User talk:Rkmullen

November 2011
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica 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 as a platform for advertising or promotion, and doing so is contrary to the goals of this project. Because 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 before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Jeremy (talk) 02:43, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Re: Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica and National Shrine Link
Hi. I have taken photographs in Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica and National Shrine and led groups of photographers around the church—indeed, one of my photos appears on the front page of their website—and I have found them to be extremely welcoming to photographers; certainly any WIkipedia editor who went to the church to take photos for the Wikipedia article would be welcomed. Wikipedia's guidelines on external links give criteria for inclusion of links; the recommendations for links to be avoided notes that one should generally avoid linking to any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article. Featured articles on Wikipedia are generally required to be well illustrated and often include a link to a repository of freely licensed images at our sister project, the Wikimedia Commons. Such freely licensed images help to advance the goal of Wikipedia to provide content that can be freely reused by others. A link to a gallery of non-freely licensed photos, whilst it may be well-intentioned and may appear to enhance the article, is much less useful to the goals of Wikipedia—these photos cannot be freely reused by others, and indeed the link to the gallery may provide the impression that Wikipedia does not need any more photos of the article's subject and discourage editors from adding new photos. I thank you for your desire to help illustrate Wikipedia articles, and I strongly encourage you to consider contributing freely licensed photos to the project—this page on the Wikimedia Commons provides details of the licenses that are typically used—but unless it would be impossible for freely licensed photos to appear in the article I would discourage you from linking to galleries of non-freely licensed photos, whether they be taken by you or someone else. Thanks—Jeremy (talk) 22:33, 26 November 2011 (UTC)