, and because I've been through variants of this process many times before). I have some concerns about this, but I also see the potential. One way forward may be to: (1) create a new template (to demonstrate the intended parametrization), and use it on a limited number of pages. (2) open a discussion thread on the talk page of the newly created template, providing a central location to discuss use of the link. (3) Notify the relevant wikiprojects of your goals (in this case, probably at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Neurology task force, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anatomy, and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Neuroscience) and refer to the template, so there can be a centralized discussion. --Arcadian (talk) 20:19, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the responses, everyone. I'm copying the above to wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Neurology task force. Please continue the discussion there.LeadSongDog come howl 20:39, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

External links

Per #9, please refrain from adding links to a search result. --Arcadian (talk) 23:10, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi Arcadian, this gets to an interesting question. The Neuroscience Information Framework (funded by the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research) is meant to provide access to external resources (e.g. databases that contain neuroscience data) through our registry database. For example, on the Wikipedia page for 'Insular Cortex' there are a few 4 external resources with some information related to the topic. Through NIF, 5 external database resources are also provided (e.g. Michigan Atlas, NeuroMorpho.org, etc...). NIF's goal is to provide many more such resources like these (e.g. providing images from the Michigan Atlas or neuronal reconstructions from neuron's at NeuroMorpho.org). It would be very difficult to list all the resources related to a topic (as this is dependent upon the entity the Wikipedia page describes). NIF provides that bridge and we are mandated to significantly increase our content over the next years of the project. Per 'What should be linked' on Wikipedia:External_links, "Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues, amount of detail (such as professional athlete statistics, movie or television credits, interview transcripts, or online textbooks) or other reasons", the NIF link does match this criteria as it provides a significant amount of detail from its registered external resources that cannot be integrated easily into the articles. The section you mention, states that these links are 'normally to be avoided' - however, I am not sure how one could provide access to the resources that NIF contains (currently 13 neuroscience databases and growing - expected to be at around 35 by September) without such a link? This is also complicated by the guideline that "In the External links section, try to avoid separate links to multiple pages in the same website; instead, try to find an appropriate linking page within the site." I am aware WikiPedia does allow links to sites that display "search" content such a YouTube which provides search results based on the current video selected and the Internet Movie Database ("When linking to large database-driven sites like the Internet Movie Database...") which is itself a search site focused on Movies. Perhaps, if the link were directed by default to the database resource tab for the results page (currently the default results tab is the neuroscience focused web results) which would give the results from a single database - similar to end page for the WOROI link (which is a database result page? Jgrethe (talk) 00:05, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Neuron Template

I noticed that you have added the "Neuron Template" to articles about cells that are not neurons, like Macrophages and Giant cells. This is just downright confusing for everyone. Please remove the templates you added to all articles that are not about neurons. Thank you --DO11.10 (talk) 18:37, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Will do, sorry to create confusion. Should have noticed that. NifCurator1 (talk) 20:56, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:05, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:09, 24 November 2015 (UTC)