User talk:72.144.66.226

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[edit] Applebride external link

[edit] 1

Hi, please do not add Applebride links to wikipedia articles. Applebride is a commercial site, as can be seen by all those google ads it hosts. It also fails wikipedia's external links guidelines as the site is not a notable one, and the content is not particularly relevent to encyclopedic articles on engagement or wedding favors. Thanks --SiobhanHansa 11:46, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 2

Thanks for all your help on Wikipedia, but it's clear that you haven't read those pages! They offer far, far more information than you seem to indicate. Please reread the Wikipedia pages and the AppleBride pages. To be clear, the external link policies state:

Links that are added to promote a site, that primarily exist to sell products or services, with objectionable amounts of advertising, or that require payment to view the relevant content

AppleBride is not a commercial site at all and falls under none of these clauses! It's a community website-- it may contain a completely unobtrusive ad off to the side, but if you banished every site that linked to a well-written page with Google Ads on it, you would be removing virtually all external links from Wikipedia.

Please look around the AppleBrde site and you'll quickly notice that it's not commercial. You might also find that you can help them out!

The external linking guidelines encourage increasing the usefulness of Wikipedia. If you edit the posts to include the appropriate level of detail to make-up for the loss of information by delinking external resources, then you should definitely remove unnecessary links. But not every external link is commercial linkspam.

Thanks for your time and rational reconsideration of the issue. Decidedly 02:20, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I have indeed looked at the site. I took a lot of time trawling through the links I removed to ensure I did my best not to delete something that was a good external link for an encyclopedia article. I can still make mistakes, and some things are a matter of interpretation where honest people may differ. At the same time one thing you state above is simply not true - This is a commercial site. Google adsense is a revenue generation engine. As a site that generates revenue, applebride is, by its nature, commercial. On an interpretation level, you may find those ads unobtrusive, but I have to tell you there were sites I removed with far less obtrusive ads than the applebride site. And I saw it as site that, successful or not, is set up to try to make money.
Still, regardless of the ads, WP:EL is not simply about not adding commercial sites. It's about ensuring wikipedia remains an encyclopedia and doesn't become (among other things) a web directory. It's about ensuring the information we associate with an article is encyclopedic. Under links normally to be avoided WP:EL states: 2. Any site that contains factually inaccurate material or unverified original research,... Applebride is almost exclusively unverified original research.
Your enthusiasm for the site may be completely altruistic, but that does not make the site suitable for inclusion in wikipedia articles. The site would not be considered a reliable source, it does not add scholarly information, it is very POV being almost entirely USA based and pro-wedding industry, and it is not even a particularly notable site of its type. There is no reason to think this site should merit a position above others of its ilk on wikipedia. --SiobhanHansa 03:08, 12 September 2006 (UTC)