User talk:Raysecurity

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February 2008
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, 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 collection 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, please discuss it on the before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Gwernol 02:45, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

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 web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. 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. Gwernol 02:46, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

This is the last warning you will receive for your disruptive edits. The next time you insert a spam link, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Persistent spammers may have their websites blacklisted as well, preventing anyone from linking to them from all of Wikipedia. Gwernol 02:46, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the message on my talk page. I use the standard warning messages that are the recommended mechanism for dealing with new users. Your suggestion that I was somehow "abusing my administrators power" is incorrect since I have not used the admin tools in this case - I have issued the standard, community approved warnings that all Wikipedia editors are encouraged to use. The reason you received several warnings in short order was because you were adding inappropriate external links to articles quickly and continuing to do so after receiving the initial warnings.

I'm sorry if you feel the warnings are not useful, but they specifically link you to our guidelines on external links which you should read and understand. They are quite clear that links to other Wikis are generally to be avoided. Let's look at an example of one of your links: Software Guidance Share which you added to the article Software Development. This links to an the front page of your Wiki. It links to an open Wiki, which WP:EL is clear is inappropriate. It links to a page that isn't about Software Devlopment article. Finally, given you are adding this link to multiple articles it appears you are trying to promote this external Wiki, not improving the articles here on Wikipedia.

All your links are either to the GuidanceShare wiki or to blogs. None of them are appropriate.

Finally, the notion that I should ignore your breaches of the rules because there are other undesirable external links on particular pages is not a sound one. If we followed this logic no rule could ever be enforced if there was a single breach of it anywhere in the more than 2.5 million articles on Wikipedia. That clearly isn't a workable suggestion. I am happy to look at the other links you cite and will remove them if they are not in line with our guidelines and policies. However I will not refrain from asking you to avoid your campaign of promoting particular sites across multiple inappropriate articles.

Thanks, Gwernol 08:24, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Gwernol --
 * If you assumed less and clarified more, I could trust your intentions more.
 * Overall, I'm seeing you focus on problems and not on solutions or help. Why is that?
 * My goal isn't to put you on the defensive, unless your intentions are malicious, which they are starting to appear.
 * My goal is to understand your behavior, learn from you where I can, and work effectively within Wikipedia.
 * I make this point because you seem to be defending your actions versus trying to help.


 * > RE: ... Your suggestion that I was somehow "abusing my administrators power" is incorrect since I have not used the admin tools in this case
 * You threatened to exert your administrative powers.


 * > Re: The reason you received several warnings in short order was because you were adding inappropriate external links to articles quickly and continuing to do so after receiving the initial warnings.
 * You are claiming that within the span of a minute (between 2:45 and 2:46), I was supposed to recieve your warning, read it and acted accordingly?


 * > RE: ... given you are adding this link to multiple articles it appears you are trying to promote this external Wiki, not improving the articles here on Wikipedia.
 * See my "Improving Software/Application Security" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tqbf


 * >All your links are either to the GuidanceShare wiki or to blogs. None of them are appropriate.
 * What are your rules on appropriate? I need precision here since so far you seem to be acting more subjective than objective, raising false claims and jumping to assumptions (not the mark of a an exemplar Wikipedia editor.)


 * The guidelines specifically says - Links to blogs and personal web pages, except those written by a recognized authority. Linking to a book author and industry authority's work seems relevant.  You can see their list of books and work on MSDN at J.D. Meier's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/.  If you do a google analysis or follow the author's work, they are the trusted authority.  It doesn't seem appropriate to link to MSDN since that appears to be less about the author or the work and more about Microsoft, which seems less subjective.


 * > This links to an the front page of your Wiki. It links to an open Wiki, which WP:EL is clear is inappropriate
 * It's not my Wiki and it's not open. Did you try creating an account?  Account creation is disabled.  It's obviously not intended to be a Wiki, just an authority site.  It's only open in the sense that you obviously don't need to register to use the site or read the pages.  In fact, if it was a registration-only site, that wouldn't be appropriate to link to.


 * I hope you are just making mistakes in your haste because otherwise it appears that you are taking facts out of context, generalizing and misrepresenting them:
 * Given the entire site appears to be dedicated to software development, that seems appropriate for software development.
 * For software security, I contributed a link specifically to the focus on software security development - http://www.guidanceshare.com/wiki/Security


 * > It links to a page that isn't about Software Devlopment article.
 * Help me understand how a site that shows techniques and practices for software development isn't about software development?
 * More interestingly, what do you perceive the site to be about?

Guidelines from the wp:EL
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EL

Liks to be considered
 * Articles about any organization, person, web site, or other entity should link to the official site if any.
 * An article about a book, a musical score, or some other media should link to a site hosting a copy of the work if none of the "Links normally to be avoided" criteria apply.
 * Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues, amount of detail (such as professional athlete statistics, movie or television credits, interview transcripts, or online textbooks) or other reasons.
 * Sites with other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article, such as reviews and interviews.

Links to be avoided
 * Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article.
 * Any site that misleads the reader by use of factually inaccurate material or unverifiable research. See Reliable sources for explanations of the terms "factually inaccurate material" or "unverifiable research".
 * Any site that attempts to surreptitiously install malware on a visitor's computer.
 * Links mainly intended to promote a website.
 * Links to sites that primarily exist to sell products or services. For example, instead of linking to a commercial bookstore site, use the "ISBN" linking format, giving readers an opportunity to search a wide variety of free and non-free book sources.
 * Links to sites with objectionable amounts of advertising.
 * Links to sites that require payment or registration to view the relevant content.
 * Sites that are inaccessible to a substantial number of users, such as sites that only work with a specific browser.
 * Direct links to documents that require external applications (such as Flash or Java) to view the relevant content, unless the article is about such rich media. If you do link to such material make a note of what application is required.
 * Links to search engine and aggregated results pages.
 * Links to social networking sites (such as MySpace), discussion forums/groups (such as Yahoo! Groups) or USENET.
 * Links to blogs and personal web pages, except those written by a recognized authority.
 * Links to open wikis, except those with a substantial history of stability and a substantial number of editors. Wikis that meet this criteria might also be added to Meta:Interwiki map.
 * Sites that are only indirectly related to the article's subject: the link should be directly related to the subject of the article. A general site that has information about a variety of subjects should usually not be linked to from an article on a more specific subject. Similarly, a website on a specific subject should usually not be linked from an article about a general subject. If a section of a general website is devoted to the subject of the article, and meets the other criteria for linking, then that part of the site could be deep-linked.
 * Lists of links to manufacturers and suppliers.

Your Rationale is a factual collection of relevant, industry-sanitized, principles, patterns and practices. http://web.mac.com/david.vernon/iWeb/The%20Canberra%20Journal/The%20Scribbles/262AC8CF-AFEB-4CE0-A87A-AF04B259775D.html), but removed links to Coping with Difficult Bosses and How To Figure Out What You Really Want.) -- Perhaps the Coping with Difficult Bosses fits in a better section, but I still don't follow your rationale or justify leaving the previous link, which does come across as Spam.
 * You still haven't explained your actions.
 * For Computer Security, you leave a link to http://www.securityfocus.com/ which is a commercially-driven, collection of threats and attacks, but remove a link to Guidance Share, which
 * On the career page, in the External Links, you left this (Does Parenting Ruin Your Career? — article about men from 'Sunday Life Magazine'


 * You haven't suggested any contextual solutions for this instance. You simply falsely claimed that I wasn't trying to improve Wikipedia.  I've seen a lot of churn in the various wiki pages from vandilism to point of view pushers, which is why I looked to people like Tqbf who seem to have the right intentions.  I put a lot of information in their talk page to help their effort to clean up the software security (which has really gotten far off from factual and Encyclopedic to more like random injections of various agnendas.)


 * It would help me if you could use specific examples, particulary with a concreate example of the External Links section. If linking to a relevant authority isn't appropriate, I'm not sure what is.
 * You suggest contributing directly to the articles, yet your non-collaborative actions are specifically why I avoid it. The irony is Ward (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham) tried to convince me that it would be worth my time and yet so far, adding relevant, contextual External Links, a low overhead operation is more overhead than it's worth because of hasty and either malicious or non-collaborative people like yourself.  I don't think you are consistent with his intentions which were to reduce friction around contributions and make it easier to collaborate and converge on knowledge.

My Questions For You (You ignored my questions, so I'll ask them again):
 * If I were to contribute External Links that are not Spam, what would my contributions look like?
 * If I were to contribute pages that are not Spam, what would my contributions look like?

If you can't answer those for some reason, I do have more basic questions which are: I don't need everything, just quick tips from your experience that you think are helpful, such as how to structure Talk pages effectively and how to structure Wiki pages effectively.
 * What are effective ways to learn accepted formatting and style practices for talk pages? (There must be a short list of key things to know -- and I don't get whether I'm using the four tilde approach the right way.
 * How do you know which styling you have to do, what useful templates are, and what you have to do manually? (I don't know what's automatic and what's not -- for example, would I manually put in ... Thanks, Raysecurity 13:15, 3 February 2008 (UTC) ... or do is there a template for that or do I just use 67.170.109.102 (talk) 20:14, 3 February 2008 (UTC) Raysecurity?   (when can I view the source to see how it's done and model from that or are there some templates that I need to know of and use?)

67.170.109.102 (talk) 20:14, 3 February 2008 (UTC) Raysecurity