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AQUIND Interconnector protest group?

The AQUIND Interconnector is a controversial proposed sub-sea electricity cable that will come ashore in Portsmouth in England. The article until recently only had one external link - the official link for the project. However, today the https://stopaquind.com protest website has been added, so a reader would understand that the project is controversial and why. The article already describes why the project is controversial and who has protested against it. Personally I think that the external link is reasonably well written - much better than a lot of protest group websites - and adds balance to the article. I'm minded to leave it but would love to hear what other more knowledgeable editors think. --10mmsocket (talk) 18:18, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I'll say one thing, for a protest site that's one of the best I've ever seen. It's not a frothing personal opinion disaster like many, and it actually has some really good info. It has much better info on the route it's going to take, the construction methods etc, than the official site. So I say we step back and look at it from that perspective. If this wasn't a protest website, but was just a regular site that contained that much info on the project route and construction would we include it? Would we even question it? If so, then why would this being a protest site change that when it's still info? I'm usually anti protest site inclusion, since they're rarely even marginally coherent, but this one is really good. Canterbury Tail talk 18:48, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. That's a really useful analysis and it echoes my own thoughts. Hopefully you can see why I'm minded to keep it and am therefore seeking advice and ultimately consensus here. 10mmsocket (talk) 18:54, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
If nobody's objecting, then there's no need to formally establish consensus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:28, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Good point. So I'm looking for consensus with myself as normally I would delete such a link. 10mmsocket (talk) 08:19, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
I guess it would be good to note on the link that it is a website with a lot of extra information beyond what we cover on Wikipedia or what is covered in other external links, and that that site is maintained by a protest group. Currently I do think that it is a bit strange that we list a link to a protest group whereas we do not have significant prose in the article that the protest group exists and how 'notable' they are. Dirk Beetstra T C 08:40, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

When I was editing the Language identification article, I saw a warning message:

No red links or linkspamming. This article is not a free license for you to spam or advertise your software on this subject, or any other. Entries will be promptly removed, and repeat offenders will be blocked from further editing.

I'm not sure if I understand this warning message: are editors of this article strictly forbidden from adding external links to open-source projects? Jarble (talk) 15:41, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

That was posted in 2016. Never saw it again until you just mentioned it. In retrospect the wording and the page it applies to may not be correct or fully warranted as posted, so it has been removed. -- Alexf(talk) 15:58, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
That sounds like a statement about Wikipedia:List selection criteria, which is internal links rather than external links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:46, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
@Jarble: the message is old and has been removed, but some comments from my side. We do have criteria on what is put into a list. Either they are 'complete' (which for lists of products or lists of companies is generally impossible), or they need to 'have a reason' to be in the list. For some pages that means that if the item is not notable in Wikipedia terms (i.e., it does not have an own article) that you need a reference that is reliable/significant, and that is totally independent of the 'item' (not some blog post by someone mentioning the product, not some article in a mainstream journal that has a fleeting mention of the product, not a mainstream journal article written (or asked to be written) by someone who is involved in the production of 'item'. For some articles we go a step further, and we do not include anything that does not have an independent Wikipedia article (i.e., no redlinked items, hence no items that have no independent notability). I think the last option is what is meant here. We have these rules to avoid spamming of anything else (basically enforcing WP:SOAPBOX #4/#5). Dirk Beetstra T C 06:09, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
@Beetstra: The message was about external links. Does Wikipedia have a notability requirement for external links as well as lists? Jarble (talk) 06:27, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
@Jarble: that is basically the same. We do not create lists of external links, we do not create lists with 10 bluelinks and 1 external link to avoid the redlink, etc. WP:ELLIST has some more information. And we do not put links to individual products in the external links sections, nor making sentences like 'Also [www.thiscompany.com thiscompany] makes this product'. Dirk Beetstra T C 08:02, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Museum Folkwang

Hi, I just noticed that many of our external links to the Museum Folkwang site and its associated pages for artworks are broken due to a website update they did in the recent past. How do I go about requesting a bot to fix all of these links? Thank you. Viriditas (talk) 21:29, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

@Viriditas: on the botreq page (user:GreenC, is this also approved for your bot?). Dirk Beetstra T C 06:59, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Kurzgesagt

A new user recently added an external link to a Kurzgesagt video to Great Filter and was subsequently reverted. However, WP:YOUTUBE provides some leeway for this link. Is this site appropriate for Wikipedia? Should I be asking this question on the reliable source noticeboard instead? I’m trying to create a paper trail for discussion about Kurzgesagt as an external link/reliable source, because I haven’t been able to find any past discussion on the subject. I have no real feelings on it either way, but it should be discussed so that if it comes up again, we can link to some kind of consensus on the matter. Thanks. Viriditas (talk) 22:50, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

@Viriditas: you are talking about this edit I presume. I am unconvinced that the link should be in the external links section, and unsure whether it should be added to the linkfarm of further reading. It may be a good reference, but that is another question. The revert was for ‘unreliable source’, but this was not a source in the first place.
I would argue that we do not link to youtube, but to https://kurzgesagt.org/portfolio/why-alien-life-would-be-our-doom/ anyway. Again, maybe as a proper reference (and if that is being questioned an RSN discussion may be of interest), but not just ‘dumped’ into an EL section for every article where it may be of interest. Dirk Beetstra T C 06:57, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
I watched the video. I liked it, until it got to the advertisement at the end.
But I don't think that it clears WP:ELNO#EL1. It provided nothing beyond what should already be in the article. The only difference is that it's a video. It's possible that some day editors will decide that "same stuff, but in video" is a valid reason for an external link, but right now, that's on the generally unwanted list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:58, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Totally agree with WithwhatamIdoing above. David J Johnson (talk) 12:44, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
I also agree with this. The EL shouldn't be tossed for being a YouTube video necessarily, but because it does not provide a unique resource (WP:ELNO). SWinxy (talk) 23:20, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Ghostarchive

I could not think of a better place to post this: Am I the only one who finds Ghostarchive a little shady? I'm worried that we are mass linking to a website with no identified owners or supporting organization, and whose only contact form seems to be its tumblr account.

Contrast that with the Wayback Machine, which is hosted by the Internet Archive or perma.cc, which is maintained by the Harvard Law School library.

This is not only an "optics" problem: I'm concerned about the long-term stability of such a website and its ability to meet our WP:COPYLINK requirements, which anonymous websites don't have a good track record of doing. JBchrch talk 11:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@JBchrch: And archive.today doesn't suffer from the same problems? We have over a million or two links to that site, and we do not know who owns archive.today. And we knew who owned Webcite and look where it is now.
I personally think that as long as the site does the job (archiving links), it doesn't matter who owns it. We link to a whole bunch of sources here, and I am sure we do not know the owner of many of those sites. You state anonymous websites don't have a good track record of staying up, but didn't provide any examples?
Alternate archive sites are not replacements for the Wayback machine, they supplement the Wayback machine. GreenC said that Wayback has more, a lot more, than any other provider. and it will stay that way for the foreesable future. However there are many sites the Wayback machine can't archive. Just today someone contacted me regarding a dead link that had a broken archive on Wayback, but a working one on archive.today. Many of these ghostarchive links are Youtube archives, which no other archive can handle properly. The wayback machine has very recently trying to fix their Youtube archiving capability, but it has a long way to go I think. Internet Archive is preparing to archive about 9000 Youtube videos a day from all Wikimedia properties, which is good i guess.
I spoke to someone working at the IA, who said they aren't even going to work on Instagram, Facebook, or Linkedin archiving. Ghostarchive and Archive.today are doing all three of those sites. I use all three sites quite heavily, they have their own strengths and weaknesses. It's about using the right tool for the job. Also i think this a better place for WP:LINKROT talk page where the archive guys hang out. Rlink2 (talk) 15:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
@Rlink2 Just to clarify, the reference to anonymous websites was only in relation to COPYLINK, not the ability to stay up. JBchrch talk 15:58, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Archive provider loss is a real problem. In the past few years we have lost 5. One lesson from WebCite is you can kind of predict ahead of time: site goes down often, lacks support, no new features, bugs not fixed, etc.. By comparison, Archive.today and Ghost appear well attended. Also of the five, 4 were conscientious to arrange moving before they shut down ie. Pandora, Europa Archives, Proni Web Archives, Collections Canada. These were institutional. That leaves WebCite as the outlier case, but also most similar to Ghost and Archive.today as an anonymous one-person provider. It is a problem of "who watches the watchers". It might be as simple as a best-practice that any archive at Ghost have a backup at another provider, or some other arrangement to ensure against total loss of Ghost. The newer the provider, the shorter estimated lifespan it will have. -- GreenC 03:39, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

The couple of times in the last week that I have come across a ghostarchive link with Firefox (under Win10/64; FF95.x and 96, with several extensions) I have got "ReplayWeb.page could not be loaded due to the following error: SecurityError: The operation is insecure." Another browser (Brave) works. My response is to replace these links with the Wayback Machine, if available, saying why in the summary. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 22:26, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
Can you try in incognito mode to verify it's not a plugin? -- GreenC 22:33, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
@Pol098: Have you tried clicking on the "archived page not working?" thing on the side bar? That usually works, at least for me. Rlink2 (talk) 23:55, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
@Rlink2:@GreenC: Private mode doesn't make any difference as I have the plugins enabled in that mode, but I tried it on a Win7/32 virtual machine with a Firefox without extensions. Same error. I clicked on the "archived page not working?" thing on the side bar, and the page then did load. I still think this behaviour is completely unacceptable. It's not just the cumbersomeness and extra click; anyone who comes across it is likely to give up in frustration rather than look at the sidebar. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 00:31, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
@Pol098: SecurityError: The operation is insecure sounds to me like you are not on the HTTPS version of the site, make sure the beginning begins with https:// and not http://. Anyway, if I encountered any given website and it doesn't load, and there is a very visible link saying "click here if the site doesn't work", I would click on it before giving up. Archive.today also has issues with not working with certain DNS providers if I recall. Rlink2 (talk) 00:49, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
I'm writing as an editor, not a reader; I have no particular interest in opening the archived link, but in making Wikipedia work for everyone. My posting here is not a request for help but a bug report. If the link is http:// where it should be https://, whoever inserted it is at fault. My view was and is (unless this issue is fixed so that the link opens when clicked in any browser without the reader needing to do anything) that ghostarchive links should be replaced where possible by Wayback ones. I've done a couple. By the way, I didn't notice the sidebar note "click here if the site doesn't work" (my reaction was "this doesn't work properly, it needs fixing" rather than "how can I read this page"). I would expect a lot of people would just give up without reading the small print. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 11:16, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
@Pol098: making Wikipedia work for everyone is one of my biggest goals as well, it drives everything I do.
FWIW, I was able to reproduce the issue after searching the error string on Duckduckgo. You need to have "Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed" in settings turned off. It was off in my Firefox by default, so you must have set it on manually. Rlink2 (talk) 13:59, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
@Rlink2: Good detective work/debugging; I do indeed always set cookies to delete in Firefox. I'd still call this an error, and unacceptable - I'm surely not the only person to delete cookies - in particular, it happens during a session without closing the browser, but even at the beginning of a session it's not OK (links archived with other archivers don't do this). If I were trying to resolve the issue I'd contact the ghostarchive people with a bug report; as it is I avoid ghostarchive. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 14:22, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
@Pol098: Each site is different, there will always be a very small amount of people that can't access any given site on the internet. Like i said before, there are people that can't click on archive.today links because of the DNS issue either. Some people avoid archive.today for the same reasons. And even archive.org doesn't work in certain browsers and configs. What matters is that the links work for 99.99% of readers and editors, which it seems to do. And if the links don't work, there is something on the sidebar to help those few. Rlink2 (talk) 14:50, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
@Rlink2: While I don't post every archive link, I also try to archive the same page on other archive sites, so even if one link goes down or one can't access it, there are other archive sites with the same material. WhisperToMe (talk) 17:08, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
@WhisperToMe
That makes sense, I think that's the perfect approach. Archive.today or similar could one day just go down with all of the data lost, so having the data on multiple archive sites is critical. We already lost one archive "just like that" which was Webcite. But again, Wikipedia or Archive.org could disappear tomorrow too (highly unlikely but possible)
Archive.org's mission is more of "save forever", and the other archive sites' mission is more of "save for an indefinite period of time".
Archive.today can not archive Youtube videos, leaving ghostarchive.org and archive.org as the two ones I know can do Youtube. Sites like Facebook and Instagram do not work with archive.org either, but do work on the other two sites. So for many sites it is either archive.today, ghostarchive.org, or no archive at all. Rlink2 (talk) 18:38, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
@Rlink2: For PDFs I find megalodon.jp works very well as an archiver, so I use that and the Wayback Machine to have two archives of PDFs. Then I can archive the respective Google Cache through archive.today, so there's a copy of the raw text in that one. WhisperToMe (talk) 21:49, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
@WhisperToMe
I didn't know megalodon.jp can archive PDFs, thanks for letting me know. Ghostarchive can also do PDFs, https://ghostarchive.org/archive/dSvw5?wr=true for example.
Ghostarchive uses webrecorder technology that runs scripts in a sandbox. You can see the difference here on online graphing calculator:
This is just a example, there exist sites that only work with archive.org and sites that only work with archive.today
It is good that you care about linkrot it is an very important issue. There are also other nice archive sites like archive.st, freezepage, etched.page.
You rekindling this discussion today is ironic, because one of my favorite Youtube videos was recently removed and I found out today (luckily, I had archived it). Rlink2 (talk) 22:31, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
@Rlink2: You're very welcome! Link rot is one of the biggest issues on Wikipedia and I work every day to try to combat it, but it's very frustrating. I would like to get in touch with the Webcitation people to try to get them to put the links back up, as there are some pages which I could at the time only archive there, and I want to double-archive those pages. I wish we had bots or other systemic efforts to auto-archive stuff put on here. WhisperToMe (talk) 23:26, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
@WhisperToMe
Link rot is one of the biggest issues on Wikipedia and I work every day to try to combat it, but it's very frustrating. Yes, I try my best to combat link rot, some like my work some don't. But i think overall linkrot prevention is a net gain and everyone stands to benefit.
Theres a couple of other great editors on here working on linkrot. GreenC, cyberpower, whoop whoop pull up, brownhairedgirl, and you, are ones that come to mind.
. I would like to get in touch with the Webcitation people to try to get them to put the links back up, as there are some pages which I could at the time only archive there, and I want to double-archive those pages. Appreently, GreenC (works at archive.org) there are some webcite pages archived at archive.today, which could be useful for finding a dead page. Regarding webcite itself GreenC said There is still some thread of hope, but what he's attempting to do, will take time and money he has to raise..
I wish we had bots or other systemic efforts to auto-archive stuff put on here. Me too, at the very least a bot that archives all the references on new articles created would be nice. I do archive refs on new articles manually from time to time, and I get edit thanked quite a bit for it. I know of people that would support such a bot. Rlink2 (talk) 23:51, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

@GreenC: To combat archive loss I try to archive the same links on several archives, so even if one goes down, there are at least one or two other copies. WhisperToMe (talk) 08:16, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Over at Camille (Monet), at the bottom of the page, I have a link to the painting in the collection of Kunsthalle Bremen. Here is what the link looks like:

https://dawnworldhub.blogspot.com/2024/02/what-is-e-commerce-and-its-types.html

When I click on it on mobile, I don’t see anything except a blank collection page. If I go back into the site and search for the painting, it will show, but any attempt to use this URL as a static link fails. Can anyone tell me how to create a static link from this URL so it can be used on the Wikipedia entry? Thank you. Viriditas (talk) 21:40, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

@Viriditas
Strange,the link does not work for me either. It only worked (sometimes) on a specific browser and specfic configuration, I tried everything else and it didn't work.
Sometimes, when you archive, it stores the copy. I tried the archiving website discussed right above us and it seems to work: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/GUndp?wr=true . The image sometimes disapeears and comes back as well, so at least with the archive it will be accessable. Rlink2 (talk) 13:47, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. I don’t know if someone from the museum is reading this or not, but there’s now a static page available for the entry:
https://www.artefact.kunsthalle-bremen.de/sammlung/sammlungshighlights/claude-monet/text/
I’m not sure why this suddenly appeared. It’s very possible that I tried to link to the wrong page in the first place. Viriditas (talk) 22:57, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
I don't know if it has become normal (first time I saw it) but the addition of the below link, along with the official site and two others, created External links bloat.
  • {{CongLinks | congbio=B001274 | votesmart=121610 | fec=H0AL05163 | congress=mo-brooks/1987 }}
I think this is a wrong way to present links. Even with just the "Official website" it creates to many links -- Otr500 (talk) 21:36, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

This is what the above generates via {{CongLinks}}:

-- GreenC 00:56, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

The template says "This will aid in the maintenance and standardization of these external links." Maybe, but it also makes dead links impossible to detect and add archives for, which is the most common form of link maintenance. In cases where URLs change structure (moves), those are better done by bot (via WP:URLREQ) because in almost all link migration cases, some are left behind ie. are dead, so you have to check each URL individually, one can't deal with it properly at a universal template level. Custom templates like this are not good link maintenance. Stick with standard links the standard tools are designed to maintain. -- GreenC 01:04, 10 April 2022 (UTC)
In the ==External links== section, dead links aren't supposed to be replaced by archives, except in unusual circumstances. They're supposed to be removed. (IABot is too stupid to stay out of the ==External links== section, which is why you see so many bad archive links there.) I have considered whether something like this would be helpful for films, which also seem to sprout the same set of links in every article.
As for maintenance, the reason we created external link templates is because it reduces the maintenance burden. If the website rearranges, sometimes they keep the same identifiers, and one central fix to the template will fix all of the ELs on wiki. That's one edit by any editor, not bot programming followed by hundreds or thousands of bot edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:58, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

use of distrotest.net in EL

Should we be adding links to "a free online emulator for operating systems" to Linux distribution articles? Huggums537 (talk · contribs) has been doing so.

distrotest.net HTTPS links HTTP links

I reverted one addition based on both Wikipedia:NOTHOWTO and that the link does not add to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject. I may have been hasty, but would like some discussion with a larger audience. Walter Görlitz (talk) 23:35, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

Keep. I haven't instructed anybody "how-to" do anything, and if seeing the actual primary source of an operating system boot up and run doesn't give the user a greater encyclopedic understanding of the subject, then I have no idea what does. Huggums537 (talk) 23:48, 13 April 2022 (UTC)
I would also like to add that some of these Linux distributions such as Arch Linux, Absolute Linux, or VectorLinux are either difficult to install, or they do not have a Live CD version, and must be installed on the system before they can be seen at all. This gives readers a unique opportunity to understand the primary source of the subject without having to be forced to install it on their own actual hardware when they might not otherwise have been able to do so because of this limitation. Huggums537 (talk) 00:36, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
Keep per @Huggums537. It seems like a useful addition to me. I think that WP:VG does something similar with old DOS video games if there is a copy at the Internet Archive. Rlink2 (talk) 00:04, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
I did not accuse you of providing how to instructions only that this is the purpose of that site. How does the site provide an encyclopedic understanding of the subjects? Seeing a copyrighted painting definitely gives a greater understanding of the work, but I do not see how running a Linux distribution helps a reader gain more understanding of the distro. The sections of that articles are features, and it may help see those, but no help with understanding its security, installation or package classification and support. The site ends up being a how to in that regard—how to run it—but little in the way of understanding how it works, which is what I expect from an encyclopedia article. Walter Görlitz (talk) 05:38, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
but little in the way of understanding how it works Having an opprtunity to test drive the distro obviously helps anyone gain better understanding of how it works. You can run commands, explore system settings, etc..... Including any possible package manager and classifications, like you are saying.
Note that WP:NOTHOWTO is more about the actual article content and not about the external links section.
The external links guideline states:
There are several things that should be considered when adding an external link: Is the site content accessible to the reader? Is the site content proper in the context of the article (useful, tasteful, informative, factual, etc.)? Is the link functioning and likely to remain functional? I'd argue the link meets all three requirements. Rlink2 (talk) 16:38, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
I did not accuse you of providing how to instructions only that this is the purpose of that site. This accusation is even worse since the gross mischaracterization of the site is so far exaggerated, I would even go so far as to say it has kinship with a lie. It is obvious to anyone the primary purpose of the site is a testing platform to see how operating systems work [what they look like, and how they are configured], not any kind of "how to" or "instructional". I have already explained how it has encyclopedic value, but since you don't understand, I explain further. Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. Back in the old days, a picture in a paper encyclopedia was worth a thousand words, but today a video is worth 10,000 on Wikipedia because it is not paper. Having a link to a live demonstration of the primary source right there in your browser is the modern day equivalent of being able to beam a faithful reproduction of that painting so you can examine it up close, and actually run your fingers across the brush strokes of the canvas if you want to. This is because of the dynamic capabilities of Wikipedia. Embrace it. The barbaric notion that something has to have some academic text based function in order to have encyclopedic value is archaic thinking that went out with the paper encyclopedia. Lastly, stop confusing the site with article; The site ends up being a how to in that regard—how to run it—but little in the way of understanding how it works, which is what I expect from an encyclopedia article. The article already does a fine job of explaining all this. So, the reader should already know what to expect. If your complaint is that the site has a F.A.Q. section for their patrons on "how-to" get unstuck if they have a problem, and you are calling that "instructional", then you are really stretching things out of proportion as I said before. You might as well say Youtube links are not allowed because of their extremely extensive "intructional" help section... Huggums537 (talk) 17:18, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
Your response here essentially called me an idiot for not recognizing what was "obvious to anyone".
I believe that your characterization is wrong. The whole purpose of that site is how to run the OS without installing it yourself. What would you call that other than a "how to"? I still see absolutely no encyclopedic value in be able to run through the OS. Clearly you to disagree. Walter Görlitz (talk) 22:17, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
. The whole purpose of that site is how to run the OS without installing it yourself. The purpose of the site is not how to "run" the OS, since it does that for you already.
That "how to" rule applies to encylopedic content anyway, not the external links section, but feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Rlink2 (talk) 22:28, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
Agree to disagree I guess. Huggums537 (talk) 00:09, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
Keep Honestly I don't see why not. Some could argue it's better than linking to an article on the distro and I don't see anything on ELNO that would be against it, other than perhaps #7 but I tested it on multiple devices and browsers and it appears to work on all of them. I'm normally against extraneous links and am pretty militant at removing them, but I can't see a reason to do so to these ones. I know it's not quite the same, but when we discuss media or other interactive items a link to the item is normal to see what is being discussed. That's obviously harder with things like OSs, but this seems to be suitable. I say keep them. Canterbury Tail talk 17:23, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

George Szamuely

One or more IP editors are adding content to the EL section of the BLP George Szamuely and I have been reverting. I don't like to revert so many times, but am confident I am justified. Would appreciate other editors having a look. BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:44, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Ameliorate! and Walter Görlitz, do you think this needs to go to Wikipedia:Requests for page protection for a while? The rules are clear: Disputed links are excluded unless and until there is a consensus to include them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:34, 22 April 2022 (UTC)
If the editor adds the ELs back again I think it would make sense. I would like some on the project to review the links that are posted in the discussion to determine if they should or should not be listed though. Walter Görlitz (talk) 02:00, 22 April 2022 (UTC)
As the disruptive editing has continued, I've put in an RfPP request. The position that BobFromBrockley and Walter Görlitz have argued at the talk page appears to be the correct one, per our external links policy. Curbon7 (talk) 02:08, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Linking to study guides

I have noticed a few articles about novels contain external links to study guides such as Kafka's The Trial. Are study guides appropriate for wikipedia? Medarduss (talk) 10:57, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

It's not feeling like a great match to me, @Medarduss, although I'm unaware of any previous discussions on the subject. I've removed the two linked at The Trial#External links. Now we can wait to see whether anyone objects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:33, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
Thanks @WhatamIdoing. I guess I should probably have done that myself. Medarduss (talk) 12:43, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
The usual rule at WP:ELBURDEN is that if a link is removed, it should stay out until there's a consensus (e.g., a quick discussion on the talk page) to re-add it. So whenever you see links that you're pretty sure are not good for the article, then you should feel free to remove them. But I'm also happy to see editors who balance that by asking for other opinions when they're not sure. You did good. :-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:07, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Good Day

I would like to publish a page for an author (see draft link below), but many of his reference links point to www.amazon.com, which appears to be linked to the black and white spam lists. I ask for your kind approval to review this draft for inclusion. Thank you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Kyle_Jantjies&action=submit — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ruthweb (talk • contribs) 16:33, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

You haven't posted that page yet, so nobody can see it.
Why do you think you need links to Amazon.com? If it's a link to a book, then just take the Amazon link out, and leave in the other information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:03, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

See here - this is the 2nd time the editor has added it. @Ario1234: I don't know what others will say, but you should see this discussion. Doug Weller talk 15:52, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

the book is on Internet Archive
"The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. As of 2022, the Internet Archive holds over 34 million books and texts, 7 million movies, videos and TV shows, 800 thousand software programs, 14 million audio files, 4 million images, 1 million media files, 2 million TV clips, and over 681 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine." Ario1234 (talk) 20:17, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
Generally no it's a violation of WP:COPYLINK. There's been a few conversations on here before and Archive.org is embroiled in an legal challenge around it, but does not actually have permission to have copies of these online. The thing is also we've had a few occasions of people just uploading books to there and then linking them. Archive.org can have a mission of making all this info free, but the fact is they don't have the legal permissions usually. Canterbury Tail talk 20:45, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
Even if there were no copyright concerns at all (e.g., a 19th century book), editors normally list books under Wikipedia:Further reading instead of in the ==External links== section. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:04, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
Canterbury, does not actually have permission to have copies of these online. Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. is settled law now. Libraries do not require permission to make scanned books available for search and limited preview. The unsettled law is Controlled Digital Lending which is one of the options at IA if users 1) log into their registered account and 2) click through to a separate page to access it. -- GreenC 03:11, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
@GreenC but this isn’t limited preview is it? Doug Weller talk 06:32, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
No a simple free account can access the entire book as part of the CDL indicated above, which they don't have permission for. As a result we cannot link to it unless the copyright on that is very clear. Canterbury Tail talk 12:48, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
Permission is required? There is no law that says libraries must have permission to lend holdings. Just the opposite. CDL is based in long-standing existing library law, one copy one lend. It's a pretty conservative position. Google was the the radical change. If you recall, we linked to Google Books during the 10 years of Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., it was a direct link, no registration required. During that trial, there was no court injunction for Google to take the content offline ie. the judge did not find it a problem the content was online, even though Authors Guild had requested an injunction, it was denied, the content was allowed to stay online as an official ruling until the case was settled. Also, web archives such as Wayback Machine and archive.today also have unsettled copyright law. We need to be careful about being too reactionary when it comes to copyright law. -- GreenC 14:01, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
@GreenC we've got two separate discussions. One is where such a link should go, and that's further reading IMHO. The other is the copyright status, and that's for another venue. Doug Weller talk 15:36, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
So in conclusion is linking to Internet Archive allowed or not? Ario1234 (talk) 02:12, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
Why not add it to the further reading section with other books. -- GreenC 03:56, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
Raised at WP:CQ#Are links to the Internet Archive for books in copyright copyright violations?. Doug Weller talk 09:55, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
My "not a lawyer" opinion - what Canterbury Tail said. I don't believe the Hachette case has been settled yet, so I think the legality of content on IA is still under review. COPYLINK advises caution. Even if the internet archive gets clearance, that doesn't mean the content is no longer protected by copyright. It would mean that the way they are using it is adjudged to be fair use. Our own claim to fair use relies on several factors. One - that we are non-profit - is a factor we've chosen to downplay, because we encourage reuse of our content anywhere by anyone for any purpose. We encourage reuse commercially. We encourage reuse in different legal environments where non-free content is handled very differently. This is one reason why in our m:Resolution:Licensing policy the first position is that content should be free. Exemptions should be limited. I'd be more comfortable with such a link if it were in a citation. As it is, it seems to be a link to a book about the same topic of which we write, but not used transformatively in any way - we're just encouraging people to go read a copyrighted work for free on a website that has a (I believe still) dubious right to display it. The primary person liable for any copyright infringement would, of course, be the person who places the link here, but there is downstream risk for reusers, too. Probably not a strong one. But the case for fair use here seems weak at best. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:52, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

I raised the topic at Portal talk:Climbing#Instagram links in External Links section but I'm reposting the discussion here following User:Zerosumnet's advice. The user has repeatedly removed Instagram links from sport climber articles (I've edited Natalia Grossman/@nataliaclimbs and Brooke Raboutou/@brookeclimbs), citing WP:LINKSTOAVOID, but I believe the IG links serve as WP:ELOFFICIAL:

  • These athletes generally don't have "official" sites, i.e. presence on the World Wide Web.
  • I'm not sure about other sports, but at least in sport climbing, Instagram is where athletes post competition updates and put out official releases. Their IG accounts are de facto official sites.
  • For the above athletes and others, the links are checkmark-verified accounts, not fan accounts.

Based on the above, they seem like a straightforward case of WP:ELOFFICIAL and the language, These links are normally exempt from the links normally to be avoided applies here. Adeletron 3030 (talk • edits) 14:32, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

I interpret Instagram for some people as being their official site if there isn't another one that they have and run. While yes we avoid social media links, I think they can have 1 official link, and if that just happens to be a social media link then so be it. However if they have a website, that usually has social media site links in it, then any other social media etc gets culled under the WP:ELOFFICIAL.
I am however more concerned with the amount of "profile" links athletes have when the majority of them just repeat the same information. If a link cannot provide unique encyclopaedic information, not found in other links or the article itself, then it should be removed. We shouldn't have profiles from every possible organization if they don't tell us anything new. Canterbury Tail talk 15:26, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
Thanks and fair point: I think the {{Climber links}} encourages bloat and running afoul of WP:ELMIN (I think we can do without links to media sites, for example). Adeletron 3030 (talk • edits) 15:44, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
That template encourages violations of the "social media directory" rules. It should probably be modified substantially. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:52, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
I see this often in Indian film/television actor/actress articles. If they do have a website as an official page, I'll remove any social media links. If they don't have a stand-alone website, having a single social media link where they interact with fans / other interested people is helpful and for me meets WP:ELYES. Yes, there are some edit-wars on which one to use, but so far nudging towards the talk page, page protection and partial blocks have helped. Ravensfire (talk) 15:43, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Satoshi spam link on Lataro island entry

Hi, This is a genuine question, about an unusual situation.

Lataro, one of the islands of Vanuatu was recently leased by some guy, who decided to rename it “Satoshi island”, and turn it into a “Bitcoin Paradise” commercial platform (whatever that means). As a result, the entry for the island not only has the usual sections on "Geography", "History" (just like other islands of Vanuatu) etc., but also a link to https://www.satoshi-island.com presented as the island's “official website” (sic). That link has been repeatedly added on the page; yet the problem is that it is clearly a promotion for a commercial project of cryptocurrency. Does it really have its place on Wikipedia? I deleted the link as this was my understanding of WP policy, in line with other editors; yet it keeps coming back.

I'd suggest two separate entries: one about Lataro the island itself (with its geology etc.); possibly another one about that “Satoshi island” business venture (like there are other WP links on certain companies, provided they meet the notability criteria etc). If so, that spam link might go on the second page, but would not be polluting the entry on Lataro.

What is your take on this? -- Womtelo (talk) 13:36, 5 August 2022 (UTC).

@Womtelo, you might present this situation to the Wikipedia:Spam blacklist folks. Edit warring to add promotional links is always a bad idea. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:53, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing, Thanks! I just followed your suggestion. -- Womtelo (talk) 18:17, 5 August 2022 (UTC).

Shared Facebook videos

I'm curious as to whether WP:COPYLINK applies to videos of news reports or other reliable sources that people may be sharing on Facebook or other social media accounts. The particular example I thinking of is this one, which is a shared video of a news report. Perhaps since sharing a link isn't technically the same a reposting or re-uploading a video, there's nothing to be worried about and the social media post could be treated as a WP:CONVENIENCE link? I've started a discussion about this at Talk:New South Wales Police Force strip search scandal#Shared SBS video for reference. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:22, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

In that case why not just directly link to the original video that doesn’t have any copyright questions rather than a Facebook reposting link? Canterbury Tail talk 01:19, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
I don't see how this is any different from someone posting the video on their Youtube channel or on Twitter or whatever, it's still a copyvio barring the boundaries of fair use, permission etc. Note we should distinguish between someone uploading a video to their own profile/channel/whatever as happened here, with someone's using social media or their website to share or embed a video that is still on someone else's profile/channel/whatever. The former is a likely copyvio, the latter is a function of social media that whoever uploaded the video either has effectively accepted by participating in the platform or has chosen not to disable. Or if it's a share of something on some other platform or external website that is partly embedded in the social media or website, it's sometimes controversial feature that has sometimes been questioned and some governments have threated or taken action over, but which has otherwise been accepted as legal. And in fact, I think many social media sites may provide means to prevent it, it's just that hardly anyone does because that just makes things worse. (The ability to embed Youtube videos is one except where some do disable the feature.) Note in any event, shares of content on someone else's profile/channel/website/whatever are not something we should be linking to anyway. Not due to copyvio reasons but because we should be linking to the original content as Canterbury Tail said. An except would be when the share itself received significant attention in reliable sources and we include the share as an additional link for readers to check out. Nil Einne (talk) 16:17, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
There is no justification for not linking directly to the copyright holder's site, rather than to somebody else's site where there might be a question of rights. --Orange Mike | Talk 18:54, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
Thank you Canterbury Tail, Nil Einne and Orangemike for your comments. The first time I removed the link, I pretty much gave what you collectively posted above as the reason for doing so. When it was re-added without explanation (as a minor edit), I removed it again and tried to give a more detailed followed up on the article's talk page. The person who re-added the link has since responded on the talk page and stated that they only did so because they were unable to find the original video. They appear to have accepted that the link shouldn't be used; so, maybe this is now resolved. Since people sharing links via social media and other way seems to be not all that unusual these days, perhaps the adding of an {{efn}} or some similar clarification to WP:COPYLINK should be discussed to make reference to this type of link sharing and the concerns related to doing so. -- 21:34, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

RfC on linking to the Kiwi Farms website

Participation is welcome at Talk:Kiwi Farms#RfC on linking to Kiwi Farms. Endwise (talk) 04:12, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Guideline loophole: WP:ELMIN and Twitch streamers/YouTubers

Shortcut
The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Issue 1: both Twitch and YouTube external links may be linked in the infobox, with caveats. There is consensus among editors that having both Twitch and YouTube linked in the infobox is acceptable. Editors however agree that inclusion of both links should not be automatic, but made using common sense, on an article-by-article basis, taking into account how notable and relevant each platform is to the subject in question.


Issue 2: Secondary channels should not be linked to in the infobox, unless covered by reliable sources. A few editors argue that this issue should be left to the discretion of editors, but a significantly more subtantial group of editors believe that linking to secondary channels is excessive. They note that the main channel already links to the secondary channels, cite WP:EL and WP:NOT which discourage excessive linking, and note that WP:INFOBOX states that the purpose of an infobox is to summarize, and not supplant, information found in the body article. As an exception, secondary channels which have received sufficient coverage by reliable sources and are included in the body of the article may be linked in the infobox. Pilaz (talk) 17:51, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

WP:ELMIN is pretty radical: to minimize the number of links, only official link per article is included.

Here comes the issue: Twitch streamers who are also YouTubers. Almost all Twitch streamers maintain a YouTube presence, and while they produce most of their content on Twitch (time-wise), they enjoy a significantly larger audience on YouTube. This leads to a problem that can be visualized in the infoboxes of XQc for example, where two official links are presented: one for the YouTube channel, and one for the Twitch channel. Examples of this involve many other channels, among which Pokimane, Ludwig Ahgren, Karl Jacobs, etc. There is currently no exception listed at WP:ELMIN that fits this scenario.

I'm opening this discussion as a survey. Here are a few options below. Which do you prefer?

  • Option 1 None should be linked in the infobox.
  • Option 2 Only one of the two links should be in the infobox, decided locally on a case-by-case basis.†
  • Option 3 Only one of the two should be linked in the infobox, decided locally on a case-by-case basis, but the unlinked channel may still appear in text form.†
  • Option 4 Both should be linked.

†If you pick these options, which criteria do you believe could work to decide which to keep and which to discard?

Thank you all. Pilaz (talk) 00:07, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm a fan of WP:ELMIN, and will trim an EL-section if I see the need, but I don't look much at infoboxes. I guess it could be argued that " If the subject of the article has more than one official website, then more than one link may be appropriate, under a very few limited circumstances." could apply, at least locally.
Looking at one of your examples, [1], I see it has links to twitch etc, so my default reaction would be "That's enough for ELMIN, then", but I can understand if an infobox-editor has a different perspective. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:44, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
I'm generally of the opinion that if one of the sites has links to the others, then that's the main site and can be used while removing the others. That being said, I do think it would be rather odd to have someone primarily known as a Twitch streamer and not include their Twitch link. Canterbury Tail talk 12:42, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
@Canterbury Tail, sorry but this bugs me. You're generally what? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:03, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
Noting that comment was changed after my question, in BLATANT disregard of WP:REDACT. I'm difficult to please today. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:43, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
Option 4 but with common sense...if a streamer nearly always uses Twitch but.sometimes adds content to their YT, only the Twitch should be linked. Only link both if both are equally used by the streamer. Masem (t) 13:06, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Option 4, a good example that is mentioned above is Ludwig Ahgren who became the most subscribed Twitch streamer of all time but since 2021 is exclusively on YouTube. Sahaib (talk) 18:00, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Option 4. While WP:ELMIN strongly suggests only one official link, the overall purpose is to minimize the amount of external links in an article to those that would provide the most knowledge in the fewest links. So the Twitch and YouTube channels should be linked if the person is notable for being both a Twitch streamer and a YouTuber because both links would give unique coverage (coverage in the sense that they cover a lot of ground). Both infoboxes should only appear when they are notable for both things (e.g. Ludwig has both infoboxes, but not Dream). In the external links section, the same should apply that both links should appear if they are notable for both. SWinxy (talk) 18:44, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Option 4 (notified about this discussion at WikiProject YouTube) Both should be linked if the person is notable as a YouTuber and a Twitch streamer, but only if both are notable/important aspects of their career, otherwise only one should be linked. This should be decided locally on a case-by-case basis based on the coverage of reliable secondary sources. Alduin2000 (talk) 19:29, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Option 4. I came here from WikiProject YouTube mainly to talk about Issue 2 below. However, after reading Issue 1, I thought I'd add my thoughts. I think that allowing both links is better, as people's YouTube and Twitch channels are usually different. Many people use Twitch as a place to talk to fans, or to stream themselves playing games, and use YouTube as a place for more scripted things, vlogs, edited content, etc.. Strugglehouse (talk) 21:01, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Issue 2: having multiple secondary YouTube channels linked (and/or having multiple secondary Twitch channels linked) in the infobox

Problem #2. Another issue that has come to light because of this discussion is that some editors really like having links to every channel that a streamer/youtuber owns, with the most extreme examples being Dream (YouTuber) and his 7 channels, and the least invasive Sodapoppin with only an extra clips channel. If the secondary channels are already linked in the main YouTube channel, is there any value in keeping links to them as an exception to WP:ELMIN? My first instinct would be to say no, since the basis for WP:ELMIN is WP:NOTREPOSITORY, with the only exception I would see being "unless it has been discussed in an extensive manner in a reliable source", which would grant it some legitimacy to notability as indicated in the WP:ELMIN footnote. Given the pushback I'm getting at WikiProject YouTube and due to having every single edit that tried to curtail these secondary channels reverted, I'd be grateful to hear your opinions about this too: to what extent should we have secondary YouTube/Twitch channels listed and linked in the infobox? Pilaz (talk) 17:24, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you all for your previous and grateful for future comments on this related question: Gråbergs Gråa Sång, Canterbury Tail, Masem. Also pinging WikiProject YouTube participants Strugglehouse and Cerebral726 to centralize discussion, following this exchange. Final courtesy ping to MJL who alerted me on Talk:Ludwig Ahgren early this year regarding ELMIN. There's potential for an RFC down the line given the disagreements at hand, so every contribution is welcome. Pilaz (talk) 17:34, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
@Pilaz For whatever reason, I didn't get this ping. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:47, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
@Gråbergs Gråa Sång:: thanks for letting me know, with apologies. Assuming all the other ones didn't work, one last technical re-ping for those who haven't participated (if they desire to): @Masem:, @Cerebral726:, @MJL:. Pilaz (talk) 12:14, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
That one worked. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:36, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
If they have their main channel linked, all their subsidiary channels will be connected under the main YouTube channel in YouTube itself, so I wouldn't include them. Canterbury Tail talk 18:00, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Not all main channels link all the YouTuber's other channels. How it is now has worked fine up until now. See Wikipedia:If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I'll write a full comment on all that's been said soon. Strugglehouse (talk) 18:35, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
It has worked fine up until now. You mean from last week? And if the guidelines clash with the content, something's broken alright. Pilaz (talk) 21:20, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I think it should be left up to the editors' discretion on which links are appropriate for which YouTuber. I've been meaning to start a discussion on combining the channels parameters into one to allow for an expandable list, passing off the linking duty to another template. But the guideline for the channels should be "don't go overboard". And for the number of subscribers and views (though not part of this discussion but it is important to discuss), include the best-performing channels, then sum up the rest to not make the list too big. SWinxy (talk) 18:44, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Editor's discretion for each article makes sense. We should not say "only add one", because many YouTubers have channels that have drastically different content on all of them, such as a main gaming channel, and a vlog channel. Strugglehouse (talk) 19:25, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
(notified about this discussion at WikiProject YouTube) I think in most cases a single link to a YouTuber's primary channel is probably enough and adding all other secondary channels is probably too much. However, sometimes there are YouTubers who genuinely have multiple channels that have all received significant coverage in reliable sources. In these cases, all notable channels should be linked. Otherwise, links to secondary channels should probably be discouraged. Alduin2000 (talk) 19:29, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Was going to mention about being notified at WikiProject YouTube in a big message I was going to write in reply to this, but I haven't done that yet and I feel I should mention that I came from there too, since I'm writing these comments.
I think linking to all channels just makes it easier for the general reader. People don't want to have to click on just a main channel, then other links, and search through all the channels linked. Some may not be linked on the main channel, and some may have no other ones linked at all. We should just simply have links to them all, like we have for a long time. It doesn't distract from the content, it doesn't clutter up the article, it makes it easier for the reader. Again, If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Strugglehouse (talk) 19:47, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
I 100% agree with you where notable channels are concerned, there is no point forcing the reader to go through the other channels tab on a main YouTube channel when they can be listed in the infobox. Therefore, I think all notable channels should be linked. However, if a channel has not received significant coverage and is completely unnotable, I don't see why there would be a need to link to it, especially given that Wikipedia is not a repository of links. WP:ELMIN explicitly says Wikipedia does not attempt to document or provide links to every part of the subject's web presence or provide readers with a handy list of all social networking sites so this wouldn't really be "fixing" an issue, but applying already existing policy. As to the idea that linking to all channels makes things "easier for the reader", the previous quote from ELMIN states that additional links being a "handy list" isn't sufficient justification for including them (so being "handy" or "easier" doesn't mean we should add the links). Alduin2000 (talk) 21:10, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
I can see where you are coming from, but I still think it is better to just include all of them. That's been how it has been for a while now. I think that the quote from WP:ELMIN in your reply is more talking about actual social networking sites. Linking to all of a YouTuber's channels is different from linking to Twitter or Instagram profiles, for example. YouTube channels have different content on them all, whereas social networking sites are just someone posting about different things relating to their life, or their content in general. It usually doesn't provide anything new or notable. Strugglehouse (talk) 21:36, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Apart from the WP:EL objections, IMO an everything-and-the-kitchensink approach inches into WP:PROMO. It's not WP's purpose to drive viewers their way, that's the job of their platforms. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:50, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
@Alduin2000, when you say "all notable channels should be linked", do you mean "all channels that qualify for a separate article in Category:YouTube channels"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:04, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
Sorry you're right I should have been more clear on that. I don't think each channel needs its own article to be included in the infobox, but they should have received enough coverage in reliable secondary sources to establish that they are an important part of the YouTuber's career/notability. Alduin2000 (talk) 20:35, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
I have come here WikiProject YouTube to share my points I made there and the thoughts I have on this matter.
I believe that we should have links to all of a YouTuber's channels. Linking only one makes it harder for the general reader, because if they want to find information about a specific channel, they have to go searching for it. Not all "main" channels link all of the YouTuber's other channels. The channels parameter on Template:Infobox YouTube personality has been there for a long time, and changing it now just makes things unnecessarily complicated for both editors and readers.
The guidelines at WP:ELMIN state that "More than one official link should be provided only when the additional links provide the reader with significant unique content and are not prominently linked from other official websites". I believe that multiple channels fits this guidance, as well as "A person who is notable for more than one thing might maintain separate websites for each notable activity, (e.g., one website for music and another website for writing).". They are different channels for a reason. They have different content/different types of content on them. I think that this means that they are should all be linked. It seems odd to make the general reader do work to find the content they are looking for.
It would also be easier for editors, such as ones updating statistics (view counts, subscriber counts, etc.) as they would be able to see all the channels they would need to check, with simple links to each right there for them. This makes it so they can be sure they haven't missed any.
Keeping it as it is now won't distract from the main content. It won't clutter the article. It has worked for a while now. It does not need to be changed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Strugglehouse (talk) 21:26, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Just replying to say that my comment was moved from its original space. I used the built in Wikipedia reply feature to reply. I did not purposely place it in the same indention level to "skip the line". Strugglehouse (talk) 08:26, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Noted, thanks for the clarification. I suppose when using the visual editor over the source editor it's bound to happen. Pilaz (talk) 14:13, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
No problem. Strugglehouse (talk) 19:41, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
  • This should not just be up to editor discretion. Per WP:INFOBOX, the purpose of an infobox [is] to summarize (and not supplant) key facts that appear in the article. So, it would be appropriate to link secondary channels, if those channels are also included in the body of the article; moreover, that content in the body should be supported by reliable sources (not just cited to the channel itself, which happens all too often). Therefore, secondary channels should not be included in the infobox, unless said channels have been covered by reliable sources. This weeds out just about all of the "YouTuber plays", "YouTuber reacts", etc. stuff, which is almost never covered by reliable sources, while maintaining secondary channels of substance. – Pbrks (t • c) 22:56, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
  • Don't almost all large YouTube channels link their secondary channels in their profiles anyways? Per WP:ELMIN, More than one official link should be provided only when the additional links provide the reader with significant unique content and are not prominently linked from other official websites. For example, if the main page of the official website for an author contains a link to the author's blog and Twitter feed, then it is not appropriate to provide links to all three. I see it like listing an actor's entire filmography in the infobox; it's kind of excessive? For example, the state of Mr. Beast's infobox (which includes all current and past channels) is Fandom.com level of descriptive and goes against the point of having an infobox to begin with, which is to provide a concise overview of the article.-- BriefEdits (talk) 04:45, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
    Agree. Pbrks' note on the purpose of an infobox is also relevant. Since this has turned in to something close to a WP:RFC, I suggest we ask for a closure at WP:RFCL when that time comes. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:49, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
    Agree with both, and agree that uninvolved closure may be needed. I'll set a reminder to file for closure on 30 September.
    Sidenote: bit of a backlog at WP:CR, so (experienced) uninvolved editors willing to put some work there might be worthwhile. Pilaz (talk) 12:06, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
    Just because most do, doesn't mean they all do. It's still much more work for editors and readers who have to search through the main channel, hoping to find what they are looking for. Strugglehouse (talk) 08:55, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
    Yes, but we're not here to provide linkfarms to all people's content, we're an encyclopaedia not a webring or portal. As mentioned, if they're not covered in the article and referenced as notable they shouldn't be in the infobox. Our topic is the actual article, not convenience links to promote people. Canterbury Tail talk 13:18, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
    I treat it a bit more strictly, especially when there's an official website. It's not our place to make and maintain a linkfarm of every site that a person has run. Given that YouTube (and most other social media channels) are a means of promotion/expression rather than information directly about the person, WP:NOT may apply in multiple ways. --Hipal (talk) 20:12, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
    I think that providing all the links would normally violate Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files. The goal for Wikipedia isn't to make it possible to find all the possible options as quickly as possible. It's just to help people learn about the subject, by making it easy for them to find the main thing, not to find all the things. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:13, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
    I think that we should include just the main channel. Secondary or alternate channels should only be included if they are mentioned in the article's body (even if briefly), which would imply that there is some reliable source covering that secondary channel. Soulbust (talk) 22:09, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

So what's the outcome action from the #2 above. It seems consensus is clearly that we should not be linking to all these YouTube links in the infoboxes. Canterbury Tail talk 17:59, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Had a look at WP:WHENCLOSE regarding the duration and it looks like we have WP:ROUGHCONSENSUS for both #1 and #2. The question is whether we need uninvolved closure. Thoughts? Maybe we can get somebody who has only taken part in #1, which is quasi-unanimous, to close both. Pilaz (talk) 16:38, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
You usually need an uninvolved person to write a summary statement only if the folks involved in the discussion disagree on the outcome. If everyone agrees on what the result was (mind the gap between "agrees on what the result was" and "agrees with the result"), then you can just implement the result. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:49, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Maria Irene Fornes

This url at Film Reference, a blacklisted site, http://www.mariairenefornes.com/ contains a comprehensive list of Fornes' work as a theater director and playwright, better than anything I've found elsewhere and rich in detail (first production of a play, often the second and sometimes the third). It's more detail than we'd ever include on WP, but of interest. I think it's right for the external links section of María Irene Fornés. Rutsq (talk) 02:37, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

@Beetstra, do you remember how this ended up on the blacklist? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:45, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing@Rutsq The site is linked, so what is blacklisted? Dirk Beetstra T C 03:51, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

@Beetstra, Sorry. Here's the link I'd like to add (modified so I can add it here):

  • http://www. filmreference.com/film/16/Maria-Irene-Fornes.html

Attempting to add it produces a lengthy warning that includes "The following link has triggered a protection filter: filmreference.com " Thanks. Rutsq (talk) 10:40, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

It's on the local MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist as a result of MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist/archives/April 2019#Advameg sites (city-data.com, filmreference.com, etc.). It has been discussed before, e.g., Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Film/Resources#filmreference.com, and generally found to not be a reliable source. However, that wouldn't automatically rule out adding it as an external link per WP:ELMAYBE #4, "Sites that fail to meet criteria for reliable sources yet still contain information about the subject of the article from knowledgeable sources." WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Harry Ransom Center

A lot of external links have been added such as at Benjamin Nottingham Webster#External links which includes:

I would have thought that a link showing that a particular library has works related to the subject would not satisfy WP:EL. I will notify Hneuhauser (talk · contribs) about this discussion. Johnuniq (talk) 03:36, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Yes, a lot! These links are not helpful, as they don't lead to any further information about the subject and are just a list of subjects for which some materials are held by the collection. It doesn't even indicate whether the collection is the principle, or even a significant, repository of materials on that subject. I consider these links to be spam. Thanks! -- Ssilvers (talk) 04:52, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
Very many, and I agree that they are spam. And Hneuhauser (talk · contribs) is an undeclared paid editor. Looking more closely, Ecolleary has also been adding external links for some months, but they do at least state they they work for the Center on their userpage. Edwardx (talk) 10:08, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
I see these kind of links added to articles all the time, and I always remove them. They fail WP:EL as they don't provide a resource on the subject. A site that says "hey we have some archives, look what contents are in box X1B" but don't provide any of the documents, is providing no value to 99.99% of people reading the article. Canterbury Tail talk 12:31, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
Well, maybe you shouldn't. These are Finding aids, and after several long discussions over four or five years (e.g., Wikipedia talk:External links/Archive 39#Request for comment on finding aids and Wikipedia talk:External links/Archive 41#Library links), WP:ELMAYBE now explicitly permits them. The fact that it's useless to you and me doesn't mean that it's useless to every reader. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
@Canterbury Tail@WhatamIdoing: they are ‘maybe’. They have to be helpful and add content. Otherwise I will come back to my real example (I should have saved the diff link) of a persistent librarian who pushed in one case a link to a (the only one) quilt in their collection to quilt. Yes, that is basically also a finding aid link but it does not help us further but for linkfarming. Or a museum organization who spammed links to agglomerate pages which included one work of the artist whose wikipage they spammed (yes, the overall behaviour was spamming) the link to. Yes, it may be useful for some people but not generalized. If the finding aid links to a record set of 14 feet worth of shelve space of originals of letters written by the subject (another real example) in their archives (and is one of the largest of its kind) then maybe is certainly a yes, but we are not a linkfarm of finding aids (that is something for WikiData perhaps). Dirk Beetstra T C 04:21, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
I agree. We shouldn't "always remove them". We also shouldn't mindlessly accept them. Also, I'd suggest that, as a general rule, a typical article rarely benefits from having more than one finding aid, or two at the most. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:38, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Is there a script or bot that can remove multiple links @ Death to Anders, or does it need to be done manually? - FlightTime (open channel) 21:51, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

You can tag the article with Template:EL, when there are lots or embedded external links (particularly in long articles where the link issue spans multiple sections) in the article body to let others know about the problem when you don't have the time or inclination to remove them yourself. In this case, the links clearly seem to violate WP:CS#Avoid embedded links and WP:EL#Cite_note-7 at first glance; so, you could remove them yourself as well. What you kind of need to be careful of is to assess whether the links might actually be converted to inline citations instead. Some older articles used embedded citations or otherwise embedded links instead of using inline citations, and assessing the value of the link might not the kind of thing or script is best suited to do. Remember, that you're still responsible for the content of your edits even if you use a bot or script; so, you may need to assess things first regardless. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:40, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
@Marchjuly: Thanks. - FlightTime (open channel) 22:47, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
@Marchjuly and FlightTime: The external links were all clustered together in one section, and all went to artist/venue pages, MySpace and the like. None of them qualified as citations. I removed them all.
Surprisingly those external links were all present as far back as the very first version of the article, created in 2008. At the time, it was littered with external links throughout the body. All of the others had been gradually replaced with either wikilinks or citations, as appropriate, but this particular cluster was never touched. I guess nobody wanted to be the one responsible for de-linking so much of the article body. Nevertheless, save for the one band mentioned that also has an article (which I wikilinked), delinking was the correct action. I have no issues accepting the responsibility and/or blame. FeRDNYC (talk) 19:52, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
@FeRDNYC: Thank you, I had forgotten about this. - FlightTime (open channel) 20:06, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
I removed them all. ...except for the one I missed, obviously! Fortunately, Marchjuly was there to salvage my sloppy work. Thanks! FeRDNYC (talk) 04:03, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Official website is on spam blacklist

The purpose of this post is to obtain consensus that an organization's official website is permitted in the infobox and external links section. Specifically, I refer to Vrbo and it's official website https://www.vrbo.com/ which is currently in a spam blacklist. I have not attempted to save the URL directly to the Wikipedia article. As is best practice, the template {{Official website}} pulls it from Wikidata.

Proposed: The official website should be whitelisted for use on this one page only.

With a sufficient number of editors approving, I can take this request to the next level. Thank you. Senator2029 【talk】 07:41, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

  • I think you are proposing that all official websites are to be displayed on the article for the organization, even if the URL is on the spam blacklist. That, Vrbo is just an example? I would oppose such a proposal since context always matters. Perhaps there are some blocked URLs that should not appear even if "official" and a case would need to be made for the particular article. WP:EL should be followed and there is no requirement that Wikipedia act as a directory of official URLs. OTOH, if this refers only to Vrbo, it should be discussed at Talk:Vrbo perhaps with a link to the discussion added here. Johnuniq (talk) 08:46, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
    I agree with Johnuniq. Doug Weller talk 11:35, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
@Senator2029, requests for whitelisting normally happen at MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist, and WP:ELOFFICIAL links in the articles about notable companies don't usually require much in the way of demonstrated consensus. You just have to let the admins know that there's a problem, and one of them will take care of it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:07, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

In the John Allen Lewis article I had included a Find-a-Grave external link for Lewis. Nikkimaria has deleted this link, twice, not used as a source or citation. Entries to Find-a-Grave are supported by dates of death, cemetery location, photos, grave plot numbers etc. There is no policy that mandates that we can't include this in an external link, so I really don't see why this apparently is a pressing issue for an external link for some individuals. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 02:14, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

This particular link provides no photos, grave plot numbers, etc - only unverified user-generated information. See WP:ELPEREN. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:20, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
The link provides cemetery name and location, birth and death dates and locations, supported by sources, date of burial, memorial ID number, and photos of gravestones of family members. There should be no issue here, the contention of which more than suggests the info has all been fabricated, for an external link, again not used as a source. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 02:39, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
Findagrave has zero mechanisms for ensuring the accuracy of entered information. Any user can add any junk. Should be blacklisted. Moxy- 02:45, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
What sources? There are no sources provided in the entry, plus it claims that the individual may no longer even be interred at that location (though that claim is as lacking in sources as every other made there). See WP:ELNO points 2 and 11. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:46, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

"Should be black listed"? Yet WP has not done so. Why is that?

Points 2 and 11:
2. Any site that misleads the reader by use of factually inaccurate material or unverifiable research, except' to a limited extent in articles about the viewpoints that the site is presenting.
I see no reason for "misleading the reader", at F.A.G., and none has been presented here. Another assumption.

11. Blogs, personal web pages and most fansites
None of these apply to Find-a-Grave. Again, there is no WP policy for censuring Find-a-Grave as an eternal link. This really is an exaggerated issue, as far as external links not used as sources go. Can you cite just one example where Find-a-Grave has put out bogus information, or is this entire argument just based on a personal sweeping assumption that everything is "junk"? If this is really going to ruffle one's feathers I'll leave it out. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 04:08, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

There are a few names under Siblings with Lincoln included, but there's nothing that says, "his own sibling", or anything to that effect, so I fail to see the issue there, also. In any case Pilaz has offered something I can accept, that this particular F.A.G. article doesn't offer anything valuable that can't be found in the sources, and though that is really something that doesn't amount to some sort of pressing issue, I'll concede to consensus, and simply bow out here. In any case, thanks to all for looking out. -- Cheers. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 17:54, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

churchofjesuschristtemples

The website churchofjesuschristtemples.org is a personal self-published website that aggregates a lot of statistics, information, and images for LDS temples. It is not an official website of the LDS Church and therefore doesn't meet the reliability criteria or allowable usage cases for self-published sources. However, I think that it might still be allowable as an external link on specific temple pages, similar to how Hagiography Circle and CatholicSaints.info is used on articles for Catholic saints. Any reasons or thoughts on why it would not be a valid EL? --FyzixFighter (talk) 23:19, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

@FyzixFighter, in which article(s) do you think it should be listed in ==External links==? Has anyone objected? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:54, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing:: I was thinking of the LDS temple specific articles - it is already used on some, such as Albuquerque New Mexico Temple. Another editor has been removing links, see here and here, in citations (which I agree with as it fails WP:RS) but also in External Links sections, calling it a fansite. I disagree that it is a fansite but is akin to the Catholic Saints links use elsewhere. Before I go back and reinsert as EL, I thought I'd check what others think at this noticeboard. --FyzixFighter (talk) 02:44, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
Have you at Horse Eye's Back talked about it before? I looked at your first link, and I'm not sure that "fansite" is quite the right word. The photographs, in particular, could be interesting to readers. I also noticed that the link after it, which was kept, is a dead link, which should probably have been removed (see WP:ELDEAD for a short explanation). I assume, since the contents of the second link are unknown, that the two links weren't considered redundant, which would be a valid reason to remove one of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:29, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

prayer-bracelet.com

I noticed the above SPA has been adding such links to 3 articles over as many years, so we may want to inspect the site and see if it is worth including anywhere or just spammed. Elizium23 (talk) 00:38, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

It's a store, so almost definitely advertising. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 00:48, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
I'm not seeing other instances of it. --Hipal (talk) 02:58, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
https://www.prayer-bracelet.com/blog/orthodox-icons-are-magnificent/ is a blog post. One of the things that surprises editors these days is that ==External links== are evaluated on the basis of the specific page that readers will see when they click the link, not what's on the rest of the website. See Wikipedia:External links#cite note-6. Treat this like any other blog post on any other website. Don't worry about what's on the other pages, because we're not linking to the other pages.
External links are also allowed to have any amount of advertising that's below the level of "objectionable". (See WP:ELNO#EL5.) Advertising for items sold on other pages of that same website are treated the same for this calculation as advertising for items sold on other websites. This is because Wikipedia:We don't care what happens to your website. We care whether readers (assuming any of them click on the link, and we know that most of them won't) will find some useful/interesting/relevant information about the subject that wouldn't be appropriate for inclusion in a well-written encyclopedia article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:06, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

clustrmaps.com

Just ran across this while cleaning up other spam. --Hipal (talk) 16:45, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

That was used as a reliable source to support article content. If you want to discuss its suitability for that purpose, please take it to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. If you think it was spammed (here's one diff of it being added), please follow the process for reporting it at Wikipedia:Spam blacklist. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:15, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
I vaguely recalled this or similar external links, and didn't have time to look. Still don't. --Hipal (talk) 18:38, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

templeknowledge.com

Looks like a spammed blog. I don't have the time right now to look closely or start cleanup. --Hipal (talk) 17:11, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Found while doing looking at the situation. --Hipal (talk) 18:37, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

@Hipal, it's good to see you around. You might like glancing at #churchofjesuschristtemples above, where we have a similar situation (but probably less spammy).
I looked at Chilkoor Balaji Temple. I am more concerned about the links for car rental services, which are obviously inappropriate. Having removed those, there are three remaining links. They are all basically interchangeable, so there is no reason to have all three. There might be some reason to keep one of them (i.e., containing information that doesn't belong in an article, such as opening hours and entry fee), but I'm not even sure about that. What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:21, 12 November 2022 (UTC)
I don't know why we'd assume these websites are accurate, nor can we tell what biases they may have. --Hipal (talk) 18:34, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
I don't know why we'd assume these websites aren't accurate, and we don't care whether they're biased. Not being a reliable source is not a problem for ==External links==. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:57, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
I don't know how that meets our basic purpose here, writing a serious encyclopedia. --Hipal (talk) 18:36, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
When you put a link in the ==External links== section, you are not "writing" anything. You are "adding a link". Links are expected to provide "meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article", such as how much the entrance price for a tourist attraction is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:59, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
We disagree, and I believe WP:EL emphasizes accuracy, neutrality, and value:
  • Some acceptable external links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy.
  • Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that is relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject and cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to... --Hipal (talk) 17:21, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
And we have no actual reason to believe that those sites are anything other than neutral and accurate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:49, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
We disagree on that. I'm glad we now agree that accuracy and bias are important. --Hipal (talk) 21:57, 5 December 2022 (UTC)


It's definitely been spammed, including dead link spam as a reference and as the official website. --Hipal (talk) 22:26, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Another find. --Hipal (talk) 17:31, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm not clear about these two. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 15:50, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Are you asking for actual practice or best practice?
The actual practice is to include these links; the only real question is how. For people, Google Scholar links are usually provided via Template:Authority control. I have suggested that the film-related articles, which routinely include half a dozen links (IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, etc.), move to a template like Authority control or like Template:Medical resources, which would look something like this if everything's filled in:
WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:11, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. Doug Weller talk 08:47, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

GenealogyBank

Looking for someone who might be able to access GenealogyBank in terms of WP:COPYLINK. Pretty much all the citations in Ray Byars and Tommy Byars are links that are apparently to old newspaper articles found on GenealogyBank, which requires registration to access. Of course, the original sources might be OK to cite without the links, but just want to know whether GenealogyBank is sort of similar to something like Newspapers.com, and whether it's OK to link to. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:43, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

@Marchjuly, https://www.genealogybank.com/information/terms-of-use says enough about partnerships and agreements with the copyright holders that I'd assume it's all legit. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:51, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for finding that WhatamIdoing. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:52, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
You're welcome. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:27, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Potential license laundering through ghostarchive.org

I've noticed several articles where ghostarchive.org is being used as a paywall bypasser, which is against WP:COPYLINK. In addition to bypassing paywalls, it doesn't seem to have a clear process for allowing copyright holders to request takedowns (unlike archive.org). And it doesn't say who runs it, so I don't know that we can trust the archived versions to be unaltered or sustainable even for non-paywall sites. It seems to be used on thousands of pages, and sadly, many are links to The Telegraph or other sources with hard-paywalls.

For instances of use, see this diff where I removed it, and search insource:"ghostarchive.org"

Note that ghostarchive.org has been discussed before at Wikipedia:External_links/Noticeboard/Archive_25#Ghostarchive, and does appear to have good technical advantages over other archivers, so I doubt a blanket-ban would be advisable. DFlhb (talk) 10:02, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

@DFlhb: The text in WP:COPYLINK and "license laundering" could apply to all content on all archive sites, not just paywalled content on one site.

The archive sites are only able to bypass the paywall because they disable Javascript. The unpaywalled text is sent on every request, and then Javascript is used to actually put up the paywall. The same effect can be achieved by disabling Javascript or using a no-javascript browser.

Archive.today and web.archive.org can also bypass paywalls, like ones for the Economist (https://web.archive.org/web/20230109231106/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/01/09/what-americas-protectionist-turn-means-for-the-world). Each site can bypass paywalls of different sites, so there is no one-archive-fits-all solution. Also there are many sites that were once not paywalled but later put up one, and archives have the copies of the old articles.

Even with all of the above, WP:COPYLINK says that It is currently acceptable to link to Internet archives such as the Wayback Machine, which host unmodified archived copies of webpages taken at various points in time.

it doesn't seem to have a clear process for allowing copyright holders to request takedowns. Yes, it does. I believe its on their About page.

Rlink2 (talk) 22:08, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
I don't believe that passage in COPYLINK addresses paywall bypasses, but thanks for pointing out archive.org bypasses them too; I didn't know. If the paywall bypass is simply a technical side-effect of archival, rather than an intentional feature, then the site suddenly seems a lot more appropriate. DFlhb (talk) 22:13, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
Yeah this is not necessarily an issue. Also, the website does have a clear process to address copyright violations, at https://ghostarchive.org/tos (scroll to the bottom). Elli (talk | contribs) 19:47, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Do readers need disclaimers warning them that they're about to be linked to unreliable tweets? (Twitter Files)

See discussion at Talk:Twitter Files/Archive 7#Warning?. The discussion is about whether we should include a disclaimer when linking to the primary source tweets of the Twitter Files in the external links section, warning people that tweets are not reliable. Here's what the warning would look like. Endwise (talk) 02:06, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: The situation here is very complex and stupid – the "Twitter Files" themselves are a series of Twitter threads by various journalists and writers. They're the main subject of the article, which is why they were being given as external links. For some reason known neither to man nor beast, Elon Musk (who gave them access to internal Twitter documents, from which the reports were made) declared that in order to report on these materials, they had to do so via the medium of Twitter threads. This was always a little silly, but when there were five of them it was more of a curiosity; now it is more of a mess. I don't think there exists a canonical website which just has a central list of links to all the tweets (although, if one existed, surely it would be preferable to this). jp×g 12:21, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
A link too such is in the article infobox. Some want it shoved in readers' faces even though they are non-reliable and conspiratorial in nature. O3000, Ret. (talk) 12:28, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
@JPxG, that sounds like it could also be handled under Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists of works (with the pre-emptive, and hopefully completely unnecessary, reminder that a list of publications really is allowed to contain URLs that link to the listed works). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:19, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

I found a new user who is adding external links to multiple articles to https://doreco.huma-num.fr. The user admits to being affliated with it. This seems like a clear cut case of spamming to me. So, I reverted them all and gave a warning and explanation to the user. They haven't edited since, but I was surprised to get reverted by another user (@Sapphorain:) stating "This site is definitely not a spam; it is hosted by "Laboratoire dynamique du langage, CNRS and Université de Lyon 2'". I'm still confident this is an unnecessary external link, and quite spammy, but I just wanted some additional feedback. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 19:00, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

The link in the article Swiss French directly leads to the Swiss-French dataset compiled by a team of researchers from various university labs, within the much larger langage site DoReCo, which is maintained at the « laboratoire Dynamique du Language » of the CNRS and of the University of Lyon 2. Providing such a precise and relevant link to a narrow subject can definitely not be qualified as « spamming ». And whether or not the user who did it is affiliated to the general project or to some part of it, is completely irrelevant. --Sapphorain (talk) 20:43, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, but that convinces me of absolutely nothing. It doesn't explain why it's needed, what it does, or why it's useful to be linked to from an encyclopedia article. And the fact that the user is affiliated is completely relevant. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 13:40, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
Doreco is a collection of text corpora, which includes audio recordings, their transcriptions and grammatical glosses and annotations of the texts. It's the most basic resource for the study of a language. A Wikipedia reader who follows such a link can hear what the language sounds like, they can read texts in the language and they can learn about its grammar. Most of the languages in Doreco are small and endangered, so this collection is one of the few places on the internet where readers can do these things. If Doreco has a collection on such a language, then the Wikipedia article should link to it, the way the article is expected to link to similar collections at the ELAR, Paradisec or AIATSIS archives. If links have been removed, they should please be reinstated. Thanks! – Uanfala (talk) 14:14, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
After a quick look at the Swiss French example mentioned by Sapphorain above I agree with him that that link is definitely not spam, but legitimate encyclopedic content, providing primary data on the language with adequate metadata. Invoking COI is also not called for here, as the article is not about DoReCo, but about the language. If Conflict of Interest were a problem here, then I wouldn't be allowed to provide links to Ethnologue, as I am a member of the organization that publishes it. So far nobody complained when I set a link to Ethnologue on a language page. LandLing 14:13, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
Ok, I stand corrected. Since the two of you have more knowledge than me think that the links are relevant, then I have no problem with them. These explanations are much clearer than I was given before. However, in my opinion, a COI can still apply if you're adding links to an external site where you have an interest in, especially financial, but this isn't the place for that the discussion. I appreciate your responses. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 15:05, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
The COI guideline doesn't prohibit people from adding refs to their own publications (see WP:SELFCITE), so it probably wouldn't make sense for us to be stricter about the external links section.
That said, if you are the owner of a website, or otherwise make money off of it, the best practice is for you to propose the link on the talk page, and at least wait a while (a week is typical) to see whether anyone objects. Also, nobody should be edit warring over external links, because WP:ELBURDEN is quite strict. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:51, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

On the article located [|here], the following two links were posted

[|This is one], [|and this one]

The diff log is [| here for when added], and [| here for when removed]. The talk page regarding this addition and removal is at [[2]]

Does adding reliable sources that include an arrested suspects name within the url itself violate the BLP guidelines, or is it allowed as long as they are in fact reliable sources, and are included in the references portion only? With an upcoming court case and what is sure to be more media coverage, I figured it was better to get clarification. Thank you.

Awshort (talk) 09:08, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

@Awshort, no, the BLP policy doesn't prohibit that, but that's a question for Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard or Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, because it's be used as one of the ==References==. This page is about ==External links==. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:53, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Participation is welcome at Talk:Sanctioned Suicide#RfC on linking to the forum. Endwise (talk) 06:53, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Trafford Publishing and BBB.org

Resolved
 – Banned user, attempted link part of harassment campaign Antandrus (talk) 16:08, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I've been stuck in the middle of a dispute at Trafford Publishing and could do with alternative eyes. An IP has been adding an external link to bbb.org [3] to the article claiming the reviews and complaints are about the subject. The problem is that Trafford is owned by Author Soultions now, who also own a number of self-publishing companies, including the more contraversal Xlibris. So when I checked the linked sites, almost nothing was about Trafford Publishing per se - two reviews out of 57 mentioned it, and one complaint out of 186. This led to my removal of the link on the assumption that this would be better suited to the article on the parent company than the subsidery, given the lack of mentions of the subsidery. However, to put it mildly, the other editor disagrees. Thoughts? - Bilby (talk) 05:42, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

This conversation clearly belongs on trafford publishing talkpage and trafford is same firm as author solutions... why are you avoiding to admit what is obvious and obvious for a long time? STOP beating around the bush: www.wsj.com/articles/SB123895881091590451 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 177.228.44.168 (talk) 02:44, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
Yes, it is clear that Trafford was acquired by Author Solutions. But so were a number of companies that continue to exist as subsideries. If the reviews don't mention the subsidery, do they belong on the article of the subsidery, or on the the article of the parent company? - Bilby (talk) 04:08, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
BBB is almost never a good external link, it's user generated reviews nothing more. Fails WP:ELNO. No matter who it's about. Canterbury Tail talk 12:48, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
This user (the p2p IP addresses) is banned by the Wikimedia Foundation - this attempt to link a negative "comments" page is just a continuation of his campaign of harassment and abuse against, well, everyone. I will be protecting the page from further disruption. Antandrus (talk) 14:37, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Bandcamp on album page

WP:MUSICSTREAM suggests that an external link to an official stream may be appropriate where it complies with other Wikipedia policies. An official Bandcamp page for an album seems to meet WP:ELOFFICIAL, but Bandcamp only allows a limited number of streams per visitor before a purchase is required. Does a limited number of free streams fail WP:ELREG? voorts (talk/contributions) 16:45, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

@Voorts, is this the only/best official link for the album?
Can you read the text on the page even if you have used up your limited number of streams? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:04, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
Hi @WhatamIdoing. Thanks for taking the time to respond. It is not the only official link, but I think it's the best because it allows one to listen to the album. The text on the page is still visible after using the limited streams. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:46, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
So WP:ELOFFICIAL comes into play if there is already an official link in there. And if the Bandcamp page is linked from their main site it's even more against using it. A Wikiproject is pretty much the lowest level of what should go into an article, MOS, policies and guidelines come before that. Canterbury Tail talk 20:50, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:05, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
Based on this description, I'll say: It's not banned. But if there is a truly bog-standard official website (e.g., www.ThisAlbum.com), and if that official website links to the Bandcamp site, then I'd prefer the standard website. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:19, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Find A Grave

I would like some opinions about whether there is (or should be) a universal ban on adding an external link to www.findagrave.com for all bio articles, and whether consensus is needed for each article to include it. I don't want to sway the discussion, but I will point out that WP:RSP#Find a Grave points out that the website is generally considered unreliable because content is user-generated, but it also states "Links to Find a Grave may sometimes be included in the external links section of articles, when the site offers valuable additional content, such as images not permitted for use on Wikipedia." I would appreciate any opinions. Thanks! Sundayclose (talk) 00:08, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

There is not a universal ban. As indicated at WP:ELPEREN, it is rarely acceptable, when it provides a specific unique feature (and is not linkvio). If its inclusion is disputed at any article, consensus is needed to include it per WP:ELBURDEN. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:26, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I understand. I'm seeking opinions about when it should be disputed in a particular article. For example, if someone adds the link and points out that it contains useful images that are not already linked in an article and cannot be added to Wikipedia, should I dispute that addition (assuming there are no copyvio or other policy issues)? Sundayclose (talk) 00:36, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Do you agree that the link is useful and valuable? If no, you should dispute it; if yes, you should not. It's going to be difficult to identify a more specific blanket rule, since it's typically a case-by-case consideration whether a particular link falls in the "rarely". Nikkimaria (talk) 00:50, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Date of Oppenheimer death wrong at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratorium

I'm not sure if this is the correct page to report this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratorium says Oppenheimer died in 1985. Also that he "opened the doors" to the Exploratorium in 1969. But three quick-finds of other references state his date of death as Feb 18 1967. NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/1967/02/19/archives/jrobert-oppenheimer-atom-bomb-pioneer-dies-physicist-cancer-victim.html Wikipedia page regarding Oppenheimer's security hearing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_security_hearing Wikipedia page / Oppenheimer biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer

Just thought somebody would like to know about this and resolve the article re Exploratorium. 1) that he died in 1967, not 1985. 2) that if he died in 1967, he could not have been at the opening of the Exploratorium in 1969.

thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.81.147.181 (talk) 20:28, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Robert Oppenheimer died in 1967. Frank Oppenheimer (Robert's younger brother) died in 1985. I think the Exploratorium article is correct. Schazjmd (talk) 20:46, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
Frank Oppenheimer died in 1985. You're thinking of Robert Openheimer. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:46, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Encyclopaedia Metallum

Isn't Encyclopaedia Metallum WP:UGC and best removed? Kometalgreat (talk) 23:35, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

It shouldn't be cited as a source, but it is allowable as an external link. The policy you mention only applies to use as a source. MrOllie (talk) 23:43, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
There are a few policies/guidelines that I am aware of that seem relevant here: WP:PRIMARY, WP:SELFSOURCE, WP:ABOUTSELF. It would make sense if a biography were citing a facebook page or a personal website if those sources were discussing the person. Encyclopaedia Metallum is different because it defines a music genre by its own definition. If a selfidentifying metal artist were to cite Encyclopaedia Metallum, it wouldn't be reliable and adding an external link to s/he page on that website wouldn't be against any policy/guideline but would not be accurate or reliable since we wouldn't cite Encyclopaedia Metallum since it isn't reliable. Is this something that might need a change in the current guidelines/policies? Kometalgreat (talk) 02:24, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
None of those policy links are relevant to the external links section. External links are not held to the same standard as source citations, that's not an oversight, that is the intent of policy. An important use of the external links section is a place to put stuff that we can't incorporate into the article for policy reasons. MrOllie (talk) 02:35, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
I understand WP:UGC. This includes facebook. If the metal artist had a facebook page, it would be ok to include it in ==External links==. But Encyclopaedia Metallum is different. Kometalgreat (talk) 02:57, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
With the caveat that they can only have 1 official link per WP:ELOFFICIAL. So if they have a main webpage, they can't have Twitter (or whatever it's called now), Facebook etc as well. Canterbury Tail talk 11:46, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
WP:UGC has nothing to do with the external links section. In fact, WP:EL specifically allows linking to wikis if they have a substantial history of stability and a substantial number of editors.. Encyclopaedia Metallum does meet that requirement. MrOllie (talk) 15:18, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
Encyclopaedia Metallum isn't a open wiki and I am not sure which point you are referring to at Wikipedia:External links#Links normally to be avoided. Maybe 11? But it's not a fansite either. Kometalgreat (talk) 23:24, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
None of the points of 'links to be avoided' apply, because it is an acceptable external link. MrOllie (talk) 23:43, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
Well I said that "Encyclopaedia Metallum is different because it defines a music genre by its own definition". So which policy/guideline applies? Kometalgreat (talk) 23:47, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
Including it is wp:spam. Kometalgreat (talk) 23:48, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
It is definitely not spam. What applies is 'What can normally be linked': Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that is relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject and cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues, amount of detail (such as professional athlete statistics, movie or television credits, interview transcripts, or online textbooks), or other reasons. MrOllie (talk) 23:50, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
I see you quoted "accurate material". But I told you that Encyclopaedia Metallum "defines a music genre by its own definition". It is therefore not accurate. Kometalgreat (talk) 23:54, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
That you personally disagree doesn't mean that the site is not accurate. This is a site that that is regularly used as a source by reliable sources. That counts for much more than someone on Wikipedia disagreeing with how they define genres. MrOllie (talk) 23:54, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
And which reliable sources use Encyclopaedia Metallum as a reliable source and please give examples. Kometalgreat (talk) 23:59, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
Just search for 'Encyclopaedia Metallum' on Google News or any similar periodicals database. You'll find many, many examples. MrOllie (talk) 00:01, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
@Kometalgreat, could you please provide a link to the exact part of the article you're concerned about? For example, are you concerned about Encyclopaedia Metallum#References or about Encyclopaedia Metallum#External links? (Two or three representative articles should be enough.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:14, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
I found Exodus discography#References, List of dark ambient artists#cite ref-184, Astarte (band)#References and Astarte (band)#External links under [4]. Kometalgreat (talk) 23:37, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
Okay: Those first three are situations that you have to discuss at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. I think the Wikipedia:External links guideline now says nine times that it doesn't apply to sources for article content, and the top of this noticeboard says "Concerns with links used as references should be handled at the reliable sources noticeboard."
For the one (1) of those four articles where the EL guideline actually applies to this link, what exactly is your concern? For example, do you see something on that link that you believe is factually wrong? Are you just worried because you think it might not be a reliable source and nobody ever told you that WP:ELMAYBE #4 explicitly permits linking to "Sites that fail to meet criteria for reliable sources"? Do you have a different worry? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:04, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Glossary of French criminal law

Should we link to individual letters in the justice.gouv.fr site, or just have one link? Given that this is archived, should it be linked at all? I initially reduced to one link, but Mathglot (hi!) reverted here. I've not seen this done elsewhere; we have Wikipedia:External links#Minimize the number of links but it's talking about the number of "official" sites to link to. -- Beland (talk) 01:54, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

This is probably moot now, at least in the narrowest sense of the question. I just (this morning) got back a response from the government of France to my request (from six weeks ago) about why they removed the glossary from their justice.gouv.fr site; and it turns out it should be reappearing at a different site shortly (or already) and we can just link that. (I have no idea why they are not using 302 redirect codes to simply redirect their old urls to the new ones, and I'll reply to their response and ask[/suggest] that, but it seems to take one to two months to hear back from them.) Meanwhile, I should have the new urls in there in the next day or few days, and we won't need to link the individual letters anymore to the internet archive. I'm still interested, though, in Beland's question, and what we could or should do in the more general case, and whether that comes out differently based on whether the urls are live, or archived. Thanks to Beland (hi back  ) for raising this interesting question about what to do with such links. Mathglot (talk) 02:10, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
If it takes more than one link to best help the reader, then that's okay, though traditionally, if it's more than two or maybe three links to the same website, we've strongly recommended finding a web directory or even a page on someone's personal website that happens to contain all the links that you want. (Yes, the guideline has always been perfectly fine with personal websites, no matter what you've been told.) If the new French website appears, then definitely switch from the string of links to that, and if your hopes are disappointed, then please consider finding a different way to provide those links.
As for archived links, they are desirable if the website is no longer functional and essentially irreplaceable. So if you are editing an article like 2004 United States presidential election, and you find an archived copy of a candidate's official campaign website, then we'd definitely want that. But if it's just some "Know the signs of lung cancer" website, of which there are thousands available (and it's probably a violation of WP:ELNO#EL1 anyway), then archived links for those should definitely not be included, and I ask you to remove them whenever and wherever you find them. It might also be useful to note WP:ELCITE, if doing this work appeals to you, because using citation templates in the ==External links== section is banned (unless you have a very good reason, of course). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:01, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
Yeah, agreed. The situation here, was an incredibly useful series of glossary entries, a bit wordier than you'd expect from a glossary (around a paragraph or two) on hundreds of core principles of French law and the judiciary system. (Also, it's in the public domain, which is nice, so sometimes I just copy and translate the entries, sometimes adapt them.) The Glossary of French criminal law is heavily dependent on it. Overnight, it went *poof*, and I panicked, but luckily, IArchive has it all. I thought that was the only place, until this morning, when I heard they'd moved it to another, related, governmental site, so I still have to deal with that next. Mathglot (talk) 07:58, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
It sounds like a great resource. I hope the new site is good, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:04, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
WP:ELNO #1 is stricter than I recalled, so I may move them (or whatever links come out of the process) to Talk under {{refideas}}. FYI, the new site the govt email claimed isn't new at all, it's another site I already have linked there, which also has a good lexique, somewhat overlapping but each has a goodly amount of unique info, and the lexique is more dictionary-like. Mathglot (talk) 01:42, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Steven Eric Spector

See also: Talk:Psychological testing § New chapter involving Graywalls and me

https://www.stevenericspector.com/mental-health-assessment-archive/ in Psychological testing. There's been fair bit of discussion at Talk:Psychological testing.
I think Psyc12 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was the only user to initially introduce Stevenericspector.com/* into articles, which they have inserted into multiple articles over time. To me, it's just a link within a blog to a gateway page linkfarm and it's no more appropriate than a random person's blog list of their reading list. I am surveying to see if the community sees the inclusion of this guy's list of links appropriate for use as EL. It is supposedly the website of a son of a well known scholar and the well known scholar supposedly co-authored the website with his son. Graywalls (talk) 01:59, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't know who originally introduced the link to WP, but if my memory serves I believe that it was I who placed a link to the site in the middle of the text of the Psychological testing entry. After a lot of discussion, the site was bounced from there. I later placed the link in the External links section of the Psychological testing page because I thought it better belongs there. The reason why it better belongs there with other external links is that the site provides the reader pathways to many sites pertinent to psychological tests used in research and practice in the field of mental health. I dispute the claim that the site is no more important than a site of a random person. This claim represents Graywalls's tendency to denigrate my efforts as a WP editor; I would never put a useless or randomly chosen website among External links—I can't even believe that I have to write such a statement in my own defense. What have Wikipedians come to?
On the psychological testing talk page, I explained that the site was organized by Steven Spector and Paul Spector. The former is website/computer tech person. The latter, unlike Graywalls, is world renowned expert in psychology. I recently looked up Spector's record in Google Scholar and found that his publications have been cited more than 110,000 times and his h-index is 110. I found that user:Graywalls single-mindedly denigrates my efforts to contribute to the encyclopedia. He is unrelenting in attacking my efforts. Iss246 (talk) 02:54, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
@Graywalls, can you please provide links to all the other discussions in which you've complained about this website? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:32, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
@Iss246 You're talking about Paul Spector. Someone asked in the article's talk page for third party verifiable proof of authorship. I don't exactly remember where I mentioned it, but I mentioned I could find no scholarly mentions of Steven Eric Spector. Graywalls (talk) 06:29, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
Paul Spector, University of South Florida Muma College of Business
https://www.usf.edu/business/about/bios/spector-paul.aspx
So it’s probably true that Steven’s assessment archive is a companion to Paul’s website site is a reliable source, though IMHO it maybe better for us to link to Paul’s website (https://paulspector.com/assessments/assessment-archive/), as our readers may not know who Steven is.
In short, all of you are right and it’s just a misunderstanding.  :) --Dustfreeworld (talk) 21:15, 30 September 2023 (UTC) --Dustfreeworld (talk) 02:40, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for this information. Of course, ==External links== don't have to be reliable sources anyway, so it's not important whether it's actually a reliable source. See WP:ELMAYBE #4. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:39, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
But it's not a way to get around WP:RS to include blogs, personal sites, and other URLs. I do believe WP:WEIGHT remains in full effect. User_talk:Iss246#User_Psyc12 and User_talk:Sundayclose#Email_to_me_from_Iss246 are worth looking at. Graywalls (talk) 21:55, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
Blogs and personal sites written by "a recognized authority" are accepted in the external links guideline.
I wonder what you mean when you say that WEIGHT remains in full effect. Do you think that providing a link to a web directory of psychological tests is undue weight for the article about Psychological testing? I guess that I'm trying to understand whether this is a bit of "Oh, gosh, that webpage was written by a known, identified person, and Wikipedia can't have anything so unprofessional as that, but if the same material were posted on some generic pyschological-testing.com website, then of course it would be okay", or if you think there should be no links to any lists of psychological tests at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:04, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
Linking to Paul's site would be agreeable since the professor's name is directly tied to it. I don't understand why we'd be using family member's site. To me, linking to spouse, children, relative's site of a known subject is undue. And his official .edu site would be preferable over personal .com site if similar contents are available. Graywalls (talk) 22:34, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
Please quote the exact wording in Wikipedia:External links that makes you think the owner of the website is a factor that the community believes is important. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:41, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
"Blogs, personal web pages and most fansites (negative ones included), except those written by a recognized authority. (This exception for blogs, etc., controlled by recognized authorities is meant to be very limited; as a minimum standard, recognized authorities who are individuals always meet Wikipedia's notability criteria for people.)" ELNO #11. So, I suppose we can swap out Stevenericspector.com with Paulspector.com as suggested by @Dustfreeworld or the .edu site equivalent. Graywalls (talk) 22:54, 2 October 2023 (UTC)
User:Graywalls, I don't want to fight. I want to settle this issue. I think I have come to understand your frustration because you want to improve WP; however, here your efforts in connection to the Spectors do not work. I explain. The Steven Spector website is not a blog although it can lead you to a blog if you want to go there. The site, which honors Steven Spector who has demonstrated expertise in website development, houses an array of links to psychological symptom scales, relevant to the psychological testing WP entry. Paul Spector is the co-creator of the Steven Spector site.
We both recognize that there is also a Paul Spector website. I want to keep the two Spector sites separate for the sake of this discussion. You replaced the Steven Spector site with the Paul Spector site. The Paul Spector site, while an excellent source of information, does not belong in the psychological testing space. On the contrary, it belongs in the I-O psychology space because it assembles measures used in I-O psychology. For example, it provides information on assessing job leadership and the work environment. I hope what I wrote settles the issue amicably. It is an excellent site for the I-O psychology entry but not the psychological testing entry. Iss246 (talk) 01:48, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
@Graywalls, you have misapplied the guideline. It's not about who owns the website. It's about who wrote the content. Also, a list of links is not a blog (defined in our article on that subject as "discrete, often informal diary-style text entries"), even if blogging software was used to post it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:57, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
Which appear to be both of them. If someone that is an expert in the field chipped in to some proportion, and a random person chipped into an unknown proportion totaling 100% in all.
  • You're assuming the whole bundle inherits the reliability of any one co-author that qualifies as leading expert
Do I have it right? Graywalls (talk) 16:14, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
I'm assuming that since this is a web directory instead of a blog post, and since we officially recommended the WP:USERGENERATED website DMOZ for web directories, and since we now informally suggest its equally user-generated replacement, that a web directory that has any involvement by anyone who actually knows anything about the subject is a step up from our usual approach.
Your choice is ultimately between https://www.curlie.org/en/Science/Social_Sciences/Psychology/Tests_and_Testing/ and a curated list by someone who knows what he's talking about. Which do you choose? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:28, 3 October 2023 (UTC)


On the blog page of this site, you can see that Paul Spector is the one providing the content. https://www.stevenericspector.com/stevens-blog/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Psyc12 (talk • contribs)


This issue has been actively discussed in the talk page for the psychological testing article. Four editors agreed to put the link in the external sources section because it was useful to readers as it contains links to dozens of free-use psychological tests that are from reliable sources (peer-reviewed academic papers). @Graywalls refuses to accept their consensus, and so has come here.Psyc12 (talk) 12:08, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing The article's talk page as mentioned, and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Psychology#self_published_source_Stevenericspector.com which got no comment. @Psyc12 In the specific link you linked, I see specific articles that are named. I might add, some outside the area of Paul Spector's field. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-Nh7u54AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao Now discussing who participated, there's you who appears to have been the one that initially inserted Paulspector.com and Stevenericspector.com in essentially every place going back to about 2020 ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?go=Go&search=insource%3A%22paulspector.com ) and re-inserting them together with Iss246. There's an anonymous IPv6 that's made from Norway that's made absolutely no edit anywhere else on Wikipedia, and ParticipantObservant who didn't say definitively. I chose to ask here, so people not involved can look at the Wikipedia article, and the doorway page for themselves and see if the inclusion as EL is appropriate. Graywalls (talk) 16:58, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
The above paragraph by Graywalls shows the lengths he will go to undermine other editors. So he went to the Google Scholar page to insinuate that something in the Spector website is vaguely outside Paul Spector's area of expertise, otherwise ignoring Spector's expertise in psychological measurement. I add that Spector has also researched the impact of workplace stress and the strains it engenders. In this area of research, strains are typically reflected by scores on psychological symptom scales and measures of counterproductive behavior (e.g., like stealing stuff). Graywalls does a good job elsewhere in WP (I think) identifying copied and pasted text inexperienced users put into the encyclopedia. What he is doing in this Spector case is arguing for the sake of arguing. He doesn't like his first judgment to be contradicted even if it merits contradiction. Iss246 (talk) 19:06, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
Filling this thread with personal attacks on Graywalls is not helping your case. MrOllie (talk) 19:12, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
What about his attacks on me? Iss246 (talk) 20:14, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
1) I have seen nothing meriting a warning from them. 2) Focus on what is in your control - your own behaviour. MrOllie (talk) 20:22, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

He implied that I was so dumb that I put a site on EL that was no better than any old website created by a random person. You can check that too.Iss246 (talk) 20:37, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

It isn't about YOU. We're here to discuss the link https://www.stevenericspector.com/mental-health-assessment-archive/ and as a course of this discussion, some background has been discussed. So, it might be stablished that professor Paul Spector's professional site and possibly his personal website (paulspector.com) are perhaps alright. What I am saying is that I am taking the position this evaluation doesn't extend to his family member's personal websites. So, I take the position Steven Eric Spector's personal website shouldn't be given favorable treatment over any random person's Wordpress or personal sites containing a link farm of similar topic(s). You mentioned the professor co-authored, but the level of his control and authorship of the contents should be independently verifiable without relying on your personal statement. After all, there are already five other links and I do not see this sixth link as something as meritorious addition to the article. Graywalls (talk) 21:12, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
Now you are trying to take back or qualify your comment about a random person. I know a smart guy who asked his son to help him set up a website. The son was very helpful. A colleague who lives a distance from me was having a problem with Microsoft software. I suggested that she find a high school student in her building. She found one and he helped her. You're making a mountain out of a mole hill with this business of a tech-savy person helping another person build a website. I evaluated the quality the Steven Spector website. It is very helpful. It can be helpful to WP readers. You earlier said that you have limited knowledge of the subject area, yet you weigh in on the subject matter. Let's ask contributors to the Psychology entry to weigh in. I added more than 700 edits to the Psychology page—I stopped counting at 700. I think I qualify as someone who can judge the Spector site. I found it helpful because it contains links/pathways to many different psychological tests that bear on mental health. Iss246 (talk) 22:04, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
@Graywalls, so far, I think your arguments against this link are:
  • It doesn't meet the requirements for a reliable source.
  • Only two (or three? I lost count) editors are known to have posted (a small number of) links to this website.
  • It's an organized directory of websites with related information.
  • It shouldn't be favored over a similar page written by someone else.
Did I miss any major points? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:32, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
That sums it up and it's just a list of links, so basically a blog with someone's reading list. Graywalls (talk) 06:36, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
I don't really expect editors who post on this noticeboard to be intimately familiar with the actual Wikipedia:External links guideline (and apologies if it turns out you already knew this), but it turns out that "just a list of links" is considered a desirable thing by the community. See WP:ELMAYBE #3. We'd rather have a single link to a webpage that lists a lot of links than to have a long list of links ourselves.
Now, obviously, articles are never required to have any external links at all, and if someone had a different web directory, then editors should consider that, but overall, "just a list of links" is just what the doctor ordered. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:15, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
Although staunch subscribers to the inclusionist ideology would likely argue that it anyone's blogspot, wordpress where they maintain a list of web reading list ought to be included and this is where due weight does come into play. Simply put, professor's family member's website in which the professor doesn't assert on their own website that the professor controls the contents entirely ought to be treated like a reading list of just anyone out there. Graywalls (talk) 21:50, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
Even if we accept your premise, what makes you think that we're not treating it like a list of links from just anyone out there? The External guidelines actually does accept a good web directory "from just anyone out there". For years, it gave DMOZ as an example (until it went out of business). What makes you think that we're treating this one differently from how we would have treated a list of links at the DMOZ website? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:10, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing Here's the counter-argument.
  • The Assessment Archive is a reliable source. It was created/co-created by a prominent psychology professor.
  • The number of editors posting a link to a source is irrelevant as to the whether that source is appropriate.
  • It is an organized directory of tests with links to reliable source material (e.g., peer-reviewed articles) about them.
  • It isn't being favored over similar sources. I just did a Google search for "mental health measures archive". The spector site comes up 11th on the list so clearly people are using it and linking to it. Only 1 of the top 10 (a book > 20 years old) contains a list of tests.
  • It is not a blog.Psyc12 (talk) 11:55, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

I propose the suggestion made in this discussion by @Dustfreeworld: So it’s probably true that Steven’s site is a reliable source, though IMHO it maybe better for us to link to Paul’s website (https://paulspector.com/assessments/assessment-archive/), as our readers may not know who Steven is. a reasonable compromise that offers a sound reasoning. There's no reason to introduce Steven Eric Spector version. Graywalls (talk) 01:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing:, how about you? do you feel this is a reasonable compromise? Graywalls (talk) 01:56, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
There's no reason to even tell the reader that who owns the website. It's the contents that matter. If the contents are the same, then I don't care what domain name is involved. If the contents are worse, then we should use the link with the better contents.
Perhaps this will help:
  • You are saying "Let's not send them to his website."
  • I am saying – as does the guideline – "We're not sending them to anybody's website. We're sending them to a web directory. Send them to the best web directory you can find, no matter who owns the web directory."
WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

palestine-family.net

Currently redirects to gambling website https://www.bowlincamps.com/. ~40 uses.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  18:24, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

This is a known problem, across all WMF languages and projects, there are 1000s of once-working domains that have been hijacked by eastern gambling consortium. WP:JUDI is where an automated response is organized. Identifying the hijacked domains is the hard part, please notify JUDI when you find one, it will be taken care of. Thank you. -- GreenC 21:36, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
Added: Special:Diff/1183298630/1183847537 -- GreenC 21:37, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Medium.com

Has medium.com recently changed its revenue sharing model? I've been noticing an uptick in linkspamming of medium blogs recently. MrOllie (talk) 23:08, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps also worth asking/cross-post on WP:COIN? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:34, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Template:IETF RFC

This template generates content like this: RFC 125 which are often placed in the bodies of articles. This seems to be contrary to WP:NOELBODY and often the ELs should be used as citations and the use of the template leaves sentences without a cite e.g. at WebSocket. I raised this on the talk page a week ago, but there's been no response, so bringing it here for more attention. I fail to see why these links should be treated differently to every other EL. SmartSE (talk) 15:57, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

We have thousands of external link templates, they are not meant as a replacement for inline citations. They were invented/designed to be used in places where normal citations are overkill or not required, such as the external links section. Probably what should happen in this case is someone write a bot that finds all instances that are embedded in the main text, and convert them to proper CS1|2 citations. In the interim you could update the template documentation about best practice, and provide a boilerplate CS1|2 template, that can easily be copy-pasted in lieu of using the template. -- GreenC 16:38, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T145604
Hey, @Smartse, the history matters here, so let me give you (and anyone else unfamiliar with it) a quick overview. For years and years and years – before you and I started editing, even, there were three 'magic words' that produced links if you just typed them in plain text (followed by a space and a number). They were RFC, ISBN, and PMID. At the time, this was considered highly desirable and convenient behavior, even though we did have the occasional problem when editors wrote sentences like "Well, this dispute has been spread across multiple pages, and the results of RFC 1 at Talk:Foo and RFC 2 at Talk:Bar are contradictory...." – and it would automagically link the plaintext "RFC 1" to https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1 and "RFC 2" to https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2, whether you liked it or not.
In 2016, @Legoktm opened the mw:Requests for comment/Future of magic links to start the process of unwinding it from the software. The central Phab task is still open, and based on what I see here in the Reply (visual mode) box, it looks like VisualEditor and/or Parsoid haven't stopped doing this (@SSastry (WMF), is this on your list?), so the software end of this isn't finished. As part of that process, we (i.e., editors here at the English Wikipedia) have bot-replaced the plain text with templates.
In terms of your concerns, all of this background amounts to a long-standing consensus that IETF RFC links are one of those "rare exceptions" to the general rule in NOELBODY. I do not recommend writing the bot suggested above, as many of these are merely leftovers of links to RFCs that were were mentioned, rather than being intentional uses of primary sources. That said, since you "raised this on the talk page a week ago", and "there's been no response", WP:SOFIXIT applies, if that's what you personally thought best for that article.
(@GreenC, external link templates were invented/designed to solve maintenance problems in the ==External links== section, by reducing the number of broken links. If a popular website uses a stable identifier and periodically rearranges itself, then we can often fix all the templated links via a single edit to the template, rather than having to edit each article individually.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:10, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
That rationale of stable identifiers is flawed, because in reality when a website makes a change, the result is some links within a domain are dead, and some are not. I run WP:URLREQ and it's a constant problem. When admins upgrade their website, they almost never migrate every old URL to the new URL.
Furthermore, sometimes entire sites go dead and the whole template has to be replaced. One might say, well, simply add |archive-url= to the template, but this requires bespoke bot code to manage the template, and because there are thousands of these templates, some very complex to parse, added and changed daily, no one is doing that. The best solution is to use standard templates like CS1|2, or square links. All the standard tools (IABot, WaybackMedic, Citation bot, refill, etc) are designed to maintain them. Everything else is not checked or maintained by bots, with a few exceptions, and the result is we have a lot of link rot in these templates that is getting worse with time. -- GreenC 17:43, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Yes, it's true that websites are sometimes inconsiderate, but many of these were created years before the tools you mention, so the design and maintenance of tools (e.g., IABot) that didn't actually exist at the time obviously did not factor into why and how people made them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:01, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping! I will have to page in all the discussion in those tasks to see where we are stalled. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
Looks like we will have to address T145590 for read views for most wikis, so my sense is that we are likely to pick that up in the coming months (may be the new year). SSastry (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

A discussion about Find a Grave as an External link is underway at "Find a Grave -- perennial source (cemetery listings v. grave listings)" – S. Rich (talk) 20:24, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Justina Valentine

Hi, is this here an acceptable official site for the Justina Valentine article ? I removed it as it is a sales site. The original official site is a dead link. The article makes no mention of her running a boutique site, regards Atlantic306 (talk) 23:42, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

@Atlantic306, I wouldn't use it. The section of WP:EL about official websites sets two criteria:
  1. The linked content is controlled by the subject (organization or individual person) of the Wikipedia article.
  2. The linked content primarily covers the area for which the subject of the article is notable.
Looking at that site, there's lots of photos of Valentine but no indication who controls the content. In addition, as you pointed out, it's an e-commerce site, and doesn't provide any information about the subject of the article (nor is she notable for e-commerce). That's my two cents. Schazjmd (talk) 23:59, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, I agree Atlantic306 (talk) 00:01, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Vanessa Marquez

I'm not sure where to bring this, so I'll raise it here. Maybe someone else who frequents this noticeboard will have a better idea of what venue would be best for this type of concern.

It has recently come to my attention that the article for actor Vanessa Marquez includes a police bodycam video featuring her fatal shooting (albeit partially off-camera, towards the end), as well as the events leading up to it; there is also an external link to the same video. The video has been part of the article since May of this year; the external link has been there since March 2020. The footage of her incapacitated body, along with any identifying shots of the officer doing the shooting, are both blurred, and the video comes with a viewer discretion warning at the start and narration throughout, so it's not as if no effort was made to show the situation with respect towards Vanessa and the officers. However, it still feels like something that should at least have community input before it is included in an article.

Thoughts? Kurtis (talk) 13:34, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm not a regular at this noticeboard, so take my advice with many grains of salt.
  • Given the video is in the article, I don't think the external link is necessary.
  • I'm not sure what you mean by "community input" – WP:NOTCENSORED reminds us against being touchy on that score. Regardless, I think Talk:Vanessa Marquez would the place to raise issues with displaying the video itself.
Cremastra (talk) 21:54, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
@Kurtis, thanks for posting this. @Cremastra is correct that the link should at most be in one place. Either the {{Listen}} template in the section about her death should be removed, or the link under ==External links==; we should not have both.
For the rest, I think your RFC at Talk:Vanessa Marquez#Request for Comment: Inclusion of police bodycam footage should answer your question about whether editors want to include it at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:53, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: You're welcome, and thank you for linking the RfC. I think that's the best place to discuss whether or not the video should be included. @Cremastra: Wikipedia may not be censored, but we should still be cautious about how loosely we interpret that rule. Depicting someone's mental breakdown and fatal shooting in a video is the kind of thing I really think should be discussed so that if it is to be included, it's with community consensus. Kurtis (talk) 00:37, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

VH1 at web.archive.org

2603:6000:d102:a66d::/64 was listed at WP:AIV due to adding external links like this. Any opinions on those edits? Johnuniq (talk) 02:44, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

It looks like an archived copy of the official website, which would be fine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:17, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

I have a question about templates like {{Magic: The Gathering card}} that are being used to essentially embed external links into articles (either in the lede section of body sections). The documentation of Template:Magic: The Gathering card states that the template should only be used in "External links" sections when used in articles, but at least in Odyssey (Magic: The Gathering) that is not the case at all. This template looks like it's being used quite a lot so I'm wondering if the use of this template in general (there are others like {{NASDAQ}}, {{Bibleverse}}, etc.) has ever been discussed and any type of consensus reached as to whether they're OK to use in the bodies of articles. I don't know exactly how many of these templates there are, but I'd imagine many were bodly created very earlier on when Wikipedia was just starting out and probably never were discussed over the years as relevant policies and guidelines started being fleshed out and further developed. All three of the documentation pages for the templates listed above state they should only be used in external link sections or in infoboxes, but that doesn't really seem to reflect how they're being used in many cases. They are all being used so many times that unilaterally going around an changing them all might (even with the best of intentions) might be seen as disruptive. There has already been an RFC for the "NASDAQ" template at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Ticker symbols in article leads so I guess that's sufficient for that particular template, but I'm wondering if the same thing needs to be done for the others individually or whether it can be done for such templates as a group generally. Even with that ticker symbol RFC, though, there's no telling how many have just ignored it or were just unaware of it when using the template. For example, AAON, ACI Worldwide, Alliance Fiber Optic Products and Amalgamated Bank were found by hovering through the first column of "A" listings at Category:Companies listed on the Nasdaq so there might be more. Of the four I found, three look as if they might've just slipped through the cracks during whatever post-RFC clean up took place, but at least one was an article created a few years after the RFC. -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:56, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

NASDAQ was previously used in the first sentence for many articles, but since the 2012 RFC it has mostly been used in infoboxes. Bibleverse has been generally accepted, although there's at least one editor who objects to it. Similar templates include Template:IETF RFC. Generally, the unifying theme is that the contents are commonly referred to through some standard mechanism (whether that's RFC 2119 or Genesis 1:1 or an Opus number for music), a tendency not to have a matching Wikipedia article (we would link to our article about RFC 4824 but we [weirdly] don't have an article about RFC 2119, so the external link template could be used in that case), and some acceptable website (authoritative or otherwise) that contains primarily the text of that item.
That said, I do not think that links such as the one found in Odyssey (Magic: The Gathering)#Torment would likely be approved by the community as being sufficiently similar. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:49, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the input. I've added some {{Please see}} templates to relevant WikiProject and template talk page to try and get more people involved in this discussion. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:49, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
Bibleverse has been generally accepted, although there's at least one editor who objects to it. I'm guessing you mean me? I'll just say that my experience is very different from WAID's – I've seen plenty of editors object to it, and very few experienced editors who actually prefer embedded links to footnotes. The Bibleverse documentation says that the template should not be used in the body of an article; this warning has been in place for years, and I don't believe anyone but WAID has ever formally contested it. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 19:37, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
  • I think that the MTG card template is closer to {{Bibleverse}} and its usage is generally fine. Bibleverse is fine because very often an article might want to cite a relevant passage, and the reader would want to check for themselves. If a card is being addressed directly along the lines of "CardX was listed as one of the most famous cards from the expansion due to blah blah blah", linking CardX so that it's not just a name is very relevant. In the case of Black Lotus (Magic: The Gathering card), there is in fact an article to link, but that's not that common. Now, I can see possibly not using it for just passing mentions in raw texts, but I think that it's especially fine for, say, bulleted lists or paragraphs specifically about a card. SnowFire (talk) 03:57, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
    I don't think it's similar. If someone is mentioning the name of a document, a link that lets them find out what the document itself directly says might sometimes be valuable. (Is Sonnet 29 the one about the summer day or the one about being old? A quick look at Wikisource [which is an external website for our purposes] tells you that it's the one about envying other people's social status!) However, a link to a different website that tells you about the document is not the same as one that is the document. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:20, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Content, external links, and citations kept being removed for reasons unknown to me--unable to contact anyone for help.

I added a section on Flag of San Antonio, but it kept being removed, even with citations and external links. Unable to upload my own images for reasons I am unfamiliar with; I believe it was an "autoban" mistake. Haven't been able to appeal or ask for help or clarification. I just created a Wikipedia account so forgive me if I am not entirely familiar with everything yet; all I wanted was to add a section for a movement to adopt a new city flag, similar to that of the Keystone Flag movement in Pennyslvania. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lowqualityposts (talk • contribs) 22:47, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

As the removal clearly said, the sources don't support what the paragraphs said. None of those references say anything about Maxwell Feldmann or his proposal. A post by Feldmann is not enough. You need to show that the proposal has been covered by reliably published sources independent of him. StarryGrandma (talk) 20:10, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

I added "How to Escape Nibiru", podcast by Brian Dunning as an EL and User:Juxlos reverted it calling it a " literal promotion plug".. I wasn't of course trying to promote anything, just adding something of interest. Does this fail WP:EL? Doug Weller talk 15:42, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Just noticed it looks as though the editor searched for Dunning, see also [5]. Doug Weller talk 15:58, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
Juxlos, what's your concern? Generally speaking, Wikipedia:We don't care what happens to your website, so if an external link leads to more traffic – well, we don't actually care. What we care about is that the linked page is relevant and interesting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:19, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Flickr group - yes or no?

[6] an el at Bennachie. Doug Weller talk 12:05, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

No, because they don't add anything more than the article. We're an encyclopaedia and as have enough images of the subject, this uncurated link of photos adds nothing more to the article that already has several photos. That's my opinion not entirely based on policy. Although, not going to lie, there are some damn good photos in there. Maybe I'm talking myself out of it, not sure. I guess it can't really hurt can it? Canterbury Tail talk 14:04, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:External links guideline doesn't address image galleries directly (we get about one question/dispute per year about it), so generally the point is whether, using your best editorial judgment, you believe the images represent "a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article" and "neutral and accurate material that is relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject and cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues, amount of detail...or other reasons", or not. For example, editors can realistically be expected to disagree over whether the five images currently in the gallery of that article are basically the same as the ~1,400 images on the Flickr page (not the same number, of course, but the same basic value to the reader). Some people find photos super helpful and informative, and others just don't care about them, so we'll get differing opinions, with nobody being "wrong".
It's not banned, so if you think it's useful, I'd suggest adding it and seeing whether anyone objects enough to revert it. If they don't, then that's implicit consensus, and you're set (at least until someone actually does object). If they do, then WP:ELBURDEN applies, and you can have a chat on the article's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
thanks all. Doug Weller talk 21:38, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Yes Mrsone40 (talk) 22:13, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Curlie is the successor to DMOZ. We have a long tradition of including links to DMOZ in lots of articles and the current template, {{Curlie}}, has 6,746 transclusions. I saw it recently and thought "who uses these anymore?" Web directories used to be essential tools, and many people have good feelings about the DMOZ in particular, but in 2024 ... I can't remember the last time I used one or heard anyone talk about them except as part of some techno-nostalgia.

The content of these links seems to be a combination of links already easily found in relevant Wikipedia articles, the most obvious links that would come up with any search, and some spam. Over time, we've come to see the external links section as something to be used sparingly, but these remain.

I brought this up at VPI, but it didn't get much of a response. I don't want to nominate the template for deletion, because it's entirely possible there are still good uses of it. What I'm hoping to figure out is under what conditions should we be using it? I'm having trouble thinking of any. After all, if there are good links at Curlie, why wouldn't we just link to those sites directly from our articles? Why risk the low quality stuff that we would decline to include?

This is not an RfC because I'm curious to hear from those who value these links and get some thoughts about the rationale for inclusion. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:52, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia talk:External links#Curlie as spam and Wikipedia talk:External links/Archive 41#Rule about the limit to the number of links in an "External links" section? and other prior discussions.
In Wikipedia articles, there are two ways to use a web directory (of which Curlie is merely the most popular example):
  • One is to provide a link to a good collection of external links. This would mean finding a particularly good page (Curlie or otherwise) that has a long list of links that you really think would interest readers. This link would represent giving readers a link to a page that is a clear improvement over them just doing a web search. Compare, e.g., this web directory of legitimate online mental health assessments, compiled by a mental health professional, against search engine results, which might include incorrect, outdated, or joke "assessments".
  • The other use is to discourage Wikipedia editors from filling the ==External links== section with a long list of links. In this instance, it doesn't really matter what the contents of the linked page are, because our main goal is to solve behavioral problems by telling editors that their link should be submitted to Curlie instead of creating a sprawling linkfarm here. I recommend this particularly when editors are adding "just one more" charitable organization. This is likely the reason editors chose to add a Curlie link to Alcoholism. It doesn't matter if it's any good, so long as it stops the spam for services in each editors' area.
WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:35, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
The line at WP:EL which considers web directories as links that can be considered has existed since the earliest versions of the page. That diff is from 2005, though it looks like it draws from other preexisting pages, so the guidance might be older. That would make sense, since in 2005 directories were past their heyday, but still something people used from time to time. It's entirely possible there are some good parts of Curlie, but I'm yet to come across a useful one linked in an article.
I could see some unusual circumstances where a directory is useful, but it's not the norm. Most of the links to Curlie I've seen seem to have been added because the link exists, not because it provides anything useful. I don't see why we'd need to generalize guidance about directories in order to add a link here and there that happen to be a directory. Also, how careful is Curlie about medical topics like alcoholism? Clicking around the site a bit, I find that they have rich resources on e.g. Reiki, which has "Bill's Reiki Page" but nothing about how it's a pseudoscience (beyond its categorization as "alternative"). Hop over to nutrition, and there's a link to Kenny & Joann's raw blog, where they have a handful of posts to help you "restore immunity" and try to sell their services. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:44, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
It sometimes surprises editors, but external links are not required to be reliable, neutral, or non-commercial.
The general trend towards interpreting advice pages seems to be that anything not explicitly allowed is prohibited, so I think it's valuable to mention it. I don't think we should suggest Curlie by name, however. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:56, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
This makes it sound like we have no standards at all if it's not listed at ELNO. That may be true (there may indeed be a lot that feels through the cracks between ELYES/ELMAYBE/ELNO), but it's hard to interpret the spirit of the intersection of WP:FRINGE, WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:NOT, and WP:EL as indicating we should push people to Bill's Reiki page and whatever people or businesses decided to use Curlie for promotion. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 17:20, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
The article Reiki might or might not benefit from a link to any web directory (Curlie or otherwise). However, a web directory might be better than nothing (e.g., if the absence makes that section a spam magnet) or than "official" sources (like an organization of Reiki practitioners – an "open" web directory has the possibility of including links from an anti-Reiki POV).
Any external link can be removed by any editor for any reason, and it can't be restored unless and until there is evidence of an actual consensus for it (per WP:ELBURDEN), so I prefer to think of it as "letting editors use their best judgement" instead of "no standards at all". It's okay for someone to add it because they think it will be interesting to readers, and it's okay for you to remove it because you think it's uninformative. (See the line in WP:EL that says Is the site content proper in the context of the article (useful, tasteful, informative, factual, etc.)? if you'd like some ideas about complaints that won't make it sound like you're POV pushing.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:18, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Your view is welcome. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:12, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Linking to Deadline Hollywood film scripts

Deadline Hollywood often posts the film scripts of Oscar candidates on their site each year. Previous discussions about the use of scripts on Wikipedia are somewhat ambiguous and hinge on readings of WP:ELNEVER. Dune (2021 film) currently links to one of these scripts in the external link sections and I'm doing a GA review. Is linking to a Deadline Hollywood film script appropriate? Viriditas (talk) 21:34, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

@Viriditas, the Wikipedia:Good article criteria do not appear to require compliance with Wikipedia:External links, so I'm not sure why the contents of the ==External links== section could be relevant to determining whether it meets the criteria.
If you are concerned about copyright issues, then what I see at https://deadline.com/2024/03/oscar-nominated-screenplays-2024-scripts-1235802192/ (the introductory article for this series) suggests that the news outlet is posting these both openly and legally. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:52, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
The use of external links are covered in various places, such as criterion 2d, "it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism". All of the policies and guidelines interact with each other in various ways. Viriditas (talk) 22:00, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Télam

Télam is a state-owned news agency from Argentina. It was closed by president Javier Milei, as part of a program of fiscal austerity to deal with an ongoing crisis. The official page is https://www.telam.com.ar/ which is currently displaying a message that it is closed. A group of former workers started the site https://somostelam.com.ar/ ("we are Telam"), similar to the former Télam page. Should it be included? It makes no mention of its nature, and seems to me as if it was trying to usurp the brand (which still belongs to the government, closure or not). Cambalachero (talk) 15:02, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I'd consider that link if there were a significant amount of information about the employee group (e.g., at least a substantial paragraph). On the other hand, if it's not worth space in the article, I'd consider it similar to a fansite and wouldn't bother adding the link. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

How to get external link Alimohmed23 (talk) 13:56, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. I do not understand what you want to do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:20, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Does the info at WP:EL help? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:18, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

CSRF Token error for whitelist request edit

I was trying to submit the text below at the spam: whitelist page. But no matter what, a small coloured error message popped up saying csrf token error. That's why I can't submit that new thread. It's very frustrating. How do I fix it? Would you be able to help with unblocking this specific WebLink into the whitelist for attaching a ref-link to a company on a page?

Here was my planned text entry in the spam whitelist request page.

Resolved
 – The relevant editor helped add a relevant text in another page for me. ObiKKa (talk) 22:55, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

www.xyz.com.sg

Moved to MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist § www.xyz.com.sg
 – Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:40, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
@ObiKKa, I think you're on the wrong page. Try posting this at MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:16, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
<polite cough> Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:19, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Hey. That is the exact page I tried submitting the text on with various edits many times today. It just doesn't work.

This error always popped up at top of page during publishing stage: "Error, edit not published. Invalid CSRF token.". ObiKKa (talk) 22:34, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

I've moved it there for you. No idea if you'll be able to reply with the Android app; it is, as you've discovered, buggy. Try using a browser if possible. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:40, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Ooh, thank you. I have checked that new addition over there. I am surprised that it would only work in a desktop/laptop browser (or in difficult circumstances inside a mobile phone browser). Much pleasure. I'll try to add the resolved tag above this section. ObiKKa (talk) 22:54, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

I suppose it's WP:ITSTHURSDAY. JTanner (WMF), are you seeing problems with Android app edits? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:28, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Hi JTanner. I checked that bug report and feature request page link. Looks interesting. Should I ask over there for why the CSRF Token error keeps preventing me from posting text over in the spam whitelist request page in the Android app? I also tried to make another reply today after my request was accepted and I made the edit with the whitelisted reflink. But that CSRF Token error popped up again there in the app. So I logged into Wikipedia in a mobile browser (Brave) in the same phone and added the reply there.
I have one feature request too. I would like a finder tool during the preview stage of edits in the Android app, not only in the first edit stage. It's coz the huge pages would take a long time to scroll down on the thin portrait-style phone screen. ObiKKa (talk) 16:17, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Hello @ObiKKa,
This is Amal Ramadan, I am a Sr.Movment Communications Specialist supporting the mobile apps team in the foundation. Can I ask you to send a screen recording video that shows how you det this error to our support email android-support@wikimedia.org and I will make sure to include our software engineers and update you on how this can be solved? Thanks. ARamadan-WMF (talk) 08:16, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Advice request

In this edit a SPA account replaced the correct external link – www.balboaacademy.edu.pa – with a gambling spamlink that is almost identical (in fact it looks at first glance to be more likely to be the real site).

To go to the trouble (and expense) of setting up a .org to hijack links to this one minor school in Panama seems excessive on the part of the spammer… unless they'll be back to add it again and again until it sticks. Would we blacklist for that risk, or is it too small a risk? Is there an edit filter it could be added to perhaps? 2A00:23C5:50E8:EE01:74C9:F21C:7D37:E976 (talk) 14:09, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

You can report this at MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist, where admins like User:Ohnoitsjamie can take a look. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:23, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
There's only been one attempt to spam it so far. We'd end up with a pretty massive blacklist if we blacklisted every site that was spammed at least once. Though I'm not a big baseball fan, I do subscribe to the "three strikes yer out" rule, though if the spammed link is connected to other blacklisted links or spam rings, I will blacklist on sight. OhNoitsJamie Talk 18:06, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
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