User talk:Amycsj

Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia. However, 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 mere directory 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, then please discuss it on the before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Burlywood 16:39, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Re: Not Intended as Spam
Hi Amy. Thank you for leaving a message on my talk page. A lot of people who spend their time promoting their websites on Wikipedia do not realize it is against our policies and guidelines. While spamming may not be your intent, when almost all your edits are to add links to websites you are connected with that pretty much fits our definition of linkspam. We ask editors not to add links to sites they own directly to Wikipedia articles (see part of our external links guidelines).

Because Wikipedia is such a popular site we have had significant issues with people wanting to link to their own websites. Wile this is understandable (I'm sure you wouldn't spend the time developing your site if you didn't think it was useful for people) it has lead to a proliferation of links that clog up external links sections to the detriment of our readers. External links also frequently fail to provide significant movement towards Wikipedia's mission to build a GFDL encyclopedia. So the guidelines and policies generally discourage promotion of other sites and provide a mechanism whereby any such sites need an independent assessment of their suitability to be included.

Also the links you added seem more appropriate to a US based portal than an international encyclopedia and didn't really meet our content guidelines in most cases. So even if they had been added by an independent third party I would probably delete them as inappropriate. For instance the Canonlaw Wiki is not really one with a substantial number of editors, and the legal advice for setting up a nonprofit corporation in the US is rather narrow and indirectly related for our religious order article (see links normally to be avoided, #13 & #14 in particular).

I hope this explains why the links were removed. If you have more questions please just ask. You can also find out more about how to contribute at our welcome page. Thanks. -- SiobhanHansa 09:56, 10 March 2008 (UTC)