User:RW Dutton/sandbox/link issues

If you don't want to create a large number of threads on various different talk pages, then surely the answer is to create just one thread, on the Talk page for the one page where an actual edit dispute currently exists, as I had suggested. I do not accept that I am the one responsible for the delay here, and I specifically reject your suggestion that I have been delaying deliberately. But since this now seems to be going around in circles, and since indeed I don't want to delay a substantive discussion, I'm ready to leave this aside, for now, and begin that discussion here instead.

This is a list of some of the sites or pages which are linked to by English Wikipedia to provide online access to old scholarly editions. The links generally appear in the External links section of the page about that edition (or sometimes its editor). None of them was added by me; none of them (except for one ...) is "Links Galore".


 * Patrologia Graeca:
 * Roger Pearse (User:Roger Pearse)'s list of PG PDFs. This is a page on Pearse's personal blog, hosted under a personal domain name, and clearly generated by a blogging engine.
 * Acta Sanctorum:
 * https://www.heiligenlexikon.de 's Acta Sanctorum page . A personal web page: it seems unclear if the author has any particular credentials or reputation
 * Roger Pearse again
 * The Loeb Classical Library:
 * Loebolus. ("Links Galore's" Loeb listing happens to have been in large part based on this, BTW.) The author happens to have a technical role in digital humanities at a major university (Duke), but this is still just his personal webpage
 * Bibliotheca Teubneriana:
 * A Teubner a Day This blog is the direct ancestor of "Links Galore", compiled by the same author. This link until I  in April.
 * Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers:
 * Christian Classics Ethereal Library
 * Internet Sacred Text Archive Both of these have English Wikipedia entries, but they're both personal websites by people who don't seem to have credentials or a publication history as humanities academics

I could give more examples, but that should be enough for now. Is it your claim that "Links Galore" is WP:USERGEN and linking violates WP:NOBLOGS but that these other links are OK? It's hard to see those could both be true. In fact "Links Galore" probably has better bona fides than most of these others. The Chris Francese who offers a pretty generous testimonial on the comments page—"Thank you for this astonishing work. So useful to all scholars of antiquity. Bless you!"—is a professor of Classical Studies at Dickinson College and the project director of the Dickinson College Commentaries. (He Tweeted about "Links Galore" at around the same time, so you can be reasonably sure it's real and the same guy. However I have nothing to do with Prof. Francese, Dickinson or the DCC, and I don't speak for them.)

Alternatively you could say that all of these links are bad and should probably go. But, first, that seems to be out of line with standard practise up to now. There seems to be little history of editors using WP:USERGEN or WP:NOBLOGS as reason to delete links to directory sites listing OCRed texts or scans of scholarly editions. Second, that's probably for the best. I don't believe it is at all clear that WP:USERGEN or WP:NOBLOGS should be interpreted as prohibiting those links, especially since those links are, for the time being, often pretty unavoidable when it comes to the pretty important objective of linking Wikipedia discussions of old scholarly eds. to the actual sources themselves. RW Dutton (talk) 08:35, 24 July 2023 (UTC)