Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate your contributions to the .htaccess article, but for legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material, and as a consequence, your addition will most likely be deleted.
Feel free to re-submit a new version of the article. You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. This part is crucial: say it in your own words.
If the external website belongs to you, and you want to allow Wikipedia to use the text — which means allowing other people to modify it — then you must include on the external site the statement "I, (name), am the author of this article, (article name), and I release its content under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 and later."
Please stop adding inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. It is considered spamming and Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or promotion. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, additions of links to Wikipedia will not alter search engine rankings. If you continue spamming, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. And yes, I did see that you have removed other peoples' warnings from your talk. -- intgr08:24, 23 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your kind and informative article and link about the GNU Free Documentation license! I just spent half an hour reading up on it and it is definately something I will be using in the future.. I am curious if you are referring to a specific site or url when you suggest to use the GNFDL?
I am not a spammer, if you look at the links that I was placing in the external links sections, they were incredibly relevant and helpful to the article at hand. I'm afraid that I am just an ignorant wikipedia user..
This is the general guideline I've been following [External_links]
No page should be linked from a Wikipedia article unless its inclusion is justified. Note that since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links may not alter search engine rankings.
Please don't ban me or blacklist me, I am a web professional and I have no interest in spam, linking, referrals, etc.. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain what I was doing wrong, I like to learn and clean up articles on wikipedia.
I am pretty unexperienced with wiki's so I had no idea that I wasn't supposed to remove a warning thing sorry I am still getting the hang of talk, discussion, syntax, policies, etc.. but I have really been learning as I go. I really made an effort to only include high-quality links when I added them. I also cleaned up older links, submitted an htaccess draft, organize and clean interesting articles, etc.. but my efforts have really been minimal as I still don't have the hang of wikipedia.
It would help me to know why the external links I added were viewed as spam, as I definately am not a spammer and I would like to follow the rules :)
> kind and informative article and link about the GNU Free Documentation license!
It's actually a standard warning template {{nothanks}} to warn users about adding copyrighted content that was not licensed under the GFDL. In particular, you violated copyrights when making your edit to the .htaccess article (diff), which you copied from the Apache user manual. Note that most of the content was inappropriate anyway, since Wikipedia is not a user manual (see WP:NOT and WP:MOS).
Note that if you've contributed original content to Wikipedia, you have already used the GFDL license — all original text posted on Wikipedia is licensed under the GFDL.
> they were incredibly relevant and helpful to the article at hand.
Well, helpful or not, clearly Wikipedia cannot link to every useful article about a popular topic — in fact, this is discouraged, Wikipedia is not a link directory.
What particularly annoys editors is adding many links to a single web site (www.askapache.com in this case), especially when the web site is clearly not established; this is considered using Wikipedia for promotion, which is disallowed. WP:SPAM states:
"Review your intentions. Wikipedia is not a space for personal promotion or the promotion of products, services, Web sites [...]"
"Don't gratuitously set off our spam radar. [...] Adding the same link to many articles. The first person who notices you doing this will go through all your recent contributions with an itchy trigger finger on the revert button. And that's not much fun."
It is best not to link to your own web sites in the first place, per WP:COI.
The first person who notices you doing this will go through all your recent contributions with an itchy trigger finger on the revert button. And that's not much fun
Wow you weren't kiddin, almost all of my contributions over the past year have been labeled as spam and whole sections that I spent time going through and checking out were just reverted.
Oh well, live and learn. :)
Adding the same link to many articles.
I assume this also means domain, since I wasn't posting duplicate links, just that site has such good info.
The best advice, in my opinion, is to only stick to official links and resist the temptation to add other links, since linking is tangential to Wikipedia's mission (see WP:NOT). Linking to established link directories such as DMOZ is also encouraged, since this offloads the burden of maintaining external links to a project specifically aimed at that. The templates {{directory request}} and {{dmoz}} can be used for that.
Of course linking to reliable sources that can be used to verify facts on Wikipedia should be included in the 'references' section, preferably using the WP:FOOT footnote format — they do not fall under the external links guideline as long as they are considered to be reliable sources.
