User talk:KelvinSmith
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[edit] Superscripts
Please stop incorrectly changing the superscripts on the articles for national parks. You are sending them to redirects now instead of directly to the linked article. Rmhermen 04:32, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)
Reply: I don't know if you'll see this or not. Sorry to have messed some things up. I am baffled why the superscripts are changing. I went in to the histories and I can see the change there, but I am clueless why it changed. Is there something special you have to do to make these not change? I am not certain what the correct text is because I'm not sure if it changes in the process of getting displayed on my computer or in the process of getting submitted back. Can you tell me more about it?
Thanks!
- What browser are you using and are you editing in the edit window or exporting it to another text editor? Rmhermen 13:42, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)
Intertnet Explorer 5 on Macintosh. I didn't export it. I just took a look at the text of one of them on this PC (windows) and I see that it will work correctly here. It looks like Macintosh just isn't supported on this site.
[edit] Your contributions have the air of spamming
Hello, I've noticed your contributions. You are certainly welcome to contribute here. However, it seems that your contributions mainly consist of adding external links to many articles pages in your own web site--pages that have Google ads on them. This has all the appearances of someone who is taking advantage of Wikipedia to boost their page rankings and get more Google clickthroughs. Forgive if I'm wrong in this, but the paucity of your contributions outside of this gives this impression strongly. Believe me, we are familiar with this thing in Wikipedia. Many try on it a regular basis and our antenna are well sensitized to it. You are not the first to try this. If you were making a stronger attempt to add content outside of external links, it might not be that big of an issue. Why not donate your material to Wikipedia by actually adding it to the articles? I can tell you for certain that your external links will be removed quickly if this is your agenda. Like I said, I hope I am misjudging you.-- Decumanus 18:02, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC)
Reply: I hope that the links I have added will be judged on the basis of what they add to the individual articles that they were added to. Each one links to a virtual tour that has had hours of work put into it, often many days over a period of years. I confess I added a bunch of them, but they are not unlike other links in the articles. As for contributing to the content, I did contribute to an article on Temple Square this morning. It was a humble effort, and I welcome any revisions to it. I have seen a large number of other articles where I was tempted to add more and make a couple corrections (like the article that says that Amboy Crater is in the Mojave Preserve) but this is a lot more work and I worry about style.
It will be your decision (collectively) about these links I added, of course. I note that a number of people have already followed these links and seem to have enjoyed seeing a tour of the areas, doing quite a number of pages. I have worked full time on my virtual tour project for a year now, and in my spare time for years before that. It costs money, and I need to support a family and that means I need some revenue. That should not be a sin. I invite you to take a look at the tours and see if they are a worthy effort. If you think not, then you can suppress the effort by deleting the links. If you like them, then please leave the links in, and we can mutually help each other. For what it's worth, there are 90 links to my site from DMOZ and about 50 from LookSmart. They apparently have found them to be of merit.
- I like your website and will not remove the links. --mav 23:51, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Thanks, Mav --Kelvin
[edit] Removal of talk messages
Please do not remove legitimate messages from your talk page. Talk pages exist as a record of legitimate communication, and in any case, comments are available through the page history. You're welcome to archive your talk page, but be sure to provide a link to any deleted legitimate comments. Thanks. OhNoitsJamie Talk 20:53, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] No Spam please
Please do not add commercial links or links to your own private websites to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or a mere collection of external links. You are, however, encouraged to add content instead of links to the encyclopedia. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. See the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thank you.
- Please do not remove this warning
- Please review WP:EL if you haven't already done so. The links you have been adding to articles appear to be in violation of this guideline
Brian 04:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC)btball
[edit] Request to add back your links
Hi, I noticed your request at Talk:Zion National Park for someone to add back the link to your virtual tour at untravelled road. The virtual tours are quite nice but the links appear to be primarily intended to drive traffic to your site for the purpose of generating revenue. I'm probably the one that deleted the link in the first place, but a number of editors noticed the apparent spam and discussed it first on Wikipedia talk:Spam. I think the virtual tours are quite nice and if some other editor decided to add them back then I probably won't delete them as that won't be the direct violation of WP:WEB and WP:EL that yours was (of course, no guarantee about what other editors would do). There's another possible solution for you to consider if your links really are solely intended to improve the quality of the article and not intended as spam. You might consider posting the virtual tours on Commons under a Creative Commons license and then linking the tours directly into the article. Then there's be no question of their being spam. You've apparently put a lot of time and effort into the virtual tours so I understand if you don't want to license them under a Creative Commons or GFPL license. Another suggestion is to change your untravelled road site so that it is not so obviously commercial. The first thing that I saw when I went to your site was all the Google Ads ... Moving them to a less obvious part of the site so that a users initial impression is more of the free content and less of the advertizing might help your objective. Thanks, Brian 15:00, 19 August 2006 (UTC)btball
[edit] Wikipedia's Definition of a Commercial Site
I think I've reached an understanding of a commercial site (at least as interpreted by user:btball). Google in a non-commercial site, because they make billions of dollars a year and won't be benfited or hurt by the presence or absence of wikipedia links. Kelvin Smith's UntraveledRoad is a commercial site because Kelvin Smith has invested tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours developing his site and puts out more each month in connection fees, and does'nt make enough money off of it to even keep it going without having a second job to fund it. Kelvin Smith's UntraveledRoad was definately benefited by the hundreds of users who came site and spent hours enjoying the extensive tours. That makes his site a commercial site. At wikipedia we don't want to do anything to benefit a struggling site, even if the viewers love it.
If the body of Wikipedia users wants the foregoing definition of commercial, then I don't care. I don't have to do UntraveledRoad. But I don't have to tell you what I think of some users who want to be vigilantes and consider their ideas above those of all other users.
- Hi, please don't take this personally. I think what you've done at untravled road is great. I only removed the links after a discussion at the Wikipedia spam project talk page and only after reviewing WP:SPAM and WP:EL (and the untravled site). I wasn't acting as a vigilante. I removed the links because of the part of the policy that says a link shouldn't be added to "A website that you own or maintain, even if the guidelines above imply that it should be linked to. This is because of neutrality and point-of-view concerns; neutrality is an important objective at Wikipedia, and a difficult one. If it is relevant and informative, mention it on the talk page and let other — neutral — Wikipedia editors decide whether to add the link." Several of the links have been added back by other users - and that is as it should be. Brian 16:00, 19 August 2006 (UTC)btball
[edit] moving google ads
Brian,
I have worked for years to try to get UntraveledRoad to the point that I can work on it full time. I have even quit my job for years at a time and worked on it with no income. I hate ads, but moving them to where they are has increased the revenue fourfold. The best chance for untraveledroad to ever succeed is to go without wikipedia links and keep the ads where they are. Increasing traffic while decreasing revenue is not going to help.
- Well, you actually will have Wikipedia links as some other editors have added links back - which is quite fine and the way it should be (see discussion above). It's nice work that you've done on the untravled road site and I think it's great that editors (other than yourself, as owner of that site, per WP:EL) are adding links to it. Good luck and I'm sorry for any distress this has caused you - I regularly fight SPAM and this looked like a clear violation of policy. Brian 16:04, 19 August 2006 (UTC)btball
[edit] Too Heavy Handed
Brian, I think you've been too heavy-handed. I can understand your concerns about spam. Anyone can pop together a page about any national park, using stock photography and text distilled from any of a number of sources, populate it with ads and feed it to the web crawlers without even visiting the park. Popping these links into wikipedia is easy and there are lots of them. The guidelines for external links said (when I looked at them in 2004) that links should be to unique sites with significant content in them apart from what is in the Wikipedia article. My site is one of the few with true content that wikipedia will never have, since virtual travel as I have implemented it is quite outside of the realm of Wikipedia. Look at almost any of the links which you left in the articles from which you deleted my links. I'm not sure you could find a single one of them with true unique content which could not be included in wikipedia. Doesn't it look like you deleted the best links while leaving the mediocre links?
Every time I have added a link it has been seen by a number of editors who watch the articles. I don't know if there was ever more than one that you did not delete. This includes numerous articles which are closely watched, like the national parks articles. My Yosemite NP link was deleted once. I raised it in the discussion pages and I got one supporting comment and no comments against, so I re-added it. Other than that, I think you are the only one who ever deleted my links to my knowledge.
You were blantant to point out the previous discussion on my links, but I don't know if you read it. The one user commented that if I had been contributing to the articles, the links would probably be fine. That user never deleted a single link. You'll note that the user named Mav voted support for my links. I looked at his page (in 2004) and it said he was like the financial officer for Wikipedia. That was all of the previous discussion on my links. I considered that people had seen the inherent and unique value in my links and that I had a go-ahead to add them. You'll note that I've tried to add something to each article as I added my link since that time. I have contributed to a number of other articles also. Some are very well filled-out, and I haven't wanted to disturb them.
Look, please, why don't you restore my links, and let the individual editors decide what links they want to keep in the articles? I think that would be the political thing to do. In the sources of my traffic, Wikipedia was the single biggest contributor of traffic, second only to those with no referring URL. I assure you, those users were finding it to be enjoyable and relavent and would often spend extended hours enjoying it. What you've done has not improved Wikipedia, nor has it helped anyone. Go find the real problem sites.
I know we all have to have policies, but they are meant to solve problems not cause them.
[edit] Untraveled road
Yes, it appears that I'm still can't access it. bob rulz 02:23, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
- Yeah, that would be it then; I'm using Comcast. It's weird, I swear I remember accessing that website before. I must be thinking of a different website, or else Comcast hasn't always blocked it. bob rulz 03:23, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
