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Hello, Poetavecchio and Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by using four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking   if shown; this will automatically produce your username and the date. Also, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field with your edits. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! XLinkBot (talk) 03:15, 17 January 2012 (UTC)Reply
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January 2012

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Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Frank Judge has been reverted.
Your edit here to Frank Judge was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline. The external link(s) you added or changed (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=13449103522) is/are on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia.
If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 03:15, 17 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

Captcha

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What's with the new Captcha feature if your post includes any external links?! Did this become a major problem? It's a nuisance to users though I can understand that you might have some real junk snuck in by malicious people. Poetavecchio (talk) 04:57, 17 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

You are correct, this is an anti-junk measure. Once you have made 10 edits and been registered for 4 days you will no longer be bothered by the Captcha. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:06, 17 January 2012 (UTC)Reply
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I just spent an hour or so updating the entry for American poet Frank Judge and restored external links that were removed by an over-eager editor (apparently you!) that did not actually EDIT the page but simply removed the links and left NUMEROUS [ red links ], which we all hate to see. Minutes later, I found all my work reverted to its prior state by one of your bots. I also worked on the entry for Rochester Poets and assume this too will be reverted by your bot.

Apparently external links within text have fallen out of favor, though I find no explicit policy on this. And I do NOT agree with the reasoning behind this.

Most links are NOT "citations" but merely links to other WP pages or external pages that have useful data. As a reader, I want to be able to see that material IN the text and click on it where it's relevant and NOT have to scroll down to a footnote to see the link, possibly follow it, and then come back and scroll back to where I left off. And aesthetically, it's also rather unappealing to see all those numbers -- i.e. [1], [2], etc. in the text or at the bottom of the page.

There hasn't been a problem with external links within text since WP was founded. What's the problem? When did this change? -- if indeed it did. I can't find any specific guideline that says that ALL external links should be stuck at the bottom of the page.

Btw, you specifically referenced the external link http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=13449103522 which is an incorrect link -- the last digit is missing and I've corrected it. But have all Facebook references now fallen out of favor. There's a lot of valuable info there just like any place else. Poetavecchio (talk) 04:57, 17 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

The Wikipedia guildelines on external links are stricter than many editors realise. Please check what I've just written at Talk:Rochester Poets. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:08, 17 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

Talk page layout

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I've re-ordered the sections on this page so that the oldest material is at the top, newest at the bottom. I hope you don't mind me doing this; see Help:Using talk pages. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:13, 17 January 2012 (UTC)Reply