User talk:Blendus

Pulitzer Center links
Hi Blendus. Thanks for leaving a message on my talk page. From Wikipedia's point of view the Center's nonprofit mission does not make promotion of its material any more appropriate than promotion of a for profit company's. What you describe as "working with the Pulitzer Center to help raise awareness of the Center and its reports worldwide by providing external links to relevant topics" is considered spam on Wikipedia. If you feel strongly that a link to one of the center's articles will improve an article in an encyclopedic fashion we ask you take steps to ensure your conflict of interest is reviewed by the community. The easiest way to do this is to post instead to the talk pages of articles and ask other editors to asses the material you would like to add. This is covered in the policies and guidelines I linked to before. As I mentioned above, we are attempting to build a GFDL encyclopedia. Links to third party sites (and especially ones that do not license their content under the GFDL or similar licensing) do not really further that mission. We encourage you to add content rather than use Wikipedia to promote an organization. -- Siobhan Hansa 08:33, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Pulitzer Center links
Hi Siobhan Hansa,

Thank you very much for your quick and detailed response. I’d like to take the opportunity to properly introduce myself: my name is Marc and I work for the Pulitzer Center based in Washington D.C. The Center is a non-profit organization and its mission is to disseminate and circulate underrepresented topics in the media. The Center finances independent journalists in the best intention to generate coverage of their under reported media content. I invite you to take a look at our site to understand our mission: www.pulitzercenter.org

An example of our work is a video about Darfur; which I think is valuable to the Wikipedia community as additional information. The business of Coltan is a scarcely known topic and users linked to the video could benefit greatly by learning more about an important environmental and technical issue affecting the people of Darfur through the medium of video. Please have a look for yourself: (http://www.pulitzercenter.org/openitem.cfm?id=177).

The mission of the Pulitzer Center meets Wikipedia’s standard of a neutral point of view. And while I completely understand and agree with Wikipedia’s needs to be cautious about hidden agendas and advertising, I also want to make sure Wikipedia does not limit its opportunities in broadening its information base. As I realize you want to really limit any possible leak of credibility on Wikipedia, I would like to offer a comprise that can benefit both Wikipedia and the Pulitzer Center. We could cap all external links to the Pulitzer Center to a certain number of links where we, as Pulitzer Center editors will be certain to only submit links we believe are fully relevant. We would even be willing to have a Wikipeda editor review our link requests before posting them.

Please let me know your thoughts on all of this. Many thanks!


 * Blendus, If you think a link will add to a particular article please post to the individual article's talk page (every article has a talk page, when you are on the article page click on the discussion tab at the top of the page next to the edit this page tab). I suggest you leave a message along the lines of:


 * I'm working with the pulitzer center, we have some video I believe would be great for this article because ..... Please take a look: URL.  If you agree this would be a good link for the article's external links section please add it.


 * You need to do this for each article you think a link might be appropriate for. There is no way for one editor to approve a link such that it's OK for it to be added to any article.  All editors working on an article are participants in making decisions about content for that article.  A link that is accepted on one article might be rejected for another.  A link that is acceptable at one time might later be edited out.


 * Again, I would point out that we are trying to build a GFDL encyclopedia and ask you to consider adding good content to Wikipedia while you are here instead of using us simply as a promotional platform for yourself. -- Siobhan Hansa 03:11, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Links to Wikipedia articles
You may freely link to Wikipedia articles from the website of the Pulitzer Center. If you wish to freeze them at a certain version use the url of the "permanent link". Fred Bauder 13:05, 8 June 2007 (UTC)