User talk:Markcowan

July 2009

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. Template:Do not delete Oli Filth^{(talk|contribs)} 07:53, 7 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Mis-understood your earlier direction. Your guidance is accepted. Regarding the articles written by a third party on the subject matter that I posted as external references. Are you saying this is not acceptable? Mark Cowan (talk) 20:59, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. If you posted links to third-party references, then I guess I must have missed them as buried in all the links to your own site! Posting relevant and suitable links to third-party sites is entirely acceptable, so please feel free to re-add them if I've deleted any. Best regards, Oli Filth^{(talk|contribs)} 23:19, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I think I know why it looked like it was our site. The articles were from a membership only publication (Inside Reference Data) which charges for reading. Since we were interviewed in the article along with others they gave us permission to host the content for others to read on our web site. In reality the links in the articles are from the company that created the article ... they are not ours. I can remove them if you want. Mark Cowan (talk) 16:43, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I think we may have been talking at cross-purposes here! When you said "articles by third parties", I had assumed you meant you had added links (external refs) that were to a website other than your own. I now see that your site hosts at least a couple of articles by third parties. These probably don't fall under the conflict of interest guidelines, and would therefore be acceptable as external links, provided that they are actually relevant to the Wikipedia articles you're adding them to, and provided that they contain information that the typical reader would find useful (so at first glance I'm not convinced by this one, although I'm not even close to a subject expert...).

Links that aren't OK would be ones such as this one as it appears to be your own content. If you believe such links are genuinely useful, the usual approach is to suggest them on the relevant talk page, and let another editor add them if they deem them relevant.

Best regards, Oli Filth^{(talk|contribs)} 16:51, 11 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

MrOllie - removing unrelated content

Hello MrOllie. While I do appreciate your diligence in policing content I think some has been deleted unintentionally. There were contributions to other pages made months ago that were deleted. On the Enterprise Data Management there were two entries on industry content that was vendor neutral and delivered through an industry forum called the Information Resource Managers Association. Its not spam - doesn't solicit services, offer a product or advertise. It was agreed to by the editor of the page. Can you un-delete them.

About the other articles you deleted - the content that was approved by another editor "Oli Filth" you deleted. These are articles from a very well respected publication on the subject matter, not spam. I have posted these in good faith and have been through a editorial review - can you leave them posted. Mark Cowan (talk) 01:34, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]