User talk:Maxlent
External Links Issue
City Guides from Travelconsumer.com I need some advice regarding what is ok and not ok to post. I publish a Web site titled Travelconsumer.com which has several pages of information about various cities around the world and includes articles about them. When I list Travelconsumer.com's city guide in the external links section it gets removed almost immediately and I received a warning about publishing a link to a commercial site on Wikipedia. What I don't understand is this. Travelconsumer.com does not sell any products or services. None! Yet other sites in the external links section are purely commercial and provide no information except about the products they sell. This being the case, why does my link to http://www.travelconsumer.com get bumped. If having advertising on my site is an issue, then nearly all of the external links on Wikipedia should be removed. Please advise.
My email address is listed http://www.travelconsumer.com/contact.htm.
Noel,
I appreciate your wanting to protect Wikipedia from spammers, but I am not a spammer. I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss your comments with you and to demonstrate how, like you, my goal is to aggregate and share information with others.
I can demonstrate that Wikipedia routinely publishes links to pages that are much more commercial than mine. For example, take a look at http://www.losangelesalmanac.com/default.htm which is a link off of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles. What do you see at the top of the Almanac page? Google ads. Nearly every Web site on the Web now has Google or some other advertising. The Almanc page is much more commercial than any of my pages. Additionally, the ads are not as relevant as mine and there are more of them. Compare that page to http://www.travelconsumer.com/articles/laintro.htm. You tell me who is more commercial.
Travelconsumer.com has pages for every country in the world, all of the states in the U.S., and hundreds of cities. My guess is that I was flagged as a spammer for the number of external links I created and not the value of the links.
I have more than 300 links to Wikipedia on Travelconsumer.com. I was planning on adding several thousand more links to Wikipedia from Medconsumer.info http://www.medconsumer.info. Isn’t linking to each other what the Web is about?
So, can we resolve this?
Please do not post your message 3 times in the future. Please see WP:WIN for info regarding what Wikipedia is not. You are not allowed to use Wikipedia to advertise or direct people to your website, as it's self-promotion. In general if someone is mass inserting links, they will be reverted. Now, I haven't checked out the content of the links you've posted, but as it's self-promotion, it is against the rules. If you feel like there are links that don't deserve to be there, feel free to remove them (put in the edit summary why they aren't worthy of being in a particular article). External links have nothing to do with commercial vs. non-commercial. The only real criteria for an good external link is that the content is related to the subject, but different and highly informative/interesting. Hope this clears things up. CryptoDerk 21:17, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)
- After reading this page and your email response to "Noel", I would just like to make it very clear once again that just because your website links to Wikipedia doesn't obligate Wikipedia to link to you. The fact that this is self-promotion automatically makes it wrong, period. Furthermore, I have finally checked out a link for Tokyo. This is nothing more than a bunch of links to other places with no original content of its own. Even if you weren't self-promoting, it would be removed because of the lack of content. CryptoDerk 21:25, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)