User talk:Caloptilia

Moths of North Carolina
Hi! Welcome to editing Wikipedia. :) Rather than add external links to this website, can you instead incorporate it into the articles as a reference, expanding each with a fact or two? —Hyperik ⌜talk⌟ 15:38, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Regarding your recent link additions
Hi, why are you repeatedly adding a single link "Moths of North Carolina" to every article? In general this is frowned upon. -- Rockstone   talk to me!   23:21, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

February 2020
Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a collection of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include, but are not limited to, links to personal websites, links to websites with which you are affiliated (whether as a link in article text, or a citation in an article), and links that attract visitors to a website or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Because Wikipedia uses the nofollow attribute value, its external links are disregarded by most search engines. If you feel the link should be added to the page, please discuss it on the associated talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you. Dirk Beetstra T C 05:57, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

You may be blocked from editing without further warning the next time you insert a spam link. Persistent spammers may have their websites blacklisted, preventing anyone from linking to them from all Wikimedia sites as well as potentially being penalized by search engines. Dirk Beetstra T C 13:08, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

You have been blocked from editing for a period of 31 hours for adding spam links. Persistent spammers will have their websites blacklisted from Wikipedia and potentially penalized by search engines. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions. If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page:. Dirk Beetstra T C 13:24, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Spamming
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and constructive edits are appreciated, but if your only purpose is to continue adding non conforming external links, you will continued to be blocked for doing so. Please read the information on WP:external links already provided.Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:45, 19 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Adding onto this, once you're unblocked, you're absolutely welcome to add constructive information. The issue is that this particular behavior of adding the same search link for moths to the external links section of different pages about species of moths isn't constructive and just seems like link-spamming and promotion. If you believe the information provided by search engine are beneficial to Wikipedia, I'd suggest contributing that information to the body of the articles themselves and citing a link to particular pages as a reference (but make sure that the contributions are actually beneficial and don't just act as an excuse to add a link to that page). -- Rockstone   talk to me!   22:56, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Moving past my cynicism, (we get a lot of LINKSPAM) if you were to actually CITE content in articles to particular pages used to source the content, that would be useful. Each item would need a citation, for which we have Template:cite. It's a lot of work, but it is fun to do.Deepfriedokra (talk) 03:10, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Dear Deepfriedokra and Rockstone35,

Thanks for your response concerning spamming and the abuse of external links, and your strong encouragement of the North Carolina Biodiversity Group (which includes the Moths of North Carolina website), to add to the text on Wikipedia and use references in place of an external link. We are a group of scientists who are focused on educating the public, and provide critical information to professional scientists about the natural history, ecology, and systematics of our moth fauna as our world is undergoing its sixth mass extinction. The problem with following your suggestion of adding to the text, and then adding a reference to the Moth site, is that the task is overwhelming due to the extraordinary number of living organisms on the planet. We have over 130,000 species of moths in the world, and perhaps over 4,000 species in North Carolina alone. We established a website for NC Moths that is run entirely by volunteer scientists. The work that it will take to write separate pages for these 4,000 or more species in North Carolina alone is monumental, and will likely take us a decade or more to complete. We simply don't have the people power of trying to tackle this enormous task, and at the same time write accounts for wikipedia with added references. Imagine the beetles, where we may have over 1 million species on the planet. That job would be even more daunting! We are not spammers and have no interest in promoting our site. Our primary goal is to get critical scientific information to professionals who need it to make important decisions concerning conservation biology and the protection of biodiversity on our planet as climate change escalates. Our web pages have far more information on specific moth species than is on Wikipedia (most of the moth species accounts on Wiki are basically blank accounts), and an external link to the NC moth site provides the only comprehensive accounts that are currently available. I might add that every link that we previously added was unique; it merely directed the reader to the specific page that covered that one moth species. So, I hope for the sake of protecting biodiversity on the planet, you will grant an exception and allow an external link to the site. I wish that we could significantly contribute to the text in Wikipedia and add references, but labor constrains, and the enormous number of species that we are dealing with, makes this impossible. All the best, Caloptila. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Caloptilia (talk • contribs)


 * Thank you for your reply. That was the main reason for me blocking you: get a discussion started.  Several editors were trying to contact you when your edits were noticed, but you did not respond.  I understand you are not a spammer (who are met with much harsher methods as described in my last warning), but your edits here were a concern that needed to be addressed.
 * Wikipedia will never allow you to just add your external link to thousands of pages. The goal of Wikipedia is to assimilate data, not to send people elsewhere for more information.  Moreover, it is then just waiting for someone from South Carolina with a similar website and, likely, considerable overlap.  Same goes for other neighbouring states.
 * Yes, getting those thousands of pages up to level will likely take years. But there are no deadlines.  We still prefer you to update just 10 over having thousands of links.  Wikipedia is a collaborative effort, you may very well inspire fellow editors to help you expand other pages in a similar way.
 * I hope you, and members of your team and other interested editors, will start improving Wikipedia, one page at a time. —Dirk Beetstra T  C 06:33, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Dirk - thanks for your response and my apologies for not responding promptly to your and the other administrators attempts to contact me. This was the first time that I had used Wikipedia, so I was a novice to say the least. So again, my apologies. Not to beat a dead horse, but it seems that there is no consistent policy in terms of using external links associated with biological species accounts. For example, there are a couple of thousand bird species in North America, and every Wikipedia page for birds has external links to other sites. The 'USGS Patuxent Bird Identification InfoCenter' and 'Cornell Lab of Ornithology' are placed as external links on almost every bird species account on Wikipedia (certainly over 1000+ external links for'Cornell Lab of Ornithology' alone). Search for birds like 'Red-bellied Woodpecker' or 'Eastern Screech Owl' (or any of your choosing) and take a look. So, if it is okay to have external links for birds, why not comparable links for moths or any other taxonomic group? I understand how this could get out of control, but there are typically only a few major comprehensive external sources for moths and other taxonomic groups of organisms. For North American moths, some of the most important groups are 'BugGuide', 'The Moth Photographers Group', 'Microleps.org', and the 'Moths of North Carolina'. It seems that if the ornithologists can use external links, then the same should apply to other taxonomic groups. I understand how this could get out of control, but I don't think that it will ever be an issue with moths or other insect groups where there are remarkably few specialists who work on these and very few web sites in the US that are devoted to them. I think that you are looking at three to five external links max for any taxonomic group (moths, beetles, slime molds, earthworms, etc.), which seems reasonable.

Dirk - thanks for listening, and I hope that you and other administrators will give some serious thought about the use of external links for species accounts, and how we can make this fair and equitable for all. All the best, Caloptilia