Drwhitefield

July 2012

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did to Indian Institute of Banking and Finance. Wikipedia is not a collection of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Because Wikipedia uses the nofollow attribute value, its external links are disregarded by most search engines. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you.

This applies to all the external links you have added to articles including Small business, Banking Frontiers, Internet marketing and Axis Bank. bonadea contributions talk 09:54, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

July 2012: Reply

Hello Bonadea, first i would like to thank you for the time you spent looking up my external link/s and removing them. I don't know whether you are an automaton or real, or how this is done. I do seek to understand how you do it.

Second, I seek to understand what makes my external links any different from the following ones, which you will see on the Small business page. I am not doing anything different from what is permissible for the links below. Are my links being removed because I am non-US? Do only US people have ownership of external links regardless of their value to readers? Please explain so we can use the medium fairly.

   Business.usa.gov - One-stop shop for everything related to business in the USA
   [2] - AMIBA|American Independent Business Alliance

Thanks again.

External links have to meet certain standards, none of which are based on nationality or race. The English Wikipedia is not a "U.S." wiki - it also covers the U.K., Australia, Canada, India, etc. The links you mention are different from the links you added. First, Business.usa.gov is a governmental website. AMIBA is a trade organization for small businesses. Both are appropriate for the article. The links you added are a form of advertising, and are not appropriate for Wikipedia. GregJackP Boomer! 12:35, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Explanation Request

Refer your note above about advertising. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_desk and the external link to http://edition.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9804/19/mccartney.obit2/ ... How does this pass wikipedia standards? My links were related to the wikipages they were added to because they supplemented the information and had no commercial leaning. Seek to understand. Drwhitefield (talk) 17:13, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, it's true that the link to the cnn.com article from Receptionist (which is where Front desk redirects to) is a dead link, but that does not have anything to do with the links you posted. You posted links to two different sites, to different articles (that is, you did not post both links to the same articles). One of the links was doonlinebusiness.info. That is a brief article advertising a 40-minute webinar. There is no indication that the site meets any of the criteria for being a reliable source, and the purpose of the site appears to be primarily to collect email addresses for marketing purposes. The link does not meet Wikipedia's external link policies. The other link was subk.co.in, including one instance of a deeplink on that same domain. That is the website for a mobile technology company, which has no relevance for any of the Wikipedia articles the link was posted to. This link therefore does not meet Wikipedia's external link policies. Thank you. --bonadea contributions talk 17:31, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Added: Thanks for the heads-up about the dead link, btw. I found an archived version of the newspaper report. --bonadea contributions talk 17:36, 24 July 2012 (UTC)