Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard

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This page is for reporting possible breaches of the external links guideline. Post questions here regarding whether particular external links are appropriate or compliant with Wikipedia's guidelines for external links. Provide links to the relevant article(s), talk page(s), and external links(s) that are being discussed. Questions about prominent websites like YouTube, IMDb, Twitter, or Find a Grave might be addressed with information from this guide. Sections older than 10 days archived by MiszaBot. (For help, see Wikipedia:Purge) If you mention specific editors, you must notify them. You may use {{subst:ELN-notice}} to do so.
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Links to Centre for Peace in the Balkans

G'day everyone,

There are several articles that contains citations which link to www.balkanpeace.org, the website of a small NGO in Toronto, Canada. I first raised these links at RSN because there were anonymous op-ed's linked, but this has now been dealt with per [1], and the WP:SPS links have been deleted. However, the issue of citations linking to pages at the website that reproduce articles from news services like Bloomberg, CNN, newspapers etc is the issue I would like to get some guidance on here. Up until last week when I started tagging such links with the copyvio link template, there was no mention on the website regarding copyrighted material. Now, (coincidentally) it has a disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage which reads "This web site, intended for research purposes, contains copyright material included "for fair use only"!" Does this mean that the website is no longer infringing copyright by reproducing news articles in full, or is it still an issue for WP? Your guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Peacemaker67 (talk) 05:05, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

I think WP:ELNEVER is what you're driving at. I'm not sure if or how their reproductions fall under fair use. If they credit the other news sources then I would suggest directly citing those. (It doesn't look like they link to the originals, but Googling the headline should find it - if it can't be found then it may not be WP:RS in any case.) -- Gyrofrog (talk) 15:20, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Fair use requires something more than saying it's "for research purposes". They have to actually be commenting on the copied material. I believe that it is still a copyvio and that the links should be removed. BTW, if the citations already have a proper citation written (author, date, title, etc.) then all you have to do to make it legal is just remove the URL to the copyvio website. Newspapers are valid reliable sources even if there's no link to the story online. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:47, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Bypassing the CPB and linking to the original source may avoid the immediate problem of WP:ELNEVER, but there is a broader problem; balkanpeace has a rather firm editorial line on certain Balkan issues which is far from mainstream, and I'm concerned that the third-party content they copy may be selected to fit this line. Which poses an NPOV problem for any of our article content which is influenced by the CPB. In which case it would be better to update our wording to reflect what other sources say, or remove it altogether.

Let me give a slightly different example; once upon a time there were several editors updating many articles using geographical data from a temptingly large, free online database, which I'll call X. Unfortunately, much of that database was wrong, or easy to use in the wrong way (because of geographical uncertainties rather than bias) so the community decided that source X should not be used. One editor was warned that the content they added to thousands of articles based on X was probably wrong, so what did they do? They went back through the articles and removed all the citations of X, but the actual content they'd based on X was left intact. They felt they'd done good; the bad links had been removed; but in reality the bad content was still online and now even harder to pinpoint. bobrayner (talk) 14:18, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll delete the urls at the very least. Peacemaker67 (talk) 09:12, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

• The discussion above does not provide a single proof of copyright violation. When talking about bias, an amateur's point of view is no more than a bias if not supported by a valid scholar reference. --Juraj Budak (talk) 22:53, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Above it says "Fair use requires something more than saying it's "for research purposes". They have to actually be commenting on the copied material. I believe that it is still a copyvio and that the links should be removed." That is the basis on which I removed the url from the link, and I believe WP:ELNEVER applies. However, I will submit this to the copyright violation team for a final word. Peacemaker67 (talk) 23:44, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

24 Game

I recently removed two external links on 24 Game. Both links ([2] and [3]) point to Rosetta Code, an open wiki. Per WP:ELNO #12, "Links to open wikis, except those with a substantial history of stability and a substantial number of editors. Mirrors or forks of Wikipedia should not be linked." So, the question is, what is Rosetta Code? Well, the answer, as far as I can tell, is a site so non-notable that I've prodded it. I can't find reliable sources that discuss it at all, much less raise to the significantly higher bar of having a substantial history and substantial number of editors. My opinion is that it's just obvious, on the face of it, that these links do not belong in the article; however, User:Paddy3118 keeps re-adding them, based on...well, I don't actually know based on what. I'll notify xyr and see if xe responds here. Meanwhile, of course, I'd like outside opinions. Qwyrxian (talk) 14:31, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, Rosetta Code does seem to be reasonably active and it doesn't have the usual spam problem, so I don't think it's all that bad. I think the ELs are inappropriate but it's not something I'd lose sleep over in this case. 24 game would really benefit from more sources though. I share your concerns about notability of Rosetta Code. bobrayner (talk) 22:00, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Rosetta Code does try and eliminate spam and not only links to good content, it is in turn linked to from good sites such as OEIS. Rosetta Code has contributions from several lead developers and maintainers of programming languages such as Perl 6, and TCL.

It seems that user Qwyrxian is still trying to support an initial blanket removal of all links from a page made without due care and attention. --Paddy (talk) 17:19, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Indian Institute of Management Lucknow

Is it recommended to add the following links at the external links section at IIM Lucknow page?

• The IIM Lucknow Blog
• IIM Lucknow on Facebook
• IIM Lucknow on Twitter

These are official pages of the institute, but the pages are updated by students belonging to the Media and Communication Cell of the institute. --Anbu121 (talk me) 13:26, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

No. WP:ELOFFICIAL recommends including very few official links. Wikipedia is not a complete source for every single link associated with a school. Give the main link, and let the students/marketing department/whoever is in charge of the main link add all the social networking and other links to their website, not to ours. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:27, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

AP.Google

I'm finding a LOT of these : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=500&offset=0&target=http%3A%2F%2Fap.google.com are seeming dead links, although I'm trying to see if Wayback has copies of the actual articles.

It seems that ap.google.com links are NOT stable.

I would not suggest using them as a long-term WP:EL, and would appreciate some assistance in finding Wayback or other versions of them.

Sfan00 IMG (talk) 14:16, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Legal disputes: Links to law firms

Hi! On the ReachOut Healthcare America I had posted a link to a law firm's website about a case involving the ReachOut company. Moriarty Leyendecker is suing ReachOut over a matter discussed in the article body (the "In October 2011 a Camp Verde, Arizona boy treated by a dentist affiliated with ReachOut complained of pain.[...]") - This is not a 100 year old company that is just facing a minor lawsuit relative to its history; a lot of the press about ReachOut, which started in 2011, has to do with disputes over its Medicaid system. So I believed it was necessary to link to the law firm page. What do you think? WhisperToMe (talk) 15:35, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

The law firm's website is going to be a major WP:NPOV fail. Link to press coverage of the matter, but not the website. --Orange Mike | Talk 17:57, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Link to a BBC History article hosted in an academic site

Hi, I'd like to get your opinion about the inclusion of a link to an article from BBC History.

The article is this one and is hosted in the web site of the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. It's suggested as reading for a field trip in Spain, as you can see here. It can be accessed from said page through the section Spain: contemporary geopolitics (one of the blue tabs at the bottom of the page). Moreover, the author of the article, Klaus Dodds, is one a reader in political geography at said Royal Holloway. As such a reference is used in the article Political development in modern Gibraltar, I've included the link (considering that Dodds, the author of the text, has possibly the right to include his work in the web page of the university he works for), but it has been removed on the claims of being a copyvio. Is it sensible? Best regards --Ecemaml (talk) 01:03, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Published in BBC History in 2004, the article hosted on those servers appears a clear violation of copyright from the BBC magazine. Unless we have a clear direction that the author has waived copyright we should not be linking to a copyright violation. Speculation that the author has the right to include that article on a webserver is not a substitute for verifying the copyright status. Something that a veteran editor like you should know. Note I would be delighted to include a weblink, since it would become obvious to everyone that you're adding fact tags disruptively in the clear knowledge that the afore mentioned article supports the statements made explicitly. You removed material from the article claiming Dodds did not support the statement made in the article, when it did verbatim. Wee Curry Monster talk 01:14, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Macroevolution.net

Cross-linked from Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard#Macroevolution.net (diff)

Over several years, Koolokamba (talk · contribs) has added roughly 20 external links to his own website (acknowledged). To what extent should these links be treated as self-promotion, and to what extent should the existing links be removed? Novangelis (talk) 19:43, 2 November 2012 (UTC)