User talk:Alan De Smet/GoOFF

Links to the "Guardians of Order Fan Forums" have been added top a bunch of pages, notably those of games that Guardians of Order published. At the moment August 31, 2005), these links are inappropriate, so I'm deleting them. This is a unified place to explain why.

Examples of edits: These edits on August 31, 2006. These edits on August 28, 2006 and September 4, 2006. Geek Messiah's edits.

Why are the link inappropriate?

1. Wikipedia is not a collection of external links or an internet directory. External links must be very useful resources. There are simply too many "this is useful to some people" pages for Wikipedia to usefully link to everyone. This particular link is not yet proven to be useful. It's a very new forum (on the order of a month). It doesn't have much traffic or useful information. Lots of young forums never succeed in the long run.

2.Wikipedia is not for self promotion. At least some of these edits are intentional self-promotion: cite

3. They're not very good links. External links should link directly to the relevant topic, not to a front page of another site that users much search to find what they're looking for. For example, the link added to "A Game of Thrones" in this edit goes to the forum's front page. The forum has a AGoT specific section, but the link didn't go there.

Perhaps in a year or so this forum will prove itself to be a useful resource. At that point it might be appropriate to read the links. But for now it's inappropriate.

Alan De Smet | Talk 22:48, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

The discussion on the topic over at the GoOFF might also be worth skimming. Alan De Smet | Talk 22:08, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Comments
I request that no one edit the text above, but I welcome discussion from this point down. Alan De Smet | Talk 22:54, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Note, of course, that no one besides me is probably watching this page; it might be better to discuss this issue on the individual talk pages of articles in which this link has been or will be added. I created this page really so I can link to it in edit summaries so curious editors can see my expanded reasoning which is much too long to fit into the edit summary.

I ask that anyone commenting [WP:SIG|sign their posts], four tildes in a row ( ~ ) will do the job. Alan De Smet | Talk 04:40, 5 September 2006 (UTC)