Dlawrenceisl

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Hello, Dlawrenceisl, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

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Mooresville, Indiana

At Mooresville, Indiana, you added a link to a finding aid available on your employer's website. I'm not sure how this is particularly beneficial to readers of that article. Please take a moment to read WP:ELMINOFFICIAL and WP:LINKFARM. Thank you. Magnolia677 (talk) 13:58, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree with the above. Since you have a WP:Conflict of interest you should (a) not be mass adding links without first getting consensus in a discussion and (b) you must make a declaration of your COI on the talk page of all articles affected. The comment above is three weeks old, yet you continue to add links regardless. Please tell me why I should not mass revert all your edits. SpinningSpark 00:33, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

I am new to using Wikipedia to edit articles, and I assumed that when adding links to finding aids that there would be no conflicts involved since all materials pointed to in the links were collected and curated by professional librarians. I have no intention of attempting to affect articles in any negative way, just adding a pointer for patrons and users to find additional information. I can add descriptions of why I am adding links to articles if you would like.

On the subject of the Mooresville page, the finding aid added to the page relates to documents created by the founder of the town, who does not have his own page, so I thought it would be relevant to add there.Dlawrenceisl (talk) 13:33, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

User:Magnolia677's point, and I tend to agree, was that the links are not useful to Wikipedia readers because nothing can be seen online. One might just as easily say that there are books on rabbit farming in the Library of Congress (or <write your favourite library here>). Our guideline on links not to include, WP:ELNO, explicitly proscribes sites that can't be freely accessed by many or all of our readers at points #6, #7 and #8. Documents that can't be seen at all online because they are in a locked repository certainly comes under those rules, so at the moment I am still inclined to revert them all. The main purpose of Wikipedia is not to provide links to other sites. If your main purpose in editing here is to add links then you are likely to run into trouble. Inclusion of links should be decided by those editing the content of articles, not outside parties not interested in improving our content.

On the COI declarations, you are required to do that on every page you have edited, not just the one being discussed here. But if you are now going to accept that the edits will be reverted, then don't bother, it would be a meaningless gesture. SpinningSpark 15:26, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

I've started an RfC at Wikipedia talk:External links#Request for comment on finding aids to try and get a definite consensus on this and have something mentioned in guidelines. SpinningSpark 08:50, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

I am sorry to disagree with two of my colleagues above, but I think the links you have been adding are generally helpful and see no problem with them. I've commented in greater detail at the RfC linked above. Newyorkbrad (talk) 06:58, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia GLAM - galleries, libraries, archives, and museums

Greetings. Wikipedia:GLAM is dedicated to collaboration between Wikipedia and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. It's not an area I'm particularly familiar with, but you can find lots of information there and potentially people who can be particularly helpful. Here's a link to the mailing list.

General info: We welcome anyone to jump in and help improve Wikipedia. We have a vast array of Policies and guidelines, but we don't expect people to read any of it before editing. We merely expect people to respect them when another editor cites them. Much of it is common sense, or deals with dispute resolution. (When "anyone can edit", people disagree about anything and everything.)

Our Conflict of interest rules were mainly created to deal with promotional edits by companies, but the language is broad and it does do apply to employees at libraries and museums. We tend to get along a lot better with librarians than corporate types, chuckle.

Regarding the links you were adding: It often attracts significant attention when someone makes systematic changes to many articles - especially when someone adds lots of links to the same site. On one hand your links are clearly well-intentioned. On the other hand the number of Wikipedia readers who are willing and able to go view the collection in person is approximately zero-point-zero percent. Approximately 100% of readers who click the link will be wasting their time, finding nothing of value.

Our guidelines for what links do/do_not belong in the External Links section is at Wikipedia:External links. The guideline doesn't directly address the type of link you were adding, however in general our fundamental criteria is how to best serve our readers.

A discussion has been opened for editors to consider whether or not we should include this type of external link. You can find it at Wikipedia_talk:External_links#Request_for_comment_on_finding_aids. You are welcome to participate in that discussion. You can present any arguments, rationale, evidence, relevant Wikipedia-policies-or-guidelines, or any other relevant discussion. Such discussions usually remain open for at least a month - although it sometimes takes weeks more for the discussion to get a formal closure. (On Wikipedia editing can move fast, but formal discussion and resolution can be very slow.) That result will determine whether we accept or reject this type of link. Our guideline for External Links will probably be updated to reflect the outcome.

My personal guess/prediction is that we'll probably decide against including this kind of link. The content you are linking-to just isn't useful for most readers.

P.S. Try not to interpret any of the comments from me, or from the other other editors above, as hostile or any sort of problem. On Wikipedia we deal with disagreements as a common and normal thing. We tend to be brusk about it, and this is what passes for "friendly and polite" disagreement around here. Chuckle.

P.P.S. Not a big deal but I notice that you marked most of your edits as Minor. According to Help:Minor edit it's supposed to be for things like typo fixes, format changes, and reverting vandalism. Edits that meaningfully changes content shouldn't be marked as minor.

P.P.P.S. I'm not watching your talk page. If you reply here I likely won't see it. If you want to make sure someone sees your reply you can include their user link anywhere in your comment. Like this:

Hi [[User:Alsee|Alsee]], this is a reply. ~~~~

The user link generates a notification telling that user they mentioned, including a link for them to come view the page. Alsee (talk) 14:58, 25 April 2020 (UTC)