User talk:Shangrilaista

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CRS reports
I apologise for removing your links. I made a bad call.-Mr Adequate 22:43, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your contributions to the Falun Gong article
Thanks for your contribution to the Falun Gong article. Feel free to express your views and opinions in the talk section.

poor quality links
Hi Shangrilaista, I see that you have been going through a massive number of articles and putting in a link to the "Congressional Research Service". I would have reverted the lot if there appeared to be any commercial stakes involved, but even so such behavior is deprecated on Wikipedia. If your source is actually that good, then other people will link to it. The links you have put for Burundi, Uganda, etc appear to be for old reports (the newest I see is 2003). Considering that one of the benefits of Wikipedia is having humans do the parsing for links, your mass posting of these poor quality links is borderline disruptive. Please exercise some judgement before adding links. Thanks, BanyanTree 15:15, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

response to Banyan Tree
Hi Banyan Tree, I have to take issue with your stance that the Congressional Research Service Reports are poor sources. The Congressional Research Service Reports are the public policy research arm of the U.S. Congress. This legislative branch agency works exclusively for Members of Congress, their committees and their staffs. For more information, visit the CRS Web site at http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/. These are very valuable research resources on a broad variety of topics. They are not easily available because CRS does not provide direct public access to these. I am a librarian at the University of North Texas, and we are trying to make people more aware of these authoritative resources, and have compiled over 9,000 of them. This CRS site receives over 3,000,000 requests for information a month, so I think people do find these very valuable information sources. Just because an article is from 2003 does not mean that there is not valuable data there. I don't believe that adding external links to authoritative research reports from valid sources constitutes borderline disruptive behavior.


 * Hi Shangrilaista, I know what the CRS is, having looked over the site and the .gov site before my original post. For example, this is the first page of results for Uganda that you have posted:
 * Uganda: Recent Elections and Current Conditions 2001
 * Africa's Great Lakes Region: Current Conditions in Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, :Rwanda, and Uganda 2003
 * Congo (formerly Zaire) 2001
 * Congo (formerly Zaire) 2001
 * Democratic Republic of the Congo: Peace Process and Background 2001
 * AIDS in Africa 2005
 * AIDS in Africa 2005
 * Democratic Republic of Congo: Transitional Process and U.N. Mission 2005
 * Congo (formerly Zaire) 2001
 * Congo (formerly Zaire) 2002
 * The proper articles for these links are:
 * Elections in Uganda
 * African Great Lakes
 * Democratic Republic of the Congo
 * Second Congo War
 * AIDS in Africa
 * Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
 * As you can see and assuming that these ratios roughly hold, 40% of the resources you are providing for Uganda appear to be redundant, 30% are specific to the DRC, 10% are regional, 10% are general to sub-Saharan African and only the first link appears to be focused enough for a country-level article albeit five years old. (You may not be aware that links "sink" to the most specific article applicable, otherwise high-level listings of links would be unmanageable.) So a 10% relevance rate is pretty bad for directory link, considering it's grouped with other US government links that are updated and focus on Uganda at the country-level.  I thus find these links a little annoying as they basically seem to assume that other people should do the work of sorting and making direct links to relevant docs.  If you really feel that these are good sources of information, a little work directing readers to the most applicable publications from the most relevant Wikipedia articles would be much appreciated.
 * Please sign your posts with four tildes ( ~ ). - 16:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * As you can see and assuming that these ratios roughly hold, 40% of the resources you are providing for Uganda appear to be redundant, 30% are specific to the DRC, 10% are regional, 10% are general to sub-Saharan African and only the first link appears to be focused enough for a country-level article albeit five years old. (You may not be aware that links "sink" to the most specific article applicable, otherwise high-level listings of links would be unmanageable.) So a 10% relevance rate is pretty bad for directory link, considering it's grouped with other US government links that are updated and focus on Uganda at the country-level.  I thus find these links a little annoying as they basically seem to assume that other people should do the work of sorting and making direct links to relevant docs.  If you really feel that these are good sources of information, a little work directing readers to the most applicable publications from the most relevant Wikipedia articles would be much appreciated.
 * Please sign your posts with four tildes ( ~ ). - 16:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * As you can see and assuming that these ratios roughly hold, 40% of the resources you are providing for Uganda appear to be redundant, 30% are specific to the DRC, 10% are regional, 10% are general to sub-Saharan African and only the first link appears to be focused enough for a country-level article albeit five years old. (You may not be aware that links "sink" to the most specific article applicable, otherwise high-level listings of links would be unmanageable.) So a 10% relevance rate is pretty bad for directory link, considering it's grouped with other US government links that are updated and focus on Uganda at the country-level.  I thus find these links a little annoying as they basically seem to assume that other people should do the work of sorting and making direct links to relevant docs.  If you really feel that these are good sources of information, a little work directing readers to the most applicable publications from the most relevant Wikipedia articles would be much appreciated.
 * Please sign your posts with four tildes ( ~ ). - 16:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

July 2007
Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia. However, the external links you added do not comply with our guidelines for external links. Wikipedia is not a mere directory 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, then 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 to this encyclopedia. Spamming ANY kind of link - repeatedly adding it to large range of articles, especially in a short amount of time - is bad. JoeSmack Talk 19:56, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a mere directory 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 policy 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, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. JoeSmack Talk 20:33, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:43, 23 November 2015 (UTC)