User talk:Weisserrabe

Welcome!
Peaceray (talk) 02:38, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

December 2022
Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, you may be blocked from editing. It is considered spamming and Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or promotion. Because Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, additions of links to Wikipedia will not alter search engine rankings. All of your edits seem to be adding links to https://archive.metromod.net/ David Biddulph (talk) 12:49, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi Weisserrabe! I noticed that you recently marked an edit as minor that may not have been. "Minor edit" has a very specific definition on Wikipedia—it refers only to superficial edits that could never be the subject of a dispute, such as typo corrections or reverting obvious vandalism. Any edit that changes the meaning of an article is not a minor edit, even if it only concerns a single word. Please see Help:Minor edit for more information. Thank you. David Biddulph (talk) 12:50, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Linking to attract readers to a web site
As you may have noticed, I did block you from editing, but on consideration I have decided that instead it will be better to try to explain the reason for concern, and give you another chance.Above, as you will see, has posted a message warning you about "inappropriate external links", but did not say what was inappropriate about them. All of your editing, or almost all, has consisted of adding links to one website, evidently in an attempt to attract readers to that website, in other words to publicise or promote the site, which comes into conflict with Wikipedia's policy against any kind of promotional editing. Also, although I have not read every page that you linked to, checking a significant sample of them did not give me the impression that any of them satisfied the requirement that linked sites should provide a resource beyond what could be included in the Wikipedia article; in fact in most cases the linked pages didn't provide anything substantially beyond what was already in the articles. I apologise for the block, because on reflection I think you should have been given a clearer explanation than just generic warning about "inappropriate" links without explanation. More detailed information about linking is available in the guideline on external links, but unfortunately that is rather long. JBW (talk) 11:13, 17 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Hey, thank you for the explanation. I didn’t want to promote the Metromod website, but rather adding this research project as a reference for artist articles. Each (Metromod) article has further references and bibliography, which might be useful for detailed research of people who use Wikipedia as a first source.
 * I have one question with respect to your message: should external links reference sites which provide information which goes beyond the Wikipedia article content or not? That was not totally clear to me
 * Thanks! Weisserrabe (talk) 09:47, 19 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Metromod is not a company or website with products but a European Research council (ERC) funded research project. The information on the sites I linked are based on proper Art historical research, that is why I did not think about any promotion. Sorry if that gave the impression Weisserrabe (talk) 09:53, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * It is common for new editors to assume that the policy against promotional links refers only to links intended to promote products or services promoted by the linked websites, but it can refer to promotion of the website itself. I do understand that your purpose was to provide a reference resource for readers of Wikipedia, rather than just to increase traffic to the website, which I would have regarded as outright spam. However, there's a strong tendency for posting numerous links to the same website to be seen as promotion of that site. Personally, I'm not a great fan of the idea that external links should be used only to sites which add a resource which couldn't be included in the article, but that is what the established guideline says, and I see my task as an administrator as being to enforce policies and guidelines as they are, rather than as I would like them to be. If you haven't already done so, you may like to read the guideline on external links, which you may or may not find helpful.
 * The short answer to your question "should external links reference sites which provide information which goes beyond the Wikipedia article content or not" is "yes", though it should not go so far away from the content of the article that it is likely to be seen as off-topic. If that seems too indefinite to be helpful, then I'm afraid the best I can say is that getting a clearer idea of how that guideline is in practice interpreted and applied is mainly a matter of building up experience while editing.  However, my advice is that it will probably be safest to avoid posting multiple external links to one website, at least until you have quite a bit more experience. JBW (talk) 15:11, 19 December 2022 (UTC)