User talk:Chwats

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~&#126;); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place  on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! JFW | T@lk  02:25, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
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Links
External links are the least important part of Wikipedia. I suggest you focus on adding original content with adequate sources. JFW | T@lk  07:07, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Children's hospital
I've noticed that you've added many links to the Children's Hospital, Seattle, and I wanted to make a couple of suggestions. First, you may want to include the internal link to Children's Hospital, Seattle instead of just mentioning the name, so people can get more context about the source of the link.

Second, you may want to take a look at the number of links in a section before adding another one to your hospital. If there are no external links on a page, then the first external link is usually quite appreciated. But if there are already several external links that have similar content, another link may not be necessary. Sometimes having too many links can be as confusing as having too few.

And third, as JFW mentioned above, you may want to consider making edits to the articles besides adding links to a single organization. Sometimes people are shy about editing article content directly, so they just focus upon links, but we have a policy called Be bold in updating pages that you might want to look at.

Finally, I want to thank you for being a part of the Wikipedia community, and if you've got any questions, feel free to ask me on my talk page. --Arcadian 18:19, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedack
I appreciate the feedback. However, I personally find a lot of value in having external (or 'further reading') links on a subject. My hope is that Wikipedia will be a place where only the best and most useful exteral links on a subject are listed (and, yes, I include the information provided by my hospital in that category).

I'm reluctant to add content to the article itself as I am not a clinician or an expert on the content. However, I do know that the health information our hospital provides is very useful as it is relevant, current and at an appropriate reading level.

Christian Watson 22:24, 6 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia tends to frown on wholesale addition of links. Not every Seattle Children's Hospital page is automatically useful, and you have admitted yourself that you may not be equipped with the knowledge to determine what is useful. On the whole, we should have more links to official guidance from professional organisations, and less from secondary providers. If I had to choose between an NIH page on the Children's Hospital, I'd give preference to the NIH page.
 * Please consider why links to other outlets of very similar information would not be equally useful, and why we need SCH links on every medical page. JFW | T@lk  22:32, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

I understand that you don't want contributors to 'spam' Wikipedia with links to every page on their web sites. However, I have been careful to add links that are informational rather than marketing or promotional. I don't see why there should be some arbitrary limit on the number of links one can add - each one should be judged on its merit. If it's not useful, then remove it.

As far as comparing the quality of our content to that of professional organizations such as the NIH, I would argue that ours is easily comparable and often better. All of our content is professionally written, copyedited and reviewed by health educators for readability. In my opinion, it would be best for a Wikipedia to have a link to our content as well as links to other relevant content such as that from the NIH and other institutions. It's better to get a breadth of information rather than to rely on a single source. I am well-placed to determine what is appropriate to come from my organization, and I would hope/expect that someone from the NIH would do the same.

Christian Watson 18:05, 13 July 2006 (UTC)