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Archive copy of Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard#Victoria and Albert Museum

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Another one with similarity to the library links, this time a museum. VAwebteam (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) (Webteam of the Victoria and Albert Museum is adding external links to wikipedia to a website where they are affiliated with.

User has been notified of WP:COI (and has responded to that), but is still adding links only. I'm posting here to record the situation, I will try and explain the user. --Dirk Beetstra T C 13:47, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

I am going ahead and remove the linkadditions by user:VAwebteam to external links sections. Please consider using the links as (proper!) references. --Dirk Beetstra T C 14:27, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I came to this little discussion because I noticed and was surprised by a deletion of the link from Don McCullin. From my PoV, the article is mildly enhanced by the presence of the link. I then looked at a couple more of the relevant articles; again, I thought that the articles benefited from the links.
VAwebteam may indeed have a "CoI" here; but it seems to me that it's a compatibility of interest: What draws attention to the V&A also helps WP readers. (You may of course disagree.)
We read above: User has been notified of WP:COI but actually that page says next to nothing about linkspamming. (It does talk of Links that appear to promote products by pointing to obscure or not particularly relevant commercial sites (commercial links) [my emphasis] and Links that appear to promote otherwise obscure individuals by pointing to their personal pages; neither is relevant.) Instead it refers the reader to WP:SPAM. This too isn't helpful, referring the reader back to COI and also to WP:LINK. The V&A links don't seem to fall within those classes best avoided.
Here's an idea. Don McCullin (a photographer) has a talk page, which has two project templates. It's obvious that one (biography) is huge in scope compared with the other (History of photography). VAwebteam should be encouraged to go to the discussion page of the latter project, explain what he/she/it -- and incidentally, doesn't "team" ownership of a username break some spam-irrelevant policy? -- proposes to do; and then if there's agreement, should feel free to go ahead and do it. Ditto for fashion, interior design and the rest. -- Hoary 15:18, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
It may very well be that the links can be relevant (but then, they are probably better as a reference, not as an external link). But WP:COI clearly states, that "... but if you have a conflict of interest avoid, or exercise great caution when ... Linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam)" .. therefore, it is better to discuss on the talkpage, and let uninvolved editors add the links. Being commercial or not, it now appears to be promotional (even if there is no direct financial gain from adding the links).
As a sidenote, why include one museum/library and not all the other ones which also have information. Again, it is better to discuss which of the musea/libraries/&c. are going to be the few that are included (see WP:NOT#REPOSITORY and WP:NPOV). --Dirk Beetstra T C 15:30, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Beetstra, thanks for your message. I had already spotted the situation & sent a message to the VAwebteam talk page. I agree most, even all, of their links so far are probably useful, but still support them being warned off. I think they should restrict themselves to suggesting on talk pages (article or project) that a link might be useful. If other editors agree, they can add it themselves. Johnbod 15:52, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Who adds it? If VAwebteam asks at "my" project talk page, then I for one will say "Sure, go ahead." If most people agree with me, I (and I think those other people) will be delighted if VAwebteam goes ahead and does the dreary work of adding the links. Anyway I'm sure that (i) in all the cases I looked at the links benefit the articles, (ii) I've got more interesting things to do in my life than add a single link to each of dozens (?) of articles. -- Hoary 16:13, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
You add it - your understandable reluctance to do so is the best way to limit these links to the really useful ones, and you have no COI. Johnbod 00:45, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
For the examples I looked at, no, the links are better as "external links" and not as "references": (i) it would be bizarre (if not fraudulent) to imply that an article depended on web pages that are actually extraneous to what's put forward in the text; (ii) "external links" seem the natural place to add links to images that are highly relevant to but not specifically mentioned within the text.
I tend to agree - is this about the bots not being able to pick up references? We should not really dictate editorial policy on that basis, and I don't want spam references that actually aren't references at all, but added hastily to get round COI restraints. Johnbod 00:45, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
therefore, it is better to discuss on the talkpage Which talk page? Should VAwebteam ask in Talk:Don McCullin and be told yes or no, ask in Talk:Dorothea Lange and be told yes or no, and ditto for dozens of pages on photography? Sheesh: just how many man–hours do you want other people to devote to this? Much better, I think, to ask once in the relevant project page, see what discussion ensues, and act on that.
Unrealistic. They should go to every page & see if people are interested enough to do it themselves. Otherwise every museum in the world will add all its little exhibitions & online features. Johnbod 00:45, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
As a sidenote, why include one museum/library and not all the other ones which also have information. VAwebteam would be doing the former for reasons that are blazingly obvious and that also are similar to the reasons why I (and I venture to guess you too) edit certain pages and not others. VAwebteam's addition to the Don McCullin page of a link does nothing to stop addition by somebody else of a link to a different gallery or to stop later removal of these links by an editor who discovers that the wealth of images in some other site renders unnecessary the links added previously.
Again, it is better to discuss which of the musea/libraries/&c. are going to be the few that are included (see WP:NOT#REPOSITORY and WP:NPOV I don't see how NPOV is an issue. VAwebteam has a clear PoV and neither hides it nor (as far as I know) sabotages the work of people with different PoVs; it's similar to the way in which my PoV on the relative merits of the two photographers leads me to work on Seiji Kurata and not the considerably better known Mario Testino; this admitted bias of mine does nothing to hinder anybody else's efforts to create an article on Testino. -- Hoary 16:13, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
For all I see, there has been no discussion on any talkpage where this user has been involved in and where it was deemed OK to add external links to pages (as for many of the other COI-discussions here). And even then, the person has a conflict of interest, and therefore, it is better discuss (also per WP:NOT, WP:NPOV, WP:EL; also WP:SPAM#How not to be a spammer may be of interest, as may be the statement in WP:SPAM "Adding external links to an article or user page for the purpose of promoting a website or a product is not allowed, and is considered to be spam. Although the specific links may be allowed under some circumstances, repeatedly adding links will in most cases result in all of them being removed."). It may be more work to discuss, but how am I, as an outsider, supposed to see whether the link-additions are NPOV when an editor is only adding the links? A link to a discussion in a wikiproject or to the talkpage in the edit summary would be helpful. There are many links that are suitable as external links on some pages, but WP:NOT#REPOSITORY says that we only should have a few (also per WP:EL); are linkadditions by someone who is involved in the website then the best person to decide whether his/her link should be on the page (how does the person decide whether his page is one of the better pages, and why this link and not other musea as well)?
I just saw this diff (I removed the link earlier because it was added by user:VAwebteamI removed the link because I thought user:VAwebteam added it, but the user only changed the text of the link, sorry for the misunderstanding). The link was there as an 'external reference', though it could easily be used as a reference in the text (good example, diff), which, I think, gives more value to the link and it gives more attribution to the text (and I am sorry if I violated WP:POINT here). --Dirk Beetstra T C 17:26, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, I sat on the sidelines, quietly doing my WikiGnome thing, but I can't keep my mouth shut any longer ... after seeing the above comment about the VAM link in the fig leaf article, I decided to take a look and use it as an example of {{cite web}} usage, since I had just made reference to it on User Talk:VAwebteam's Talk page (I also invited them to participate in this discussion, BTW, with a direct link so that they did not have to search for it) … what I found in that article led to some Major Surgery, which I documented on that article's talk page, but that's what compelled me to add some comments here.
  1. That article had two ELs to a NN website (www.SandowMuseum.com) honoring Eugen Sandow, a 19th century bodybuilder, that apparently hasn't been updated very recently … every page contains the footer,

    copyright ©1998 - 2001 R. Christian Anderson - All Rights Reserved

  2. The decision of which museum/library/etc. may be linked to a Wikipedia article should be based on a Very Simple criterion: WP:Notability
  3. Victoria and Albert Museum has an article in Wikipedia, and since it has been around since 1852, it should be considered a WP:Reliable Source. Period.
  4. SandowMuseum.com does not have an article, however, in this case, I feel that it is an appropriate link because (a) it's a citation is for a paragraph that talks about how Eugen Sandow made a living from photographs taken of him in the nude except for a fig leaf, (b) the paragraph is linked to his Wikipedia article, and (c) the page referenced in the citation has the title "Eugen Sandow Wearing a Figleaf" and begins,

    Photographed in New York in 1894, Sandow wears a trademark "figleaf".

  5. I feel that Beetstra placed the VAM reference in the wrong place, so I moved it to a more appropriate location (compare the before and after versions)
  6. The choice of where an EL belongs depends on a simple rule of thumb: "If you can find an appropriate place to use it as a citation, then do it that way, otherwise add it to External Links."
I don't think that allowing ELs to VAM is a slippery slope situation; if anything, their inclusion adds verisimilitude to Wikipedia's credibility! OTOH, if it were not so relevant, I would have eliminated both of the SandowMuseum.com links without asking for anyone else's opinion or approval … but one of them just had to go because one link to any NN site is sufficient, and if the one that I chose to delete had been the only one (it was very off-topic, with only a peripheral mention of "figleaf"), then there would be none there now.
In conclusion, (a) links to VAM should not be forbidden, (b) the links should be added as cited references whenever possible, and (c) VAwebteam's contributions should be monitored for a while, as any newbie should be when they are going to be around for the foreseeable future … to be quite honest, I would consider it an Honour to be allowed to help such a venerable and respected institution in their efforts to become a responsible contributor to Wikipedia, so I volunteer to supervise their activities for the next few weeks while they come up to speed.
Happy Editing! —68.239.79.82 05:00, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for the elaboration, 68.239.79.82. I think I should clearly state here, that I indeed think that there is nothing wrong with the links, they are from a respectable, reliable source, and for what I have seen in the reference on fig leaf, I indeed think that they give valuable information (sorry for the misplacement, I was already a bit doubting the position). Looking at the approx. 275 links that are on wikipedia, it seems to me it is extensively used, though I saw some cases where there may be a more appropriate use. But that is beyond this discussion.
The thing is (and I have argued that earlier with other libraries/musea as well), WP:COI states

Wikipedia is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit," but if you have a conflict of interest avoid, or exercise great caution when ... 4. Linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam);

(underline by me). Now, people working in a library/museum do have extensive knowledge about a) the things they have in the library/museum, and b) know their website. That information is certainly an advantage for wikipedia and we should, indeed, stimulate them to add content to wikipedia (in that case a CoI is a compatability of Interest, as it was described above). But they also work for the organisation where they link to. Since I believe that we are writing an encyclopedia here, not a linkfarm, I think that also such linkadditions should be considered, discussed. So when I see an account adding links to a certain domain only, I will investigate that. It may be that such an editor is actually adding content with references to many different articles, and, as I have argued before (in other discussions, e.g. diff), I do not have a problem with that, how can I have a problem with clear improvement of documents. But when edits are only addition of links, I will give a (good-faith) warning that their edits can be explained as spam ({{uw-spam1}}; and for registered accounts I also do place a welcome message; {{welcomeg}}, in this case that was already there). In this specific case, I also asked the editor to review WP:COI. I presume that such messages do encourage the editor to consider the edits.
When the spamming is to bad links, I may remove (almost) all occurances of that link (depending on specific use) throughout wikipedia (even if that means that other 'bad links' stay). When one account 'spams' (note: I use the word 'spam' here in the wikipedia definition) a good link, I may choose to remove the links added by that account only (as I have removed the additions by this account, with help of others; I have, by the way, not removed the links where they were used as proper citations). As per most of the policies and guidelines here, when in doubt, edits should be discussed before they are performed. I therefore do not have a problem if established users reconsider my removals when they do believe that the use of the link is correct.
My reasoning if this constitutes a COI may be completely wrong here, but seen there are at least 4 cases in the recent past about people working for a library/museum (European Library, EServer, Mitpress.mit.edu (user:Bookuser) and this) that add links to their website, filed by different people, I guess this should be addressed.
I hope this explains. Have a nice day, Dirk Beetstra T C 15:31, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
Points taken, and your concerns are both valid and shared by many, myself included, so let's just focus on the VAM case:
  1. Special:Statistics says (as of 19:24, 30 May 2007 (UTC)):

    The English-language Wikipedia currently contains 1,808,773 articles.

    ... so I really don't think that "approx. 275 links" from employees of this museum is "excessive."
  2. The fact that "they are who they are" grants them an exemption to WP:COI for adding references, but not for ELs of dubious significance, e.g., a link to "audio interviews with photographers" added to Documentary photography, one of your reverts with which I concur ... anybody care to ask Jimbo about this?
  3. Someone needs to help them climb the learning curve, and be able to add either a reference/citation or just an EL as appropriate, or else nothing at all, and I have volunteered to do that.
Were they a younger, smaller, more narrowly focused museum, like the Guggenheim for example, adding links to 275 "art related" articles only, I might have raised a flag here, too ... but I'll probably add the same VAM reference that you added to fig leaf to the article on Michelangelo's David (as I'm sure you would have if you'd thought of it), and I have no COI problems with it if VAwebteam does it first.
The Guggenheim doesn't have an art collection that covers things going back to the 16th century, and that is what makes the difference, i.e., the fact that the VAM has the potential for impacting an order of magnitude (10x at least) more articles just in the "art related" area alone, not counting the other areas to which it can contribute ... I mean, we're talking the entire history of the British Empire here as just the "core focus" of their collection, and that ain't small.
The Good Thing about raising this flag is that we can catch them while they're still in the cradle, and raise them so that they can contribute without any supervision or constant follow-up damage control ... assuming that we have not already soured the milk, and we'll never hear from them again. (D'oh!)
Happy Editing! —68.239.79.82 19:24, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
Just for the record, the "history of the British Empire" is not the "core focus" of the V&A, nor even covered by them as such, and they have works of art going back to the 4th century, as described in their article. Johnbod 19:30, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
My bad! I meant to say, "entire art history of the British Empire." :-) —68.239.79.82 21:13, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
That isn't what they do either - they have tons of European stuff; they cover applied/decorative art worldwide, sculpture worldwide & non-European art (post antiquity). Plus fashion & other stuff. Johnbod 03:26, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
Just to correct, there were 275 links to the site on wikipedia when I looked at the statistics, by far not all of them were added by user:VAwebteam. I think I cleaned about 40 of them, the rest has been removed by others, certainly not excessive or alarming, but it does raise some flags (the old linkwatcher bot had a built-in treshold of 3 links by one user....). The other occurances show that the link is judged by its value, others have used the link in all the other cases. Hope this clarifies a bit. I hope they will join us, and maybe they can even help us find (and fill!) some gaps in wikipedia's coverage. --Dirk Beetstra T C 21:55, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
Heh! I wasn't going to go there, but thnx fer the clarification (although a 1:8 ratio of anything should raise a flag!) ... I guess I had assumed that your WP:BOT was tracking additions by WP:USERNAME in addition to URLs in articles ... although I've never written one myself, one of my hobbies is mentally reverse engineering bot algorithms, and this one looked trivial:
  • scan all articles modified within the last <time-period> for "www.vam.ac.uk"
  • in members of that set, scan the associated history log for "VAwebteam"
Seeing that you ran a bot, I had assumed that your mass-revert had been bot-assisted, because even your humble friend and narrator is not Monkish enough to manually scan a user's edit history and open every article on it. :-)
FYI, the reason why I keep wikilinking the WP:SHORTs in my posts is for the benefit of the nuggets ... it's like a part of my DNA reminding me that someone who only discovered Wikipedia within the past <48 hours> will read this page, and just like happened to me when I was that green (and you, too, gentle reader), their first thought is inevitably, "What the four-letter-expletive are they talking about?" ... think of it as a genetic predisposition to embrace the extended spirit behind WP:DBTN based upon "it's always the First Time for somebody," so just remember a time when you knew less about it than they do now, and don't just write it off as a symptom of my OCD ... having said that, maybe Some Other Editor will remember to wikilink more often. —68.239.79.82 03:08, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

OK! Is this resolved now? — Athaenara ✉ 03:20, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

GOSH! I hadn't realised putting what I thought would be helpful links would cause such a fantastic debate. When I embarked on looking at Wikipedia pages my intention was to add links to established articles to point visitors to other helpful information. I didn't feel it was right to rewrite articles people had carefully set up, even adding a little further information I felt could upset the balance of the article. The V&A's pages I linked to held pages of information and images that might overload a page in wikipedia if reproduced there but might enhance a reader's knowledge or interest if they visited them. I put the links in 'External links' as I thought it would misleading to put them in as a 'Reference' as I had not written any of the content on the wikipedia page and just thought an 'External link' could be added if a visitor to wikipedia thought it might be useful.

The content on the V&A's site is written by specialist curators who write with an unbiased point of view so I thought it was safe to link to it. Also, the V&A is not a commercial organisation so again thought it was ok to link to it. When I looked through many of the related topics on wikipedia users had already linked to the V&A, eg. Art Deco but I see this link has been removed. I'm wondering if something in the workings of wikipedia has been a little overzealous in removing everything to do with the V&A now we have been highlighted!!

Obviously it looks like I need a bit of hand holding to get used to contributing to wikipedia and would like to take up offers of help. Already, the information provided on this page and mytalk page have been very useful. So, just to clarify... - if I go to a talk page of a related article and ask to add a link it's ok? - if I add content and then put a related link, books in as a reference that's ok? - if I add images and say where I got them from that's ok? I'm not fluent in wikispeak so am deciphering slowly... Hopefully this has not prevented me from contributing to wikipedia as it would be a shame not be able to share the V&A's information and images. Thank you for all your help and interest. VAwebteam 09:33, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. I think what you describe is indeed the way forward. Hope that you can help us enhance the wikipedia (I am sure you can), and if you have questions, remarks etc. don't hesitate to leave me a message on my talkpage. --Dirk Beetstra T C 09:41, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
VAwebteam ... I think that a better approach than leaving messages on each individual talk page is to collect a list of articles and proposed links on your own sandbox page (I'll show you how to make one) and review them with Some Other Editor ... I'm in a rush at the moment, but now that you've resumed contact, let's close this COI/N discussion, and move further dialog to the VAwebteam talk page ... look for my message there, and we'll star your lessons ... everyone kewl with that? —68.239.79.82 10:21, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
That would be ok by me. Johnbod 12:48, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
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