Talk:List of blood donation agencies

External link as resource?
I am posting a question here, hoping others would find it possible to spare a few minutes and help decide, whether the external link in question provides a valuable resource and whether it can be added to this List of blood donation agencies, or elsewhere.

I have received a note from a user, who was trying to add an external  (quoting from the email) "as a resource because the site is non-profit and has listings of hard to find blood donation centers that paid and don't." This link got added earlier to Blood donation page and to this List. I kept removing what looked as spam attempt, because when I followed that external link, I couldn't see useful listings and so to me, the linked site wasn't looking quite as resourceful. Perhaps I wasn't trying hard enough, my sincere apologies if so -- I certainly didn't want to hinder progress :) and I can only welcome any and all valuable resources for the benefit of wikipedia visitors, especially if those resources are hard to find otherwise.

So what do people think? Thanks in advance for help -  Introvert  •  ~  22:00, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

United Kingdom National Blood Service
The UK "National" Blood Service (http://www.blood.co.uk/index.html) only covers England and Wales. Scotland (http://www.scotblood.co.uk/) and Northern Ireland (http://www.nibts.org/) have their own agencies.
 * Maybe they could be added to the page, as second-level bullets with the "**" prefix. For a similar case, I have added Hméa-Québec (provincial), which is independent from the Canadian Blood Services. Hey, I have given blood 13 times so far -- when I reach 50 times I'll be proud. Hugo Dufort

User Box
Is there a template for an userbox that would say "This User Donates Blood" or "This User Has Donated Blood __ Times" ? Hugo Dufort 07:08, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I couldn't find a userbox you are looking for (was looking here), but maybe you could use the generic Userbox template? .  For example, something like this:


 * which creates this box:


 * A better image would be nice, perhaps a traditional red blood drop? -- but I didn't find one.
 * - Introvert  •  ~  08:16, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Rapidly turning into a linkfarm
I'm a little torn about this, since I'm used to the idea of a blood donation agency as a brick-and-mortar laboratory that collects, tests, processes, and distributes blood for transfusion. These are fairly limited, as most wealthier countries have a single national agency or a limited number of regional agencies. The term, however, is vague, and the "finding a donor" issue for countries that don't have established blood services is also a "donation agency" but not in the same sense. I'm a little concerned that since these are mostly internet activities that this is just going to turn into a linkfarm rather than a list, but many of the national agencies don't really have articles and I'd rather have external links than red links.

If no one particularly objects, I'm going to start switching the external links for internal links as a general rule. If an organization meets WP:N we should really be encouraging people to write an article rather than just spam links. SDY (talk) 03:34, 20 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I have removed all the external links, and redlinked articles. Wikipedia is not a directory service.  -- Whpq (talk) 20:40, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I am removing all external links and red link articles again.  Grey joy talk 05:23, 19 May 2021 (UTC)