User talk:Damianrafferty

April 2008

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Waterboarding do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection 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, 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. Thank you. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 13:35, 29 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

April 2009

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Baaba Maal has been reverted.

Your edit here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove unwanted links and spam from Wikipedia. The external link you added or changed is on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. The external links I reverted were matching the following regex rule(s): \bflickr\.com/(?:photos|groups|search)\b (links: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flykr/sets/257559/). If the external link you inserted or changed was to a media file (e.g. an image file) on an external server, then note that linking to such files may be subject to Wikipedia's copyright policy and therefore probably should not be linked to. Please consider using our upload facility to upload a suitable media file.

If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 14:02, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Linking to Kew Gardens a lot

Hello, Damianrafferty. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about ensuring their edits are verified by reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:

Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).
Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you.--McGeddon (talk) 12:16, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

May 2014

Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to Black pepper may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "[]"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:

File:Pepper vine.JPG|Pepper vine, Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, India]]
{{Herbs & spices}}]

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 14:35, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Link canvassing

Please stop adding inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. 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. If you continue spamming, you may be blocked from editing Wikipedia. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 14:36, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Jamie - have you seen the links? They are absolutely appropriate and not commercial in nature. I am puzzled. Could you give me an instance where a link to one of the world's foremost centres of knowledge on botany contravenes any guidelines?

I understand why there has been concern about your addition of these links; a quick Google search shows that you are strongly associated with Kew. On the other hand, you are quite right in saying that in many cases these are highly appropriate external links – often much more appropriate than some of the existing external links. Kew is one of the world's foremost botanical centres and the information available in the pages whose links you added is authoritative and informative. I do not believe that the links you added to those plant pages on my watchlist constitute "spamming".

I strongly suggest that you disclose your relationship with Kew at User:Damianrafferty which will help to limit the conflict of interest. I will check and then restore some of the links which were removed if I think they add value to the article. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:52, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Peter coxhead - I have edited my profile as suggested. I am not (and never have been) a staff member of Kew but have done freelance work for them and I have now noted that. I tried to be highly judicious in choice of links to ensure they were of clear benefit and to avoid anything other than a factual description of what they were. Having such good information on the Kew site but unconnected to Wikipedia always seemed a shame to me. 16:47, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I accept that the Kew site offers excellent information, and I really don't want to discourage you. Adding external links does require care. Firstly you need to check that the link hasn't been used as a reference, since external links are meant to be extras. Secondly you need to be sure that the link is added to the right article; for example you added a Kew link relating to the Common Snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, to the genus article Galanthus rather than the species article. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:31, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Peter, I see some of the links have been put back in and many not. And some should I agree have been more finely targeted such as the snowdrop link. I love Wikipedia and appreciate the remarkable effort that volunteers such as yourself and ohnoitsjamie put in to make it one of the best things about the internet. On the other hand, I have to personally confess to being utterly discouraged by notes (not from you I might add) accusing me of spamming and so on and I feel like the proverbial fool who pulled the tiger's tail.

Well, I understand why Ohnoitsjamie reacted in that way: when you do a lot of Wikipedia editing, you spend far, far too much time undoing undesirable edits – either idiotic or malicious – and fall into a "better safe than sorry" mode. However, I think the actions taken in your case were wrong. Wikipedia requires editors to show judgement, not just blindly follow rules. Do you have any other Kew links you'd like to add? Peter coxhead (talk) 16:55, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Peter and thank you. There were links from the Tea and Coffee pages and perhaps a broader idea would be to link relevant plant profiles more routinely to help with citations and generally useful links. There are no fewer than 488 detailed profiles at http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/plants-fungi/species-browser?query&habitat=0&family=0&country=0 all written to be scientifically informative but accessible. I won't be adding them myself but it would be great if editors knew they were there and considered how they could be of use as a matter of course. Kew also has all kinds of specialist databases http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/research-data/resources/databases that may be of use for reference but that's a bit beyond my own level of expertise!