User talk:Stevenjgarner

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[edit] macports.info spam

Please stop adding inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. It is considered spamming and Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or promotion. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, additions of links to Wikipedia will not alter search engine rankings. If you continue spamming, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. -- intgr [talk] 01:11, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I received your e-mail:
...which sources you? I don't know the appropriate way to respond to this other than by email (am I "allowed" to just edit your response, adding my response to your comments?) - Personally I think it is inappropriate to label my contributions as spam, and referring to them as "inappropriate external links". What objective criteria defines something as inappropriate?
MacPorts is a relatively NEW environment that has great hope for Mac OS X techs who are otherwise inexperienced in open-source environemnts, getting up to speed on them. The problem is that there is very little tutorial information available online at this stage - the MacPorts.info site I added is a non-profit site with no advertising that gives a comprehensive tutorial approach on implementing MacPorts. How is this inappropriate?
I'm sorry if I am new to this whole thing - I'm sure there is much I have to learn. I find it a put-off that any attempt I make to contribute constructively to a "collaborative" environemnt like Wikipedia results in my being threatened with being "blocked from editing Wikipedia". I do greatly appreciate your attempts to educate me though - your links to wikispam etc. just make me wonder even further though - how can an educational site that naturally extends other educational articles be considered an "advertisement masquerading as (an) article". I genuinely appreciate any edification you might provide.
I'm sorry, the harsh wording of the warning was unwarranted; thank you for reacting rationally.
Firstly, Wikipedia users normally communicate simply by editing discussion pages and adding new messages. Every user has his own discussion page at User talk:Username (like this one). When someone brings up something on your talk page, you are generally expected to reply on the same page to keep the discussion together. See talk page guidelines for details.
Adding external links to Wikipedia articles is generally discouraged in the first place because Wikipedia's purpose is not to be a link directory; listing every relevant link about an article's subject means that the "external links" lists would often be longer than the articles. Tutorials about installing a software package on a particular operating system are only tangentially relevant to the software package. For more details on what should and shouldn't be linked, see the external links guideline.
But one thing that is bound to make people to consider your edits critically is massively adding links to the same website, which, as far as I can tell, fits under the definition of "spam". A Google search for "MacPorts" doesn't find any hits for macports.info within the first 200 results, so it is clearly not an established site (as you admitted). Adding links to sites that are not yet established is, in my opinion, an attempt to use Wikipedia for promoting the website.
In short, contributing to Wikipedia by adding external links is a very thankless job. We much more need substance than plain links, although I realize that it can be difficult to get started on adding content. One word of warning though: if you're creating a new article, make sure you read and understand the notability guideline. Articles that do not establish notability by citing reliable, published sources are in danger of deletion. Feel free to ask if you have any further questions. -- intgr [talk] 15:24, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for taking the time to make these clarifications - which leads me to three further questions/comments:
1) Are new User talk messages emailed to the parties involved? For example do you get automatically notified of this comment to your comment? Or do I need to email to notify you (which I hope you will excuse me for having done)?
2) Does search engine ranking contribute to notability? Your reference to 'a Google search for "MacPorts" (not hitting) macports.info within the first 200 results' is a good one. I don't know much about how Google does things, but a Google search for "MacPorts tutorial" lists macports.info as the second result on the first page. Does this necessarily make it notable though?
3) More substance than links? Originally, I was acting off the instructions on Article Development, which seem to encourage external linking: "At the end, you should list the references you used and the best available external links about the topic." Yet your comments above about Wikipedia not becoming a link directory make so much sense. You may have noted that in my flurry of activity, I also created an article on DAMP, which went unchallenged by you. I was genuinely surprised not to find such an article, as its use in the Mac OS X systems world is pretty ubiquitous. My inclusion of macports.info as an external link to this article was in response to the need to provide references and citation, the absence of which I have heard will lead to pretty much an automatic delete. I guess the fine line here might be one again of notability and relevance. I can understand now how a macports.info external reference in an article on Apache, BIND, Postfix, etc. might not be fully relevant, as they will operate on a multitude of systems. Whereas the relevance of such an external link to DAMP is much greater, as it is just for that one (Mac OS X) operating system. Personally I feel the relevance of tutorial sites on Wikipedia is extremely high - it is one of my primary uses of Wikipedia external links and of many people I know. I hunt out those external links when reading many articles. Maybe it is just my ignorance of how to use search engines, but going to Google, and searching for "link: http://www.macports.org" (the official MacPorts site) does not yield much high ranking tutorial information. This is generally the case. So one looks for a source of tutorial information on topics. Perhaps I have been erroneously looking to Wikipedia for this.
Thanks again Stevenjgarner 04:49, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
1) No, most Wikipedia editors prefer not to be reminded of Wikipedia-related stuff when they would rather do it at another time. It's kind of like being interrupted with work-related stuff during a vacation or on the weekend.
2) I was just using the Google rank as a quick indication of how established the site is, because recently launched sites often attempt to use Wikipedia for promotion, as opposed to simply relevant linking. "Notability" as in the Wikipedia guideline talks about something entirely different and is irrelevant to external links.
3) You're right, the external link on the DAMP (software bundle) article is relevant. I was doing these reversions without looking, under the assumption that its only purpose was spam.
Terms like "DAMP" rarely need references because (a) they are trivial to verify by doing a simple Google search; (b) it is a generic label for clearly notable products, not a product itself, so there is little chance that anyone created the article purely for promotion (yes, we're really obsessed with hunting down attempted promotion).
But speaking of references, yes, new articles very often are deleted if they fail to satisfy the "notability guideline." Poorly named as it is, it's Wikipedia's guideline for inclusion, and by extension, deletion.
When creating new articles, you should keep in mind the primary notability criterion: "A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject." You should only list sources which match all three of those requirements. Informational websites like macports.info are generally not regarded as reliable sources due to their lack of self-verification — not to imply that they are unreliable.
Keep in mind that "references" are distinct from "external links". New articles should always include a few references regardless of whether any information is taken from those; but adding more references to clearly notable articles (e.g. Apache HTTP Server) should only be done when you're providing a citation for a fact/claim in the article.
If something in this post didn't quite make sense, be sure to ask; I'm writing this really late. -- intgr [talk] 00:41, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Welcome to Wikipedia!

Welcome!

Hello, Stevenjgarner, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! -- intgr [talk] 15:24, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Image copyright problem with Image:Shelby Phillips.jpg

Image Copyright problem

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