User:Kevin Murray/gjenvick.com

Per investigation of actions by User:Gjenvick there has been no spam activity at Wikipedia

Result summary
Gjenvick has not been engaged in spam activities. The following discussion reflects eroneous postings of warnings and the resultant investigation. In the end it was determined that User:Gjenvick was not engaged in spamming, but his proper actions were statistically compatible with likely prohibited activities. We at Wikipedia thank Paul Gjenvick for his continued and valuable dedication to this project and other historic archiving on the internet. --Kevin Murray (talk) 00:56, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Initial warnings
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Maniac18 (talk) 18:44, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

This is the only warning you will receive for your disruptive edits. The next time you insert a spam link, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Spammers may have their websites blacklisted as well, preventing their websites from appearing on Wikipedia. --Dirk Beetstra T C 16:23, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Dirk Beetstra, We apologize for being ignorant of the the Wikipedia Terms of Use. We understand that a link to an excellent resource can turn to spam when multiple links are provided for the same domain even when it went to different pages. We have tried to update, or remove, other links to outdated Gjenvick-owned websites, but were unsuccessful.  Any suggestions on how to correct this situation would be greatly appreciated. --Paul Gjenvick

Investigation and findings

 * Hi there Paul. I am a Wikipedia administrator and was contacted by another user in email asking that I take a look at this situation.
 * As I understand it, these links were to your old site steamships.org, which has moved (I see the http web redirect) to gjenvick.org, is that correct?
 * If that's what is happening, then your changing of links was the right thing that should have been done, though it appears that other people did not understand what you were doing.
 * If you can post a statement here to that effect, and verify that you owned both steamships.org (the old site) and the new one, that should help clear things up.
 * Other administrators / users - if you see a problem with this account that appears to be related to this, please take a closer look and let me know if you still think there's a problem of some sort. Thanks!  Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 21:47, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Regarding the two domains in question, Gjenvick.com and Steamships.org, I, Paul Gjenvick, am the owner of both domains: Gjenvick.com since 1998 and Steamships.org since 2004. The Gjenvick-Gjønvik Archives was originally on Gjenvick.com beginning in 2000 - switched in 2004 to Steamships.org and due primarily to user confusion (over non-steamship related sections of our Archives), we have now switched it back to its original domain, Gjenvick.com. --Paul Gjenvick
 * I have confirmed that Steamships.org now redirects to Gjenvick.com on a page by page basis, and that Paul Gjenvick is the owner of Steamships.org. I've worked with Paul Gjenvick before on a WP project as he used to provide BangorPunta.com, which was an historic archive for the Bagor Punta company which for a while was the manufacturer of several lines of sailboats (one of my interests at WP).  Paul contacted me about the current dillema and after investigating, I feel that he was not spamming, but fixing productive links to his archive.  I also contacted an admin, Georgewilliamherbert, to get a second opinion.  It seem that George and I are in agreement.  It appears that this is a rare situation where the high correaltion identified by Dirk's robot has led to a false conclusion.   We certainly can't fault Dirk or Maniac, and Paul has made the right move by reaching-out for help to sort this out.  I'm going to ask Dirk to see if the robot can be modified to accept Paul's links; then I'd like to work with Paul to restore the appropriate links to his site. --Kevin Murray (talk) 18:29, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

user:gjenvick
Dirk, it looks like your COI bot has identified user:gjenvick as a spammer and generated WikiProject Spam/LinkReports/gjenvick.com. I was contacted by Paul Gjenvick, who I worked with some time ago on some sailing articles. He is not too familiar with policies etc. and asked me to figure out what he was doing wrong. Paul is a good guy and a dedicated historian. He runs several websites related to history, which for cost and other reasons he is consolidating into gjenvick.com, which is the home-site for his family's historic archive. The recent problem emerged when Paul decided to shut down his sight Steamship.org; the first step was to redirect pertinent steamship pages to parallel pages at gjenvick.com, but recently he has decided to shutdown the steamship site completely. A short time ago he went through WP to manually change the references from Steamship.org to gjenvick.com. I'm not sure what triggered the WP reaction. There was a newbie user named Maniac18 who was involved in COI enforcement (account seems dormant now), I think that he might have triggered a COI complaint that got your robot involved. I really don't know all the details and nuances, but I think that we've unjustly labeled Paul as a spammer and removed many valuable links from WP.

I'm only slightly involved in the ship project so I asked an Admin who works a lot in the ship project to confirm my assessment. Please see the talk page for user:gjenvick to see the recent discussion. If you agree with us, what I'm asking of you is to blank or delete WikiProject Spam/LinkReports/gjenvick.com and "whitelist" user:gjenvick and/or the site gjenvick.com. Are there other steps that we should take? Any help will be appreciated.

The links to his site are mostly to illustrations lists or graphics which would be impractical to include at WP, but add rich detail to historic articles, particularly the shipping series. I've discussed with Paul that the appearance of what he was doing can easily be construed as COI. We've also discussed the propriety of him inserting links to his own site into articles at minimum as an appearance of COI. I would like to work with Paul to evaluate the return of any appropriate links and where else WP could benefit from such links. --Kevin Murray (talk) 19:58, 1 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Done, all whitelisted. Gjenvick <-> gjenvick.com clear overlap, but COI does not have to be a bad thing, and as long as it is discussed, I have no problem with whitelisting.  There seems to be an item on WT:WPSPAM where you might want to respond as well?  --Dirk Beetstra T  C 15:38, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much! --Kevin Murray (talk) 17:53, 2 May 2008 (UTC)