User talk:SchuBomb

Sorry about that. I thought that you were yet another kid trying to put his name in the record slot (I've reverted a lot of these, on Minesweeper and elsewhere). However, I'm concerned that unless we can find reliable sources that talk about the world record, this entire section will have to go. I'll remove the message. yandman 10:03, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

My mistake. I should have been clearer. It's not the content that's the problem, it's the fact that you use the wrong tone. Never use the second person in an article, and try not to sound like a guide, if you see what I mean. If you can rewrite the section using the same phrasing as in Sudoku that'll be fine. I'm sorry to have deleted it, but I prefer an incomplete Wikipedia to an imperfect one. Anyway, all you have to do is edit your previous version ("history" tab). Once again, thanks for your contributions. yandman 16:53, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Re: Minesweeper

I'm really sorry man, I wasn't looking at the changes you made from the right perspective. You see, it looked to me like you blindly added your changes after they were reverted, but I see I was wrong. I've reverted back to your revision. Sorry again! — JeremyTalk 06:30, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Regarding your revert to Minesweeper (computer game)

I am curious as to why you reverted my edits and said they were "Unneccesary and incorrect changes". Please refer to external link policy with regards to why these links were removed. With regard to this section, these external links are in violation of the following points:

1. Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article.

Very few of these links bring up anything that isn't already included in the article already. If some of them do, they should be used as references within the actual article and not as sites tagged on to the end.

3. Links mainly intended to promote a website.

They were almost all personal sites that are linked to from here to solely promote and create traffic to their sites.

4. Links to sites that primarily exist to sell products or services.

A lot of these links are offering a product, some even require you to buy it after a trial.

8. Direct links to documents that require external applications (such as Flash or Java) to view the relevant content, unless the article is about such rich media.

Many of these links just go to Flash/Java versions of the game.

10. Links to social networking sites (such as MySpace), discussion forums or USENET.

Several of these links go straight to discussion forums and even chat rooms.

11. Links to blogs and personal web pages, except those written by a recognized authority.

Several are blogs and most are personal webpages of some sort.

Also according to this policy, "it is not Wikipedia's purpose to include a comprehensive list of external links related to each topic. 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. If the site or page to which you want to link includes information that is not yet a part of the article, consider using it as a source first." This basically means that you shouldn't be linking to things just to link to something. You should have fewer links that more. If there are specific links you think contain important information, they should be used as sources first.

Please also refer to what Wikipedia is not. This page clearly states that Wikipedia is not "mere collections of external links or Internet directories. There is nothing wrong with adding one or more useful content-relevant links to an article; however, excessive lists can dwarf articles and detract from the purpose of Wikipedia." The list was excessively long. Most reliable editors will agree that even five links can be excessive. This one had more than 40! Even the article for George W. Bush only has five external links and lord knows there are a lot more out there than just those.

To top it all off, there was at least one double-link (a link that went to two different sections of the same site), at least one triple link (same fashion as the double, just to three pages instead of two), non-English sites (this is an English encyclopedia), and at least one dead link.

The cleanup-tag was in place and I cleaned it up based on Wikipedia policy that all editors are required to follow. If you disagree with these reasons, please discuss them here and I will talk about them with you. If you would like to discuss them link-by-link, that is fine as well. Until then, I will revert your edit and any subsequent edits until a consensus can be reached. Please keep in mind the policies in which you must adhere to when editing Wikipedia, including WP:EL and WP:NOT. Thank you. --pIrish ^{talk, contribs} 20:34, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

"1. Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article.

   Very few of these links bring up anything that isn't already included in the article already. If some of them do, they should be used as references within the actual article and not as sites tagged on to the end."

I found that nearly all of them did include things that aren't in the article aldready. I don't think you looked very hard at them

"3. Links mainly intended to promote a website.

   They were almost all personal sites that are linked to from here to solely promote and create traffic to their sites."

Some are personal sites, but I believe most were not linked on wikipedia by the owners: I've linked many myself.

"4. Links to sites that primarily exist to sell products or services.

   A lot of these links are offering a product, some even require you to buy it after a trial."

Offering a product is not a problem. Any that require you to buy something to use it should be removed, but I think you seem to avoid the word "primarily" in many of these reasons.

"8. Direct links to documents that require external applications (such as Flash or Java) to view the relevant content, unless the article is about such rich media.

   Many of these links just go to Flash/Java versions of the game

10. Links to social networking sites (such as MySpace), discussion forums or USENET.

   Several of these links go straight to discussion forums and even chat rooms."

Fair enough, so remove them, don't just remove the entire links section.

"11. Links to blogs and personal web pages, except those written by a recognized authority.

   Several are blogs and most are personal webpages of some sort."

I think you're stretching "of some sort" a bit too far here. If it says "x's website" or something like that, fair enough, but just because a webpage is owned by an individual does not make it a personal webpage.

Seriously man, removing the entire links section and just replacing one or two links looks a lot more like vandalism to me than any kind of help- maybe you should have just removed the links that violated the rules you gave. I'm adding a few links that unambiguously do not violate these rules, though I'm sure you'll find a way to construe that they do. SchuBomb 02:39, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Err...I'm not a man. :O

I kept the links that showed up within the first few hits searching "minesweeper" on Google as these are probably noteworthy in their own right (afterall, they didn't come within the top five hits by being Bob's Minesweeper Site that gets visited by twenty people monthly).

Perhaps deleting all of them was a little rash, however, once I did start going through them on an individual basis, I wasn't finding anything worth noting (that I hadn't already kept). I even considered going through each one and putting it with a point from the policy it was violating because I just wasn't finding any that should be there, but with more than forty links, that got really tiresome really fast.

I don't mind if you add a few that you think don't break policy, but don't add the entire section back in. Most of those did violate WP:EL and, those that I found that weren't in violation of it, I kept or re-added. Please do also keep in mind that the fewer external links, the better. It is a common goal here on Wikipedia to keep these sections extremely small or even non-existent if at all possible. Adding links just for the sake of adding links rather goes against that idea. Always keep in mind that links should be used as sources first. If they can't be used as sources, they probably don't belong in the article at all (unless it is an official site for the topic). Thank you. --pIrish ^{talk, contribs} 02:55, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

...though I'm sure you'll find a way to construe that they do. Please remember to assume good faith. I regularly clean up external links in articles that are tagged to do so and I only clean up articles that I have no bias towards or against. This way, I am looking at each link through policy and standards rather than looking at them as which sites I like or prefer to visit. I'm only working to better these articles so they meet Wikipedia standards and may possibly have a chance at becoming good or featured articles some day. They have no way of becoming that if a clean up of a ridiculously long external links section doesn't happen. --pIrish ^{talk, contribs} 03:16, 8 May 2007 (UTC)