Wikipedia talk:External links/Amendment

Discussion

I suggest we have some discussion first before immediately seeking consensus. I can see both sides here. ++Lar: t/c 22:52, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Well... For one thing I'm not so sure that this part:

"preference will be given to those appearing on Wikisource, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikinews, and other open-source repositories, especially those under the Wikimedia Foundation umbrella."

is a good idea. (1) Not exactly NPOV, wouldn't you say? Why should we value Project Gutenberg more than [insert commercial site with the same content here]? (2) We already make the content under the umbrela stand out (by using those boxes with logos and other such cool stuff). This just comes naturally. No use incorporating it into project policies. Just some thoughts. Cheers, TOR 23:06, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

<considers> There is benefit to giving preference to Wikimedia projects; by keeping traffic within the WMF sites we get more eyes on our articles, and more views has a direct relationship to article improvements. It also works toward the goals of Wikimedia Foundation: "The goals of the foundation are to encourage the further growth and development of open content, social software WikiWiki-based projects (see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge."¹ But, even so, that may be instruction creep. Does it address a current, existing problem? Are we currently linking to non-free sites when we could be linking to free sites? - Amgine 23:22, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

I think this a good policy for what we want to see in a good article. I worry that people read this and think it means a mass deletion of informational external links in articles that our barely above stub level. As the current situation is very problamatic and cannot be allowed to continue indefinately, we do need to pare down these links in short order. I do not believe we should delete the links to sites which have information not yet in the article (but would not fit this policy), but instead move such links to the talk page and make a new maintance category under the expand category. Expand from web source perhaps. That way we can tackle the linkfarms in a timely manner without losing any real information. Another suggestion I have is to go through the current featured articles and see if any have links outside this policy, that will give us a good idea what exceptions might need to be made. --Birgitte§β ʈ Talk 15:46, 7 May 2006 (UTC)