Thorongil CVI

Hi Thorongil CVI, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

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External links

I'm not sure about the links you're adding to the Smithsonian site to various mammal articles. Item 1 of WP:LINKSTOAVOID says we should generally avoid "Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article." Do you think links provide a resource that we would not want in the article itself? These might make good references if you would like to take the time to add the information to the article. But I don't think they are appropriate external links. Thanks! ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:20, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

The North American Mammals species pages contain images that are not in the public domain or are copyrighted. Those resources, while useful and informative, are better kept on an external site as per item 3 of WP:ELYES. Thorongil CVI (talk) 17:29, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Just for the images? I think we already seem to be getting pretty good (free) images. Is this really necessary? I looked at American black bear and the links you added, and I would say that the images in the article are substantially better than the ones you linked to, both in terms of information conveyed and photographic quality. I think the point of item 3 is we should consider linking when we can't find something free that is as good or better that we can put in the article directly, or when there is a special non-free image that is really critical to the subject. We do not need to link to a bunch of sites containing images when we already have similar images that are better. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:49, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I share concerns of ErikHaugen and suggest you reconsider:

• The images are indeed of low quality
• The animal description pages are very brief and are sourced to works published some 100 years ago or earlier; much has changed since then.
• While I do believe you are trying to improve wikipedia, the pattern of mass adding those links might suggest you also aim at promoting the Smithsonian site. Materialscientist (talk) 07:35, 15 September 2011 (UTC)