User talk:193.95.233.141

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[edit] sorcerers.net link spam

Please read Wikipedia's policy on link spaming:

Adding external links to an article or user page for the purpose of promoting a website or a product is not allowed, and is considered to be spam. Although the specific links may be allowed under some circumstances, repeatedly adding links will in most cases result in all of them being removed.

Please consider this policy before your next wikipedia edit. Thank You. -Quasipalm 23:00, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] link "spam"

Hello.

What about Wikipedia's policy on people coming along and deleting what they don't have any idea about? I don't know if there is one, but there should be.

I'll try to explain this to you nicely. I don't "spam" anything. I have corrected and unified (via descriptions) the majority of links that Wikipedia users have posted to Sorcerer's Place over the years (I've only added a few where relevant on my own), because I happen to run the site and I have noticed that people were linking to it in Wikipedia. Usually with the site title spelled or named wrong, which is kinda annoying, so I like to fix it.

Why did people feel that putting Sorcerer's Place among the external links for the games in question was a good idea? Gee, hmmm. Maybe because the site is the definitive download, information and news resource for the majority of the games it covers? Which, if you'd bothered to check, you'd have realized on your own if you had the faintest interest in content of the articles that you've decided to deface. This is the kind of thing that eventually puts people off contributing to Wikipedia.

The external links for the articles in question have originally been provided by gamers who have contributed to the articles and knew that Sorcerer's Place is one of the favourite destinations of people playing the games. We've been around since 1999 and have extended and enhanced the gameplay experience for hundreds of thousands of gamers. And all of the links to SP have been in Wikipedia for years.

But now, a couple of days ago, you come along, and decide that I've spammed the articles with useless links and remove all of them. You obviously didn't bother checking the relevance of the site in question to the articles themselves, or made an effort to contact me so I could explain the actual background of my link corrections. In short, you've decided to play the judge, jury and executioner by removing the links and accusing me of link spamming.

The questions now are:

a) do you need me to do any further explaining why links to SP in those articles are more than justified
b) does common sense override policy which does not take high relevance of the links posted into account (and policy which is not being used in practice in the majority of Wikipedia articles)
c) are you going to undo your link removals

Toonstruck 00:07, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Linkspam

If you'll look, you'll see that none of your edits were fixing or rearranging links like you say above, you were just adding links to your own website:

If this is a mischaracterization of your edits, please feel free to show me your edits where you weren't the only person adding links to your website into wikipedia. -Quasipalm 23:00, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] link "spam"

Of course they are a mischaracterization of my edits, because those are only my own changes and reversals of malicious link removals done in the last couple of years. You'll notice that I wrote the site has been around since 1999. Up until about two years back my IP was not fixed (and I was not registered at Wikipedia) because I was using dial-up, so what you've produced are only the edits I've made since getting broadband. And those edits don't amount to much more than maintaining the links that have been up for years before, certainly. But considering the number of articles you've contributed to, I'm sure you're familiar with incidents of your own added text or links being deleted or replaced without as much as a word from the person who's done it. For some reason, this has been happening to our site's links a lot during a period of a few months some time back. Unfortunately, this is a common occurence in Wikipedia, so the only thing you can do is reverse the changes or re-add deleted content. I've had to do plenty of both.

However, my original contributions and edits to those game articles go back to shortly after the beginning of Wikipedia. And no, I simply don't have the time to go wading through 5 years of Wikipedia edits to find my first ones. But if you want to waste your time digging through all that, be my guest, you'll find what you're looking for. If I truly were spamming links like you've accused me of, I'd say ok, you got me, and just move on. But having to defend my edits going back several years in this manner where I have no way of proving their validity without an insane amount of wasted time digging through years of Wikipedia edits has me really upset and I don't intend to just take it silently. Once Interplay has died and shut down the official sites and all of the support for those games, we were one of the few support options for people to go to to get help with their games and download the official patches for the games. This is still the case and we're getting a large number of people coming to the site daily simply to download the patches for their Infinity Engine games. By removing the links to our site you're depriving new people of knowledge about an invaluable resource for the support of their old games, simple as that. For the life of me, I can't see why you would think that this is a positive thing for anyone. Last I heard, Wikipedia's purpose is not to limit the spreading of valid and helpful information. Toonstruck 20:10, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi again Toonstruck. First, let me apologize if you think that I'm questioning the value of your website. I'm not. Secondly, let me just reiterate the importance of Wikipedia's policy of keeping external links to a minimum, and asking that websites not add in links to their own commercial content. I'm sure you understand why: Wikipedia is a very high traffic website, and if the community allowed every website owner to link to their own pages, the project would suffer.
To verify your claims, I went back and looked at the complete edit history of two games you've edited. In both instances, you were the first and only editor to add links to your website. There were no links to your website before you added them.
Neverwinter Nights
Planescape: Torment
Is there an example of a situation where you were reverting a removal that I'm missing? Thanks again. -Quasipalm 19:41, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] cont.

Quasipalm, I understand the policy, but up until the recent attempts, it has never been enforced (at least not seriously). Wikipedia is chock-full of articles with tons of external links, not to mention vanity articles and articles which serve no other purpose but to promote a certain company, website, etc. If anyone was serious about upholding that policy, none of that would be allowed in practice, but it is (unless someone happens to prevent it, which is extremely rare, and usually only done out of malice or competition). You can either have external links, or not. You can't have "some" external links only, because that's simply unfair and doesn't work in practice. Even in the gaming articles that we're discussing, a number of them have other fansites than my own listed. Most of the articles also have links to IGN and GameSpot, completely commercial sites. Yet those links were not removed. Not by you, not by anyone else. Why is that?

Let me list just a few with fansites listed (I won't even bother listing all of the commercial external links):

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age

(Russian fansite masking under BioWare's name... wtf?)

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonshard_%28computer_game%29

(Dragonshard fansite)

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Online

(a bunch of fansites, wikis, databases, etc.)

---

The list goes on and on... there are at least 15 separate Wikipedia articles about the games, expansions and themes we cover that have fansites and a bunch of other fan links under External Links. Are you going to remove them? And will you keep removing them for as long as the people running those websites keep adding them back? And should I also go over all the other articles and wipe out all the external links?

This is simply counter-productive and a waste of time.

As for NWN and Torment that you've singled out, it's quite possible that I've added the same kind of unified description and link to our site there as I've used on all the other articles. Considering the amount of deletions I've never really kept track of everything chronologically... so it's quite possible that I was the one who added the links to SP in those two articles first. But they're no less valid there than in any other article, since the website focuses on coverage of all those games.

If you want a few more recent examples of my reverting link removals, just check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Toonstruck

Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dragon Age in particular there. It's been happening so many times I started leaving angry comments with some of my reversals. I've also added back a few links to other fansites that someone has removed without any good reason. Toonstruck 19:31, 8 February 2007 (UTC)