User talk:Uncle Y

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September 2009
Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. Please don't forget to provide an edit summary. Law Lord (talk) 12:01, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Advocacy links
Uncle Y, I spend a lot of time cleaning up link-spam and I started looking at your edits after your link additions triggered alarms for potential spam at meta:User:COIBot/XWiki/lib.icr.su and meta:Talk:Spam blacklist.

You've added some interesting and useful stuff to Wikipedia -- thanks! I ended up "wasting" a lot of time reading about topics like the Roerichs, Yakov Blumkin and the Altai Republic that I was previously unfamiliar with; the endless labyrinth of interesting, hyperlinked stuff on Wikipedia can do this to even the most jaded of administrators!

Looking at your edits, it quickly became apparent that you were not our average link-spammer. Just the same, I am concerned with the links you're adding; they're inappropriate for several reasons.
 * First, Wikipedia is not a platform for advocacy, or as we put it, "Wikipedia is Not a Soapbox". Please take a look at our policy on this: "Wikipedia is Not a Soapbox". In fact, take a look at the entire page, "What Wikipedia is Not" of which it is a subsection. When I see additions that say "Lets protect the names and heritage of the Roerichs (in Russion). Issue 1. Issue 2. Issue 3. Issue 4", that looks like advocacy. Advocacy is a good thing elsewhere, just not in an encyclopaedia.
 * Second, your links don't fall into the categories we allow in our External Links Guideline.
 * Third, we prefer resources in English unless it's absolutely critical to use another language. The External Links Guideline also addresses this.
 * Finally, when you add these links wholesale across multiple Wikipedia, it looks like our definition of linkspam as we define it in our Spam Guideline. I know your link additions are well-intended and not added for commercial gain nevertheless they've set off a number of red flags for spam.

There's probably nothing wrong with these pages you're linking to -- they just don't meet our very specific and narrow requirements for inclusion in an encyclopaedia. Please don't add them anymore. If you disagree with my comments or have any further questions, you can raise them with other editors at the External links/Noticeboard‎.

All these links and rules I'm throwing around must seem a bit frustrating and bureaucratic. The last time I checked, we had several dozen firm "policies" and still more "guidelines". Nobody in their right mind has ever read all of them; I recommend instead that new editors such as yourself just closely read this one summary page: Simplified ruleset and start editing. That page covers 90% of what you need to know around here and you can pick up the rest as you go.

I hope this brush with "officialdom" doesn't deter you from further editing -- we need all the volunteers we can get that have your passion, interest and effort. Thanks for joining us! -- A. B. (talk • contribs) 19:16, 29 September 2010 (UTC)