Talk:Altadena, California

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[edit] Copyright Information

© Copyright. I am the webmaster of record for the Altadena Town Council and I have licensed all the material from that web page which I have copied to the article on Altadena, California IAW GNU Free Documentation License. Magi Media 18:45, 9 April 2006 (UTC)Magi Media

[edit] External Link to Altadena Weather

I had an External Link set up at one time to my Web Page with Current Altadena Weather Conditions. I thought it was relavent to Altadena and it was there since June '06.

I recently tried editing the link to another page I maintain which includes a WebCam Image of the foothills above Altadena along with current Weather Conditions and Forecast. Shortly after, the External Link to Altadena Weather was removed.

In further investigation I found more info at Wikipedia related to the suggested appropriate and inappropriate use of External Links. an excerpt:

Due to the rising profile of Wikipedia and the amount of extra traffic it can bring a site, there is a great temptation to use Wikipedia to advertise or promote links. This includes both commercial and non-commercial sites. Use of Wikipedia to link to a website that you own, maintain or are acting as an agent for is strongly recommended against, even if the guidelines otherwise imply that it should be linked to. If it is a relevant and informative link that should otherwise be included, please consider mentioning it on the talk page and let neutral and independent Wikipedia editors decide whether to add it. This is in line with the conflict of interests guidelines.

While I do maintain the Web Pages, I also feel that the information would be of interest to many who might visit the Altadena page in Wikipedia.

Soooooo, I am posting the info here so that some independent Wikipedia editor who might also feel it relevant might consider posting it in External Links.

Detailed Altadena Weather is available at: http://www.westphalfamily.com/wxdata.html

Current WeatherCam Image and abbreviated Weather and Forecast is available at: http://www.westphalfamily.com/wxdata2.html

I welcome any comments or suggestions and look forward to being a valuable Wikipedia Contributor.

Bill 19:43, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I was the person who deleted the link after looking at it. Your website, to be honest, was a very, very basic personal weather station report, offering a limited amount of current information, a webcam photo, and then archives of historical weather data as pages of comma-delimited data dumps. What does that really tell me about Altadena? Of what use is the website to readers who wants to learn more about Altadena?

If they have articles on Altadena, the WikiTravel or World66 websites might be a more appropriate place to add your website. There is also a Los Angeles-area wiki at Wikia.

<soapbox mode> If you want to help do some of the grunt work on the Wikipedia, you might look at the Wikipedia:WikiProject External links. You can help go through the external links in Wikipedia looking for inappropriate or low-value links—the spam, the links to flikr webpages with vacation photos, the blogs filled with uninformative blather, the chat room links, the message boards completely filled with off-topic posts and spam, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. If I sound grumpy, it's because I am. In the Wikipedia articles that are on my watchlist, I've recently been seeing an increase in deletable links in the External links sections of articles (as well as hidden within the rest of the articles) during the past few weeks. </soapbox mode>

If a couple of other editors see this discussion, and after viewing your website they say they think that it is an appropriate link, I will not delete it again. ^BlankVerse 20:55, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Of what use is the website to readers who want to learn more about Altadena? Possibly what it looks like, how hot it gets, how cold it gets, how windy it gets, how much it rains. Just my point of view.

Being relatively new to Wikipedia, I don't know all the intricacies of how everything works but I want to learn more. I can definitely see how it could be very tediuous policing everything that goes on so I completly understand your grumpiness. As I become more familiar with Wikipedia I will certainly be glad to help if I can.

Thanks for the quick response.

Best regards,

Bill 21:34, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

For the sort of information that you are talking about, I've seen a couple of Wikipedia articles on cities where people have created graphs from historical data showing the average temperature over the year, plus lines showing the max highs and lows for the year, and then they've uploaded the graphs to the Wikipedia to use within the articles. I wish I could recall which cities that I've seen the graphs in so that I could give you an example. A graph like that is so much more informative than the tabular data that is currently in the Los Angeles, California#Climate article. ^BlankVerse 14:40, 13 December 2006 (UTC)