User talk:67.104.219.21

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Please do not add commercial links or links to your own private websites to Wikipedia, as you did in Learning management system. Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or a mere collection of external links. You are, however, encouraged to add content instead of links as long as the content abides by our policies and guidelines. See the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks. A link to the edit I have reverted can be found here: link. If you believe this edit should not have been reverted, please contact me. --AbsolutDan (talk) 23:52, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Hello - while I appreciate your interest in contributing to Wikipedia, there are guidelines regarding the inclusion of external links. Wikipedia isn't a linkfarm; external links should be to resources that contain relevant information that for whatever reason can't or shouldn't be included in the article itself. Generally this means that links to products related to that article are excluded (unless the article is specifically about the product itself). However, in the case where there might be a plethora of products available related to a topic, a single (neutral) link to a directory of those products might be appropriate.
Overall, we try to keep the amount of external links on an article down to a minimum, preferring cited content from reliable sources much more than "bare" external links. Please refer to the guidelines regarding external links (WP:EL) and spam (WP:SPAM).
If you wish to write an article about a specific company or software product, then of course links to that company and that product would be appropriate for the article. Before you spend a lot of time doing so, I recommend you check out a few guidelines which cover some of the criteria for inclusion, and one of the basic requirements of all articles (verifiability):
  • WP:V - verifiability guidelines
  • WP:N - general notability guidelines
  • WP:CORP - notability guidelines specifically for corporations/companies
  • WP:SOFT - notability guidelines specifically for software products.
I hope this information helps. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to let me know --AbsolutDan (talk) 21:29, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
Hello again,
Yes, you're absolutely right in your example that an article about Kleenex would and should have an external link to Kleenex.com (or whatever the official website of the product would be). However, it wouldn't be expected that a general article about "facial tissues" would have the same link. Following this example, since Kleenex is a notable product, it should (and does) have its own article. The "facial tissues" article could then wikilink to the Kleenex article, on which the external link to the official Kleenex website could be found. This is the encouraged route - keep links internal, and link externally only when the "information path" reaches a dead-end.
Since neither the Lifelong learning article nor the Learning management system article are specifically about the "Lifelong Learning Management System" product, there's no need to include the external link to the product or that company's website. However, if the Lifelong Learning Management System product and/or its parent company meet notability guidelines, and would also pass other guidelines such as WP:V (verifiability), an article could be written about one or both, and the wikilink to that article added to relevent general articles.
I hope this clears up any confusion about the links. Again, let me know if you have any other questions. --AbsolutDan (talk) 23:03, 31 August 2006 (UTC)