User talk:Erl

Welcome[edit]

Hello, Erl, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the Wikipedia Boot Camp, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes (~~~~) produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Kukini 14:05, 10 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of external link[edit]

Copied from User talk:Pollinator

Thank you for your efforts to keep Wikipedia clean of link spam. I sympathize with your efforts.

However, you removed an external link that I do not believe qualifies as link spam. You removed the link to a close-up photo of a popcorn from the Popcorn entry with the motivation "do not add links to pages with advertisements".

To my knowledge there is no Wikipedia policy against external links to pages with a reasonable, limited amount of advertising. Wikipedia:External_links says links to pages with "objectionable amounts of advertising" are not to be made, but I don't think you can argue that that is the case here. If there is a policy like you mention, please point me to it.

There is no equivalent close-up photo of a popcorn in the Wikimedia Commons, so I believe the photo does add value to the article.

I have added links to photos in various Wikipedia articles, but I do so in good faith to add photos as information where there are no similar photos previously in the articles. I am always up front about adding links, and try to enter good edit summaries of why. If you want to argue against a link to a photo, I will accept it if you motivate it by there being equivalent or better photos, or if you believe the photos are of too poor quality.

I have reverted your removal of the link. If you want to further motivate the removal this link, let's have a discussion here or on the Popcorn talk page!

I am a relatively new Wikipedia editor, and I hope to have a constructive discussion in good faith!

Erland Lewin 22:10, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know of any applicable Wikipedia policy on linking solely to photos on another page, but the problem here more general, as Internet protocol. Linking to a photo on a page, rather than to a page is coloquially known as "stealing bandwidth," and it is at least frowned upon across the Internet. If these are not your pages, do you have the webmasters' permissions to use their bandwidth in this fashion? If these are from your page or pages, why not upload them to Wikipedia? Pollinator 04:44, 22 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Links to phogle[edit]

If you have a close connection to some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

editing articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors;
linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam);
and you must always:
avoid breaching relevant policies and guidelines, especially neutral point of view, verifiability, and autobiography.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have conflict of interest, please see Wikipedia:Business' FAQ. For more details about what constitutes a conflict of interest, please see Wikipedia:Conflict of Interest. Thank you. [1] ✤ JonHarder ^talk 20:44, 2 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]