User talk:Wikieditoraus

Spam
Hi, I found this account while cleaning up spam from several IP addresses in the 124.188* range. From your contributions which seem to be exclusively related to linking to the same book selling website, I can only conclude you are the IP editor or related to the IP editor. Please stop spamming these links. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a venue for advertising. If spamming of this site resumes from any IP or registered account, we will add the site to our spam blacklist. Sarah 12:57, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi Sarah. I am indeed involved with the cdbooks site, and yes, the books listed there all (or most, in any case) have prices attached to them. However, the cd book project - which has been running for 7 years - has as its main function the preservation of books of a genealogical, cultural-historic or biographical nature, specifically wrt to South Africa. Books that are out of print, or books that are provided by various authors are scanned in and made available on the site, and proceeds are used to further the project. So although there are prices on the site it is not a true commercial site, so I had no hesitation in putting in links to those e-books. I would have gotten round to also putting in links to free books on many of the subject matter.

Some of the books would have been added from my ip address ( I forgot to log in) but that should have been only one IP address and not a whole range. Some of the books would have my username attached (after i remembered to log in).

Wikieditoraus (talk) 13:10, 3 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for responding, and as a book lover I'm personally very supportive of groups making available out-of print books and such however, I do not believe these links meet Wikipedia's guidelines for external links. Specifically, WP:EL says we should not use external links that "primarily exist to sell products or services" and "instead of linking to a commercial bookstore site, consider the "ISBN" linking format, which gives readers an opportunity to search a wide variety of free and non-free book sources". The idea of external links is that people will follow them to find out more information on the subject, not to go to a page trying to sell them something. I'm sure you understand how 'valuable' and highly sought after outbound links from Wikipedia are in terms of the outbound traffic they can generate, particularly from high traffic articles, and the very real problem is that if we allow you to include these links then thousands of other sites will expect to be able to include links to things they're selling and Wikipedia would quickly be rendered a useless list of commercial links. Do the free texts exist elsewhere like on Project Gutenberg? Sarah 01:04, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

No Problem. These texts do not exist elsewhere, with I think 2 exceptions which exist in Gutenberg. Most of the items I was linking were items still under copyright, which the copyright holders made available specifically for his purpose. Wikieditoraus (talk) 04:45, 5 June 2008 (UTC)