Talk:American World University

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For a previous debate over the deletion of this article see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/American World University.

You shouldn't change external links into an image "to prevent AWU link from factoring into Google pagerank". Or can I do this to the George W. Bush article? anthony 警告 13:52, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Here are the links which were removed:

If merely linking to something is promotion, then all external links are inheirently NPOV, which is rediculous. --L33tminion | (talk) 19:59, Nov 12, 2004 (UTC)

This is totally unacceptable. What google does and how google works are google's business. Anthony is quite right. If you remove links to the things you find objectionable, you have no grounds for saying that he can't remove links to the things he disapproves of.Dr Zen 05:35, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I didn't exactly remove them. I'm assuming you've examined what I actually did. I've since found what I think is better way to deal with this issue, namely the use of links such as link removed because it is blacklisted -- Mzlla 14:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC) in place of this AWU's website. Try both. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 16:42, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)
You did remove them when you changed them into an image. Your new change, utilizing tinyurl, is less harmful, but I still think it's POV to intentionally boost links to one site at the expense of another. Furthermore, I don't think your change will work the way you intend it to. Tinyurl returns a 302, and google will follow the 302 and boost the pagerank of the linked-to page, not tinyurl. anthony 警告 20:02, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Blacklisted by the Indonesian Education Ministry???

http://www.laksamana.net/vnews.cfm?ncat=25&news_id=6551 says "American World University is not accredited by the United States Secretary of Education. It [is] also blacklisted by the Indonesian Education Ministry." However, I don't know how credible the source is. The context of the article is an attack on Vice President Hamzah Haz. (Other things I've encountered while Googling suggest that AWU has been particularly active in Indonesia). [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 19:40, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Vfd debate

The second deletion debate for this article may be found at Talk:American World University/delete -- Graham ☺ | Talk 15:42, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

  • Why was this removed early? I don't have a problem with this, I was just wondering if something changed. anthony 警告 16:08, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Handling promotional links

The issue of promotional links is similar to the issue of deleting copyright violations, which we delete even if they are factual and encyclopedic. We customarily remove link spam from unrelated articles. However, it does seem as if an article that is about AWU should have an easily followed reference to AWU's website.

The original reason for deleting this article was that it was advertising, which is considered a valid reason for deletion. Many of us believe that the purpose of the article's creation was to promote AWU.

The issue is not with relevant external links placed by editors of pages in general. The issue relates to a specific technical issue. A factor in the Google weighting of sites, originally one of the most important factors, was links from other sites, which were in effect assumed to be independent endorsements of the value of the site. The existence of open Wikis allows the system to be gamed, by allowing people to directly place links to their own sites on Wikis. Because Wikipedia is relatively important, such links have relatively great weight.

This is a growing issue and the systematic exploitation of Wikis in this way is already occurring: see Wikis the next frontier for spammers and Nigritude Ultramarine and the Wiki Sandbox Effect.

I feel very strongly that we need to find ways to make it unattractive to use Wikipedia in this way. I really don't see how there can be any serious objection to the use of a tinyurl link, since it does not change the appearance or the functionality of the page. The page is exactly as useful to our readers as it was before. I personally have no objection to the substitution of tinyurl links anywhere, in the George W. Bush article or the John F. Kerry article or anywhere. To show the sincerity of this remark, I've replaced the direct link to my personal web page at User:Dpbsmith with a tinyurl substitute.

Refining this, yes, the page text should contain HTML comments that are a) not quite valid URLs but b) allow the original URL to be recovered in the event of a tinyurl failure, although my guess is that the longevity of tinyurl is likely to be quite comparable to the longevity of any particular link. I would suggest considering tinyurl as a stopgap and seeing whether the developers would consider engineering a similar feature as part of MediaWiki, running on our WikiMedia servers under WikiMedia control.

I ask that anthony, User:L33tminion, and Dr Zen as a personal courtesy to me, let me have my way with this particular edit on this particular page. Building on User:L33tminion's constructive start, I made significant improvements that resulted in the page being kept, which I believe was one of your goals. I have no intention of using tinyurl links on a large scale, only in rare cases comparable to this one.

(Does anyone have any better ideas on how we can serve our readership without promoting AWU's self-serving goals?)

There are no rules about such things, but this would be a act of kindness which I would appreciate. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 16:35, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

P. S. In addition to tinyurl, according to blacklisted link removed -- Mzlla 14:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC), sites offering similar services include: blacklisted links removed -- Mzlla 14:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Some of them allow you to select the substitute link, e.g. blacklisted link removed -- Mzlla 14:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC) for AWU [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 20:07, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The existence of open Wikis allows the system to be gamed, by allowing people to directly place links to their own sites on Wikis. This is google's problem, not ours. Because Wikipedia is relatively important, such links have relatively great weight. And I suspect they've already resolved it, by treating google as a link farm. I have no intention of using tinyurl links on a large scale, only in rare cases comparable to this one. If we used tinyurl for every single link, this would be acceptable. But doing it only in rare cases is precisely the problem. Wikipedia must remain neutral in situations like this. Taking a stance against AWU is no more appropriate than taking a stance against Wesleyan University (except that Wesleyan rips people off by a lot more money). If you wish to resolve this issue, then it needs to be done in an NPOV way. This is nothing like the removal of copyright violations. There is no law against "diploma mills", let alone a law against linking to them. anthony 警告 20:10, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Oh yeah, and please don't tout your improvements to this article and ask for special consideration after you voted against this article being undeleted and voted to have it deleted again. This page wasn't kept due to your actions. It was kept despite your actions. anthony 警告 20:29, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC) I have to say that I extend every courtesy to Dpbsmith but because I think he is wrong in this instance, I couldn't possibly support his stance. I believe Anthony's post of 20:10 14 Nov is exactly correct. I sympathise with Dpbsmith's concern, but it's not for Wikipedia to judge. This is a problem of google's making. Perhaps Dpbsmith could write to them and ask that they fix this institution's page rank. There are other pages google does not list, are there not? He could ask google to censor AWU. I'm not sure we should. If we do not allow a link to AWU, then there should be no links to personal or promotional pages of any subject of this encyclopaedia, because the likelihood is each will be offensive to someone.Dr Zen 23:01, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

What we need is a way to allow links to be still live, but marked as NOINDEX. The questions here are:

  • can we do this, technically?
  • what syntax should we use to denote this?
  • is there enough of a desire to do this amongst the community to justify a developer's time or interest?

-- Karada 14:39, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

  • I don't think it's possible to mark a link as NOINDEX, and don't see why we would want this in the first place. anthony 警告 01:35, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Supposing people are constantly walking through my house to drink from my kitchen tap. I don't care about the water they use up, but I do care about the mud they bring in on their shoes. I don't want to lock my front door. So I turn off the tap, so that people no longer have that reason to walk through the house.

The point is not to improve Google. The point is to protect Wikipedia. We would not hide links from Google in order to improve Google's accuracy, because that's not our problem. But even if we don't care about Google's rankings, others do, and they will use Wikipedia as a tool to do that. This will have a bad effect not just on Google (which we don't care about) but on Wikipedia (which we do) because external links will become less informative as advertisers try to cram them into articles everywhere. So the proposal is to hide some links from Google so as to remove this motivation from advertisers.

However, doing it by hand via services like tinyurl seems like clearly the wrong thing - and it's not clear to me that it will work, either. The only proper fix to this is to hide all external links. This requires a change to Wikipedia's codebase; each link should redirect to a page within Wikipedia, which is marked NOINDEX, which redirects on to the desired page. ciphergoth 12:41, 2004 Nov 23 (UTC)

This would only work if you force the forks to link through Wikipedia as well, which seems like something Google wouldn't appreciate. In any case, I think it's better than selectively removing some links and not others based on whether or not we approve morally of those links. On the other hand, I think the best solution is to just remove links which serve no purpose other than advertising. In the case of AWU, we're increasing the liklihood of someone finding the home page for American World University by searching for "American World University". So what? anthony 警告 16:32, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If the link is valid I think it has more value than harm. If it improves ranking and the link is valid the improvement in ranking is justified. If the link was not valid or appropriate then the improvement is not, so we should remove the invalid inappropraite ones and leave the valid ones. Dagimar

I agree with anthony. If we're going to have an article on this, we should link to it. I express no opinion on the propriety of using a tinyurl, however. Johnleemk | Talk 11:47, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

For a previous debate over the deletion of this article see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/American World University.

You shouldn't change external links into an image "to prevent AWU link from factoring into Google pagerank". Or can I do this to the George W. Bush article? anthony 警告 13:52, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Here are the links which were removed:

If merely linking to something is promotion, then all external links are inheirently NPOV, which is rediculous. --L33tminion | (talk) 19:59, Nov 12, 2004 (UTC)

This is totally unacceptable. What google does and how google works are google's business. Anthony is quite right. If you remove links to the things you find objectionable, you have no grounds for saying that he can't remove links to the things he disapproves of.Dr Zen 05:35, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I didn't exactly remove them. I'm assuming you've examined what I actually did. I've since found what I think is better way to deal with this issue, namely the use of tinyurl links in place of this AWU's website. Try both. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 16:42, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)
You did remove them when you changed them into an image. Your new change, utilizing tinyurl, is less harmful, but I still think it's POV to intentionally boost links to one site at the expense of another. Furthermore, I don't think your change will work the way you intend it to. Tinyurl returns a 302, and google will follow the 302 and boost the pagerank of the linked-to page, not tinyurl. anthony 警告 20:02, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Blacklisted by the Indonesian Education Ministry???

http://www.laksamana.net/vnews.cfm?ncat=25&news_id=6551 says "American World University is not accredited by the United States Secretary of Education. It [is] also blacklisted by the Indonesian Education Ministry." However, I don't know how credible the source is. The context of the article is an attack on Vice President Hamzah Haz. (Other things I've encountered while Googling suggest that AWU has been particularly active in Indonesia). [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 19:40, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Vfd debate

The second deletion debate for this article may be found at Talk:American World University/delete -- Graham ☺ | Talk 15:42, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

  • Why was this removed early? I don't have a problem with this, I was just wondering if something changed. anthony 警告 16:08, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Handling promotional links

The issue of promotional links is similar to the issue of deleting copyright violations, which we delete even if they are factual and encyclopedic. We customarily remove link spam from unrelated articles. However, it does seem as if an article that is about AWU should have an easily followed reference to AWU's website.

The original reason for deleting this article was that it was advertising, which is considered a valid reason for deletion. Many of us believe that the purpose of the article's creation was to promote AWU.

The issue is not with relevant external links placed by editors of pages in general. The issue relates to a specific technical issue. A factor in the Google weighting of sites, originally one of the most important factors, was links from other sites, which were in effect assumed to be independent endorsements of the value of the site. The existence of open Wikis allows the system to be gamed, by allowing people to directly place links to their own sites on Wikis. Because Wikipedia is relatively important, such links have relatively great weight.

This is a growing issue and the systematic exploitation of Wikis in this way is already occurring: see Wikis the next frontier for spammers and Nigritude Ultramarine and the Wiki Sandbox Effect.

I feel very strongly that we need to find ways to make it unattractive to use Wikipedia in this way. I really don't see how there can be any serious objection to the use of a tinyurl link, since it does not change the appearance or the functionality of the page. The page is exactly as useful to our readers as it was before. I personally have no objection to the substitution of tinyurl links anywhere, in the George W. Bush article or the John F. Kerry article or anywhere. To show the sincerity of this remark, I've replaced the direct link to my personal web page at User:Dpbsmith with a tinyurl substitute.

Refining this, yes, the page text should contain HTML comments that are a) not quite valid URLs but b) allow the original URL to be recovered in the event of a tinyurl failure, although my guess is that the longevity of tinyurl is likely to be quite comparable to the longevity of any particular link. I would suggest considering tinyurl as a stopgap and seeing whether the developers would consider engineering a similar feature as part of MediaWiki, running on our WikiMedia servers under WikiMedia control.

I ask that anthony, User:L33tminion, and Dr Zen as a personal courtesy to me, let me have my way with this particular edit on this particular page. Building on User:L33tminion's constructive start, I made significant improvements that resulted in the page being kept, which I believe was one of your goals. I have no intention of using tinyurl links on a large scale, only in rare cases comparable to this one.

(Does anyone have any better ideas on how we can serve our readership without promoting AWU's self-serving goals?)

There are no rules about such things, but this would be a act of kindness which I would appreciate. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 16:35, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Some of them allow you to select the substitute link.

The existence of open Wikis allows the system to be gamed, by allowing people to directly place links to their own sites on Wikis. This is google's problem, not ours. Because Wikipedia is relatively important, such links have relatively great weight. And I suspect they've already resolved it, by treating google as a link farm. I have no intention of using tinyurl links on a large scale, only in rare cases comparable to this one. If we used tinyurl for every single link, this would be acceptable. But doing it only in rare cases is precisely the problem. Wikipedia must remain neutral in situations like this. Taking a stance against AWU is no more appropriate than taking a stance against Wesleyan University (except that Wesleyan rips people off by a lot more money). If you wish to resolve this issue, then it needs to be done in an NPOV way. This is nothing like the removal of copyright violations. There is no law against "diploma mills", let alone a law against linking to them. anthony 警告 20:10, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Oh yeah, and please don't tout your improvements to this article and ask for special consideration after you voted against this article being undeleted and voted to have it deleted again. This page wasn't kept due to your actions. It was kept despite your actions. anthony 警告 20:29, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC) I have to say that I extend every courtesy to Dpbsmith but because I think he is wrong in this instance, I couldn't possibly support his stance. I believe Anthony's post of 20:10 14 Nov is exactly correct. I sympathise with Dpbsmith's concern, but it's not for Wikipedia to judge. This is a problem of google's making. Perhaps Dpbsmith could write to them and ask that they fix this institution's page rank. There are other pages google does not list, are there not? He could ask google to censor AWU. I'm not sure we should. If we do not allow a link to AWU, then there should be no links to personal or promotional pages of any subject of this encyclopaedia, because the likelihood is each will be offensive to someone.Dr Zen 23:01, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

What we need is a way to allow links to be still live, but marked as NOINDEX. The questions here are:

  • can we do this, technically?
  • what syntax should we use to denote this?
  • is there enough of a desire to do this amongst the community to justify a developer's time or interest?

-- Karada 14:39, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

  • I don't think it's possible to mark a link as NOINDEX, and don't see why we would want this in the first place. anthony 警告 01:35, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Supposing people are constantly walking through my house to drink from my kitchen tap. I don't care about the water they use up, but I do care about the mud they bring in on their shoes. I don't want to lock my front door. So I turn off the tap, so that people no longer have that reason to walk through the house.

The point is not to improve Google. The point is to protect Wikipedia. We would not hide links from Google in order to improve Google's accuracy, because that's not our problem. But even if we don't care about Google's rankings, others do, and they will use Wikipedia as a tool to do that. This will have a bad effect not just on Google (which we don't care about) but on Wikipedia (which we do) because external links will become less informative as advertisers try to cram them into articles everywhere. So the proposal is to hide some links from Google so as to remove this motivation from advertisers.

However, doing it by hand via services like tinyurl seems like clearly the wrong thing - and it's not clear to me that it will work, either. The only proper fix to this is to hide all external links. This requires a change to Wikipedia's codebase; each link should redirect to a page within Wikipedia, which is marked NOINDEX, which redirects on to the desired page. ciphergoth 12:41, 2004 Nov 23 (UTC)

This would only work if you force the forks to link through Wikipedia as well, which seems like something Google wouldn't appreciate. In any case, I think it's better than selectively removing some links and not others based on whether or not we approve morally of those links. On the other hand, I think the best solution is to just remove links which serve no purpose other than advertising. In the case of AWU, we're increasing the liklihood of someone finding the home page for American World University by searching for "American World University". So what? anthony 警告 16:32, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If the link is valid I think it has more value than harm. If it improves ranking and the link is valid the improvement in ranking is justified. If the link was not valid or appropriate then the improvement is not, so we should remove the invalid inappropraite ones and leave the valid ones. Dagimar

I agree with anthony. If we're going to have an article on this, we should link to it. I express no opinion on the propriety of using a tinyurl, however. Johnleemk | Talk 11:47, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Better Business Bureau reports

Very sorry, but I can't confirm the BBB report so I'm snipping that item for now.

I went to http://www.labbb.org/, the cited office, and tried (separate) searches on Name contains American World University, on Website contains awu, and on "type of business" = colleges and university,

and none of them turned up any hits (except the last, which came up with Cal State University Parking Services). (See below for update)

I find the email convincing and personally think it is likely authentic, but we need something better than that. Dpbsmith (talk) 12:30, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Update

Actually, I've found this:

http://www.bbbmississippi.org/commonreport.html?compid=6001227

This seems to me to be inconsistent with the material inserted. It says "Based on BBB files, this company has a satisfactory record with the Bureau. Any complaints processed by the Bureau in its three-year reporting period have been resolved. The number and type of complaints are not unusual for a company in this industry." It says the Mississippi BBB received only one complaint in three years and that "Company made every reasonable effort to resolve." Dpbsmith (talk) 13:01, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

OK, I found the labbb report. I did it by bringing up a random labbb report on another company, and replacing the company ID with the company ID mentioned in the email. Here it is:

http://www.labbb.org/BBBWeb/Forms/Business/CompanyReportPage_Expository.aspx?CompanyID=100029797

I think for neutrality both need to be mentioned in the article. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Material removed re BBB report on AWU

From: <dispatch@labbb.org>

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 20:58:03 -0700

The Better Business Bureau of the Southland, Inc., California, has a record of AWU/AWE:

DBA: American World Enterprises

Address: P.O. Box 49421
Los Angeles, CA 90049
Primary Phone: (310) 474-5368
Primary Fax: (310) 474-6396
Primary Contact: Maxine Asher, Administrator
E-mail Address: info@awu.edu
Website:

Company ID: 100029797
Business Start Date:
BBB Created Record on: 3/28/2006

Nature of Business:
This company's business is under review.

Company Rating: "D"

Rating Explanation: The rating the Better Business Bureau assigns a business is determined by our composite score of such factors as its type of business, length of time in business, compliance ...

"D" = We have enough concerns about this company (for example, their offer, customer complaints, advertising, etc.) that we recommend caution in doing business with it.

Problem with AWU, contact:

Attorney General Jim Hood, and the Director of the Consumer Protection Division, Office of the Attorney General, P.O.Box 22947, Jackson, Mississippi 39225-2947, USA. Or 800-281-4418.

Also the Better Business Bureau of Mississippi, Inc., P.O.Box 3302, Ridgeland, MS 39158, USA. Or 800-987-8280.

Since Maxine Asher leaves in California, you may also contact:

The Department of Consumer Affairs, State of California Consumer Services Agency, 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834 Or 800-952-5210