User talk:CNicol

Please do not add commercial links or links to your own private websites to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or a mere collection of external links. You are, however, encouraged to add content instead of links to the encyclopedia. If you feel the link should be added to the article please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. See the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thanks. Mwanner | Talk 15:03, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

You wrote: "I am not posting any commercial or generic links. The articles I post are specifically related to the entries and are meant to offer an interesting perspective not necessarily appropriate to be included in the main body of the article."

It is not quite true that your links are non-commercial-- they promote a paid subscription site. Please read WP:EL. And given the amount of time you are putting into this, I can only assume that you are violating the rule against adding links to your own site.

The only reason that I have not removed your links as spam is that they look like reasonably good additions. But I can almost assure you that if you keep going as you are now, someone will decide that you are a spammer, and start deleting all of your work. Please try to see it from our point of view-- Wikipedia is not a link farm. The idea is that we want our articles to be the best possible source of information on a topic, not a short article followed by a long list of links to other articles-- our readers might as well just google a subject and read the first dozen sites if we are going to assemble long external link lists.

After all, it is fairly clear that the purpose of your work here so far is to promote your site, not to improve Wikipedia. -- Mwanner | Talk 16:08, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

It is not a paid subscription site. The articles are all available online for free, and will continue to be so. The purpose is to provide interesting perspectives on developments in science and technology. I believe these links are an appropriate and beneficial addition to Wikipedia for that reason. The contents of a complex article are not easily incorporated into Wikipedia entries without violating copyright regulations, so I thought it best to let the authors speak for themselves. These articles represent a diverse array of perspectives and topics, and are being posted thoughtfully and only where directly relevant - it only looks like link farming because they are all included in the same publication. Again, there is no commercial value either hidden or overt to "promoting our site" - there are no advertisements, no hidden fees, no abstracts with paid links to the full article. Nor is there a party line. The only interest is to contribute to scientific and philosophical discourse on topics of importance to society and of potential interest to Wikipedia readers. Thank you for your time and attention.

Please stop. If you continue to use Wikipedia for advertising, you will be blocked from editing. Computerjoe 's talk 17:22, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

This is your last warning. The next time you insert a spam link, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia.

The articles you are linking into Wikipedia are highly point of view and thus are not within our external linking guidelines. Gwernol 17:26, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I apologize to all of you who are alarmed by the number of links I posted this morning. I have stopped posting, but I encourage you to look at some of the articles and verify for yourselves that there is no ulterior commercial motive, and that while particular authors have particular stances, there are a variety of such stances included in the publication as a whole. The New Atlantis encourages critique and dialogue and would be happy to see links to other articles with thoughtful, opposing claims. Assume good faith and Please do not bite the newcomers. Thanks, CNicol


 * When you edit an article here, you should edit the article. From the rate at which you were posting links, it's hard for me to believe that in a minute or so you could read the article, carefully consider it, decide what was missing, conduct a search for good external links, and then add them, coincidentally from the same source each time. The alternative explanation is that you were promoting a web site without much regard for how Wikipedia works and without attention to core policies like neutral point of view. A couple of links is either a useful contribution or a good-faith mistake. Nearly a hundred is another story, especially as nearly fifty of those came after being asked to stop by an experienced editor. William Pietri 18:02, 5 July 2006 (UTC)


 * To echo William Pietri's comment: there may not be a commercial motive. But Wikipedia does not just exclude spam links on the grounds of commercial motivation. Inclusion of links that contain highly one-sided treatments of a subject (what we call points of view) is considered spamming. The motivation may be to get publicity for a particular viewpoint rather than money, but that's just as bad. I read a couple of the articles in depth and skimmed many of the rest. Its clear that the articles are often highly biased, which is commendable in a publication like New Atlantis but inappropriate for an encyclopedia. Please read the external links policy again. It is very clear that partisan links are not acceptable. Gwernol 18:06, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. In fact, I did read the entries before I linked to them, but on a previous occasion, choosing the links carefully, but choosing many of them. I apologize if this is in violation of Wikipedia regulations. I am also aware that many of the articles do indeed represent a strong point of view - as I said, I would be encouraged to see other strong treatments of a topic debating the ones I had posted. I would have thought that these would be more appropriately approached outside the main body of the WP entry, both because they often represent strong points of view, and as they are more often reflections on/discussions of a topic rather than an encyclopedia-appropriate source of information. I attempted to integrate them into the guidelines of the other links already listed on the entry, and to always reference the source so as to be upfront about what in fact they are. Other editors are, of course, free to delete any links they find irrelevant to the substance of the entry – please evaluate them based on individual content, however, not on quantity. I spent several days preparing this list because I have great respect for The New Atlantis and believed these articles would be a valuable addition to many WP articles for which I have no personal expertise to offer, but believe are very interesting and important to us as a society. Since none of this activity was visible online until today, however, I can readily see why it resembles spamming and was of concern to several editors.

Your request to reinstate links
Hi, I'm sorry but I'm not inclined to reinstate any of the links. The New Atlantis articles are highly WP:POV and aren't appropriate as external links which are required to be "sites that contain neutral and accurate material not already in the article". I see no evidence that any of the New Atlantis article fulfill this criteria for inclusion. If you believe there are a few specific articles that are neutral and informative it might be appropriate to include them, but the onus is on you to select those. Gwernol 19:24, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I think there is one sort worth keeping. A few of the links were from bio pages to articles by the subject of the bio. Letting our readers see what biography subjects have to say for themselves seems very appropriate. I saw four like that: Robert Zubrin, Leon Kass, Victor Davis Hanson and William B. Hurlbut. However, if CNicol is serious about improving Wikipedia, the way to work on those articles is to find not just one article from his favorite magazine, but a good selection from each author using Google and/or a periodicals index. William Pietri 20:01, 5 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Ok, I will reinstate the links to author entries along with any other articles of that author available free online. CNicol 23:58, 5 July 2006 (UTC)CNicol

I am wary of your external link-adding after you have been repeatedly warned for linkspamming. Please do some productive edits to the body of various articles instead of turning Wikipedia into a link directory, which is it is not (see WP:NOT). Furthermore, stop using the "Assume good faith" policy against Wikipedia. It does not apply to people who persist in violating WP:NOT. Wikipedia does not need external links all over the place, it needs more substantial article bodies which are well-sourced. If you added content to articles, using the external links as reference (if they were reputable and not to your own site), then it would not be against the link policy. CRCulver 01:19, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

The edits in question at this point are very modest, 1-3 articles by each of the four authors I was asked to look for. They are from different sites, and were posted only under their authors' entries. While I do intend to contribute to bodies of articles for which I am appropriately qualified, this immediate activity represented my good-faith attempt to respond to criticism and comply with the request of another editor. I thought they would be helpful, pertinent, and within WP guidelines. CNicol 01:34, 6 July 2006 (UTC)CNicol


 * Though I do not want to question Mr Pietri's competence as an editor, his advice seems contrary to WP:NOT and to the community sentiment, ever-stronger of late, against excessive external links. If you can find decent external links, and if you really want to contribute to Wikipedia, then you should add content to the articles and source said content by means of the links using the ref tag. CRCulver 01:26, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Heck, you're welcome to question my competence as an editor; external links are something I've never dealt with much. I thought they'd be acceptable under the "other meaningful, relevant content" clause of WP:EL; samples of an author's work seemed like it enhanced the bio. I can certainly see your concern, though, so I've added a query on the WP:EL talk page. Perhaps we can improve the guideline to make this clearer. William Pietri 01:47, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Sadder but Wiser
Dear concerned editors, Ok, will do! (contribute content to articles - I am working on some already, but of course to be well-developed they will take a little time) - however, in the meantime, please reconsider the deleted articles on the author pages - there are not many, and I believe if someone else had posted them they would not have been seen as a problem, as indeed there are already similar articles under most of those entries. Happy to oblige, CNicol 02:09, 6 July 2006 (UTC)CNicol
 * Hi. I note that at least on the Robert Zubrin article, yet another editor has already re-added your links and even improved the link text. I'm sure it's painful to go through, but the upside is you're getting a great insight into how Wikipedia works: it's a continuously evolving conversation among many thousands of editors. Don't get discouraged! --William Pietri 04:13, 6 July 2006 (UTC)