Tomcervenka

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Hello, Tomcervenka, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Beeblebrox (talk) 06:28, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi

Hi Tom, welcome to Wikipedia! I noticed your addition of a very useful link to Taracacum officinale. I was curious what else you are doing and clicked on your contributions history. What you have been doing might look like a fairly safe, uncontroversial way to start editing Wikipedia, without much chance of making mistakes. – But it turns out that due to external pressures such as excessive spamming, our site has evolved in such a way that this is not the case.

To avoid any misunderstandings (and since you are editing under your real name I am not just assuming good faith because that's what Wikipedia editors are supposed to do, but I know it would be misunderstandings) leading to conflicts with our vandal fighters, I suggest that in the future instead of merely linking to your site you integrate the additional information that you are offering into the articles and add your site as a footnote reference,i.e. inclosed in <ref></ref>. This way you avoid a conflict with our guideline WP:LINKSPAM. It may sound strange, but if I remember correctly once even a librarian at a public institution was accused of being a "link spamming" "single-purpose account" for adding many highly relevant high-quality links to documents hosted by his library's web server, and I think there was something close to a consensus that he should stop. --Hans Adler (talk) 18:08, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Hans

Thanks for the suggestions, I have been adding my pages as external links because my site seems to fit the idea of what should be an "External Link", as opposed to a cited reference (ie a published work). As far as link spamming goes, I'm not selling a product or even hosting adds on my site, my goal is both to add useful data to the wiki and attract visitors to my site who are looking for additional information from external links, which (as far as I can tell) is why most pages have an "External Links" section.

Having said that, I have no problem with the idea of adding the data directly to the articles and having my page be a reference for that information... in fact I expected someone (not excluding myself) to do that as a next logical step. So I have no problem with your suggestion in principle, although I do suspect that I will receive objections from other people if I add my pages as a "reference", no doubt suggesting that I make it an "external link" instead!  ;) Thoughts?

I think it's quite unlikely that anyone will suggest that you use your site as an external link rather than a reference. But it's certainly possible that someone will object if you use it as a reference too much. My advice was definitely not based on my personal preferences but on my experience with other people's behaviour in this project.

I agree that someone else adding the information from your site would be a logical next step. But this can take rather long on this kind of pages, and it's quite likely that before this happens some spam fighter decides that he had better remove all your links.

I would guess the information on your site all originally comes from books etc. To the extent that you still know the original sources, from the point of view of Wikipedia it would be better if you use these as references, rather than your site. In this way you can avoid the appearance of only editing to promote your site. I really like it, and obviously you are not link spamming in the sense for which the guideline was mainly written. But Wikipedia has people specialised on fighting vandals and spammers, and for them almost everything looks like spam. Perhaps you just finished your site, are very proud of it (for good reasons), and would like the other people who, like you, always wanted such a resource to know about it? Perhaps this motivated you to start editing Wikipedia? I wouldn't call this link spamming, but as I hinted with the librarian example, there are some insane things going on. One of Wikipedia's most ignored guidelines in this area is WP:Don't bite the newbies.

It's hard to tell how reliable your site is. I think it wouldn't do as a reference for something in a featured article, but most of the plant articles are far from that stage and still have a lot of information that is completely unsourced - so for them it should be fine.

Finally two practical matters: Experienced Wikipedians normally "watch" all talk pages where they have written something, and will notice when you reply there. And you should end every message on a talk page with ~~~~. This produces your signature and the date and time of your message, as you can see here: Hans Adler (talk) 21:49, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips, in the future I will make more of an effort to brush up and update the pages with information before I add my own site as either a reference or an external link. And in the more developed pages I will use referencing instead of external links. One of my motivations is indeed to share my site as a resource. In the case of edibility information, I think it makes a lot of sense to use an external link - would you trust your life to the accuracy of an editable encyclopedia when it comes to correctly identifying edible/poisonous food? I'm not going to make a lengthy argument advocating external linking, but my own view is that wikipedia should make use of external links when it makes sense. Perhaps my site is not authoritative enough to be an external link, or maybe it will only serve a transient purpose for less developed pages. I have no problem with people removing my external link when/if they thinks it's inappropriate. Hopefully, my edits will appear less link-spammy from now on. Thanks for taking the time to help me out. Tomcervenka (talk) 02:11, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

No problem. Let me know if you need any further help. --Hans Adler (talk) 09:32, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Site linking

Hello, Tomcervenka! I came across some of your edits adding the external link and was on the fence. Usually in these cases this is a clear-cut case of a single purpose account with a conflict of interest adding linkspam, but I found the pictures of the animal tracks could possibly be a net plus for the article, so I thought about the purpose of this project for a moment, and more specifically, the purpose of the external links we encourage.

I have to say, these links do not meet the criteria for inclusion on the articles. My logic: According to our policy on external links to avoid,

#2 states "Any site that misleads the reader by use of factually inaccurate material or unverifiable research [my emphasis], except to a limited extent in articles about the viewpoints which such sites are presenting." Your tracks, unfortunately, are unverifiable in this format.

#4 states "Links mainly intended to promote a website." You state above that you want to increase traffic to your website.

#11 states "Links to blogs, personal web pages ... except those written by a recognized authority [my emphasis] (this exception is meant to be very limited; as a minimum standard, recognized authorities always meet Wikipedia's notability criteria for biographies)." This was the deal breaker for me, if you had published works of your animal tracks or were a leading authority in the field, that would be a different case.

Therefore, I would like to suggest that you upload your pictures on Commons and insert the images into each article where I feel they would be valuable additions, but adding a link to your website in this context is inappropriate for our project. I hope not to discourage you, and do hope you stick around! Rgrds. --Tombstone (talk) 15:54, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Tombstone, as I said to Hans, I don't really mind if someone removes my links if they think it's inappropriate. Unlike the rest of my content, the animal tracks section has no references, though I believe it to be accurate based on reviews from experts in the field. In editing wiki pages recently, I've noticed a lot of high quality external links attached to wiki articles. And all those those links probably violate #4. Or do they... I don't pretend to be able to judge a person's "main" intent. More importantly, I don't see why rules about contributor "intent" are necessary, above and beyond rules about the value/nature of the contributed content. That's a bit of an aside, since you are in fact raising questions about the content, correct? To get back to practical matters, can you explain a little more what you're proposing? Are you suggesting that I add 15 links in the "fox" article (for example), each pointing to an (uploaded) wikimedia pic of a fox track? Kind regards, Tomcervenka (talk) 18:16, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for being slow to respond, I'm not logged on very often nowadays. What I am suggesting is — if you are comfortable with releasing the copyright — uploading the image of the animal track, using Wikipedia:Uploading images for instructions, and then inserting the image into the article. I am not suggesting linking to the image, rather I'm suggesting inserting the image itself into the article. However, you would have to release the copyright, so it is up to you. Rgrds. --Tombstone (talk) 15:09, 17 June 2009 (UTC)