User talk:Sjjupadhyay

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Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a mere directory 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 exist to attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam policies for further explanations of links that are considered appropriate. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. See the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thank you. --Guinnog 10:51, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

You have been previously warned about adding Spam to Wikipedia. Today, you are repeatedly adding the same text and link to numerous Wikipedia articles. This is not appropriate. I have blocked you for 24 hours to give you some time to read up on our policies and to consider how to make a more appropriate contribution. Johntex\talk 05:40, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
All of your recent additions have been reverted. Wikipedia does not exist to promote Wikibooks. Our goal is to build an encyclopedia while references reliable sources. Please do not make such wholesale additions to Wikipedia articles. Johntex\talk 05:52, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia additions

Our goal is for people to add more details to the APDIP wikibooks created. Since Wikipedia is utilized widely via searches, relevant pages would have displayed the wikibook links with brief description. However, if this cannot be done, can you recommend an approach I can follow so that wikipedia users are aware of the APDIP wikibooks? Thanks. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Sjjupadhyay (talk • contribs) 10:06, 1 January 2007 (UTC).

Do you have a link to your project? That might give me some better ideas before I reply. Best, Johntex\talk 02:33, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm sorry I haven't gotten back to you. I am looking at the links you gave me right now. I'll be back to you in a few minutes with some thoughts and/or questions. Johntex\talk 04:26, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • OK, I've done a little more homework. Before I try to give you any suggestions, let me please summarize what I think I have learned, so that you may correct me if I am wrong:
  1. You are with The Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP)
  2. The APDIP is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
  3. The goal of the APDIP is "to promote the development and application of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for sustainable human development in the Asia-Pacific region." - Or more simply, you want to spread knowledge.
  4. You have written some potentially useful Wikibooks
  5. You would like to increase the search-engine presence of the Wikibooks
  6. You would also like to recruit additional people to help you write the wikibooks

Two questions for you:

  1. Does the above set of points correctly cover what you are trying to do?
  2. One concern I have in general about wikibooks is the same concern we have about the accuracy of Wikipedia - namely anyone can edit. How do you then, ensure that that the information in the wikibooks is accurate?

Johntex\talk 04:36, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Question 1: Yes to all the points Question 2: This is the question we have also been thinking about. I have seen instances of wikibooks that restrict the edit functionality, but we have not explored this thoroughly. At this time, we are hoping for the authors (and others) to make additions. Do you require us to have a policy for this question prior to adding links to wikipedia?

Thank you - I understand your goal better now. First of all, let my applaud your efforts to spread this type of knowledge.
As to your question about whether we have a policy for ensuring your authors know what they are talking about, the answer is "yes and no". I am not aware of a specific policy about Wikibooks. However, we do have a policy against citing one Wikipedia article to prove a fact in another Wikipedia article. As much as we want to be treated as a serious, trustworthy source, we know that citing ourselves we be like saying "we know this is true because we said it was true on another article".
The two main policies that govern the use of sources are verifiability and Reliable sources. I encourage you to read them over. They tend to be distrustful of self-published works. These days, nearly anyone with some extra time can write a blog about anything they want. With a few extra dollars they can even go to a so-called vanity press and have their writings made into a book for sale. We don't tend to consider these reliable sources because the barrier to write such a work is so low that anyone can do it, regardless of whether they know what they are talking about.
Therefore, my main objection is whether these books are a good reference for their selected articles. I am not saying that they are bad books - I have not read them and I am not an expert on all their subject matter. However, I do know that some of the articles to which you were adding these references (for example Chromosome or Genetics) there are dozens if not hundreds of PhD-authored, peer-reveiewed, professionally printed books on the topic. We have a policy WP:NOT that specifies some of the things Wikipedia is NOT. One of these things is that we are not a link farm with dozens of external links on each article. Therefore, we need to keep the number of links down to a manageable level by utilizing only the very best external links. Again, I don't want to say that these wikibooks are bad sources, but I find it very hard to believe that they are among the world's very best resources on this topic.
The second objection I have is one of article content. As I mention above, we are not a link farm, we prefer content that is incorporated into our article internally, vs linked externally. Therefore, if a wikibook was somehow proven to be a reliable resource, we would much prefer that some fact be taken from the wikibook and incorporated into the article, and then the wikibook given credit by way of a foot-note. This way, our article is improved.
My third objection is one of formatting. You were adding the wikibook information as its own section. We basically never do that with sources. Sub-sections are for discussing different components of the topic - they are not for talking about different exteranl works that may be related to the topic. External works go in the "External links" section and they are just formated as a single bullet line. A look at Genomics will give you some idea of what I mean, but even that article is not well-formatted by our standards (it needs work). See how there are in-line references backing up specific facts? That is our prefered way to reference a source. The second preference is to list them as external links. The Genomics article really needs fewer external links and more in-line references. A better article for this is HIV/AIDS in Brazil or Barbara McClintock.
What to do about it?
I don't know a perfect answer. The main stumbling point is "how do we know this is a reputable source that is among the very best sources we can link to?" I think yu have to answer that question. Here is my idea:
If you look at an article link 2006 Texas Longhorn football team or Tattoo or Marching band, down at the very botoom in the external links section, you will see some links to Wikiquote and Wikipedia commons. The Commons links may provide a useful example. They point to repositories of photos about the topic. This way, the article is not overloaded with every photo that someone would like to add, but the photos are available elsewhere where less judgement has to be made about how good they are.
If your wikibook project organized all your books by topics, as commons does with photos, then we could design a similar box to link to related wikibooks. For instance, if you have 5 or 50 books on Biology, they could all be grouped into a category for Biology. Then, here on Wikipedia, we could design a box that says "Wikibooks has content on Biology" and link to your category.
That is the best suggestion I can think of at the moment. Please let me know what you think about all this. Johntex\talk 16:12, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Update, actually, we already have such a template. Please see Template:Wikibooks. This still leaves the question of whether the wikibooks are rigorously enough authored to be one of the links from our articles, but that is up to you to discuss with the individual authors of each page in question. If you want to add some links using this template, and if the links seem relevant to the articles in question, then I will not remove the links. Please understand that does not guarantee they will remain. Someone else may doubt the reliability of them as a source and then hopefully in that case discussion would occur about the specific link in the specific article. I look forward to your thoughts. Johntex\talk 16:16, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Hello, thank you for your message. I agree that sounds like a reasonable thing to try. That solves the problem of formatting and of undue prominance to a particular source in the headings of an article. It does not adress the question of how anyone knows that the source is reliable. Because of that, I can't guarantee how the links will be received, or that someone else does not remove them.
I don't fully understand the time pressure you are under, but I don't think this can be done all at once. I suggest that you add such links to a few articles (<10) and see how it goes. Check back in 1 day, 3 days, 5 days, and see if anyone has removed the link. Check the Talk page of the article to see if they have been questioned. If you add the link at the bottom and do it on a small number of pages, I personally will not remove the link. I will wait to see what other authors do.
When someone adds such a link to many articles at once, it gives the impression they have not really taken the time to ensure the link is relevant to the topic. Again, we usually have only a few links per article. Therefore, when authors add a new link, we expect them to effectively be declaring "this is one of the very best links I could possibly add to this article." If you just go through and add the link to lots of articles - it looks like you are just adding the link everywhere you can think of. That is why we tend to view such links as SPAM. If you are careful and deliberate, then the links may be well received.
Good luck, and please let me know if I can answer any other questions. Thanks, Johntex\talk 16:52, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


Dear John

Greetings from Bangkok! I am UNDP-APDIP’s Programme Specialist on Content Development and Knowledge Management and would like to add to Sanjay’s comments on the Wikibooks.

These wikibooks were originally UNDP-APDIP’s e-Primers. I understand your concerns about the reliability of the resources so please allow me to briefly explain how UNDP-APDIP e-Primers are developed, how they are being used and translated by governments and others around the world, and why we have donated our e-primers to Wikibooks.

15 UNDP-APDIP e-Primers are currently available on Wikibooks for all to use and update. The e-primers are intended to help laypersons and decision-makers understand the various terminologies, definitions, developments and issues surrounding the different aspects of information and communications technology for development (ICT4D). Nine of the e-Primers are part of UNDP-APDIP’s "e-Primers for the Information Economy, Society and Polity" series that detail the concepts, issues and trends surrounding different ICT4D issues such as e-commerce, education, e-government, Internet governance, legal and regulatory issues, and ICT for poverty reduction. Six of the e-Primers are part of the "e-Primers on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)" series that introduce various aspects of FOSS, including education, government policy, licensing, localization and open standards.

All e-primers are written by experts in the field, selected by UNDP-APDIP’s staff, partners (http://www.apdip.net/about/partners) and advisory panel members (http://www.apdip.net/about/advisory), and are published by UNDP. All e-primers also undergo peer review. Draft of the e-primers are posted online for all to review and comment. They are also sent to our partners and advisory panel for review and comment before they are finalized and published.

The e-primers have been used by governments, academic institutions and others in training and education. For example, the e-Government e-Primer (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/E-government) is used In India by the National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) as reference material in their training course. It is also used as the e-government handbook for all civil servants in Sri Lanka. Moreover, the e-primers have been translated or are being translated by different organizations into Vietnamese, Mongolian, Sinhalese and Tamil, Portuguese, Farsi and Chinese at their own cost.

Below are some relevant accolades for your reference (http://www.apdip.net/about/accolades/apdip):

• I want to thank you very much for the [FOSS: Licensing e-primer] and encourage you to continue publishing such guides. They are really useful quick references. - Pierre-Paul Lemyre, LexUM - Université de Montréal (5 January 2007)

• We find the e-Commerce and e-Business [e-Primer] by Zorayda Ruth Andam very useful and informative and thus we would like to incorporate it in our forthcoming executive reference book "Innovation: An Effective e-Business Management Tool." - Arindam Basu, Research Associates, The Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (14 April 2006)

• We had given the soft copy of [the e-Government e-Primer] to the participants in one of our one-week IAS officers training. This was used as reference material. We now plan to use the material in the e-Gov Champion programme - Piyush Gupta, National Institute for Smart Government, India (16 March 2006)

• This [Internet Governance e-]primer can be of interest to many, as are the other publications of APDIP - a programme worth of praise for its pro-active role in effective knowledge dissemination. - Michel J. Menou, France (9 December 2005)

• I am a lecturer at the Stellenbosch University, South Africa. I present a module on aspects of the Information Society. One of my themes is : e-government. I found your e-primer [on e-Government] on the internet and reckon it to be excellent. May I photocopy parts of this [e-]primer to hand out to my 60 students? - Willem van der Merwe, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (5 November 2005)

• Firstly, congratulations on the excellent e-primer series. I am writing to you because I am currently writing a course on ICT for Development, which will form part of a Masters degree in Sustainable Development, offered by distance learning. Our programme has about 800 registered students...I would very much like to include the following material(s) that you have made freely available on your website. - Jon Gregson, Manager: Learning and Development, Distance Learning Programme, Wye Campus, Ashford Imperial College London, United Kingdom (January 2005)


UNDP-APDIP decided to donate the e-primers to wikibooks because it facilitates collaboration. Every day, volunteers are improving wikibooks, making many changes, writing, updating, and correcting books. At the same time, wikibooks maintains quality control and has policies and guidelines that users need to follow. We hope by adding the wikibook links in the relevant wikipedia articles, this would help to strengthen the articles.

You mentioned in your discussion that “if a wikibook was somehow proven to be a reliable resource, we would prefer that some fact be taken from the wikibook and incorporated into the article, and then the wikibook given credit by way of a footnote.” This is what we have in mind and we believe would add value to the wikipedia articles.

Hope this email clarifies some of the questions you have, and let me know if you require further information. We look forward to further collaborations with the wikipedia and wikibooks communities in making knowledge freely available and facilitating knowledge sharing.

Best regards

Christine Apikul UNDP-APDIP

Dear Christine,
Greetings to you in Bangkok, such a wonderful place. I hope I am able to soon renew my acquaintance with the city.
I am personally inclined to believe that these e-primers are quality works. That was the impression that I recieved from my glance at them, and it is reinforced by the testimonials you provided.
I don't know how much you know about Wikipedia, but please allow me to mention a few things that may or may not be known to you.
First of all, I do not have any special status to make decisions for Wikipedia. I am an active contributor (one of the 800 most active users if judged purely by the number of edits I have made), but clearly there are many others as active or more so than me. I am an administrator (one of about 1,088) so that means I am required to understand our basic policies and to act on them if I feel they are being broken. (There are also avenues for review if anyone believes I have acting improperly.)
We are a very decentralized operation. We do have policies, but often these policies leave room for individual interpretation. Most decisions regarding content of individual articles are made by the specific volunteers who happen to have an interest in working on that particular article.
We do not have a specific policy for or against citing a WikiBook as an external link or as a source for an article. We do have several policies that are relevant in a general sense to this question:
WP:V - Full policy - his states that articles in Wikipedia should be "verifiable". We sometimes say we strive for "verifiability, not truth". An author may know for certain that his dog has lived twice as long as any other dog of that breed, but she would not be able to write an article on her dog unless this fact could be verified by other people.
WP:RS - Guideline, not policy - this says that sources cited in Wikipedia should be "reliable sources". Some cases are clear-cut. The BBC is considered reliable. An obscure blog that gets 15 visitors a week is not. There is a lot of grey area in between. Interestingly, Wikipedia does not consider Wikipedia to be reliable in the sense of this policy. It would clearly be no conclusive proof if one article here cited another article here as proof of its veracity. That would be a self-reference that would prove nothing. The fact that WP:RS is a guideline as opposed to a policy should perhaps be viewed as meaning that the concept is extremely important and well-accepted, but the specific examples cited are more open for debate.
WP:SPAM - Guideline, not policy - Adding the same external link to multiple pages is frowned upon. Again, this is a guideline, so there is some room for debate about how rigorously this should be enforced.
I initially reacted negatively to Sanjay's addition of the e-primer links for several reasons:
Since I was not so familiar with these particular WikiBooks, but since I know that WikiBooks can in principle be editted by anyone, even vandals or those pushing an agenda of some kind, I was worried that these links may not be reliable sources.
Sanjay was adding the same link and the same or very similar text to many articles - this seemed to point to a WP:SPAM case.
The format Sanjay was using was unorthodox, in that he was adding a seperate heading into the article to talk about the wikibook. This is definitely not consistent with our existing articles. Please see WP:MOS for our Manual of Style.
The combination of the 3 things above caused me to react swiftly to revert the changes, and I left an explanation for Sanjay. In cases of clear-cut policy violations, depending on the severity, administrators can block access to a user to prevent them from editting Wikipedia. We generally issue a warning first, because a genuine mistake or misunderstanding should not be treated too severly. We don't want to scare away new contributors who certainly can't be expected to know all our policies and preferences.
So, where does that leave us?
Since I hold no special status to make decisions for all of Wikipedia, I cannot promise to keep your links in place. What I can do is to advise you on some things that may help:
We don't like too many external links. One of our other policies is WP:NOT which lists out some things that Wikipedia is not. One fo these is that we are not a "link farm". This means we tend to prefer adding to our content vs. just linking to external content. Therefore, it might be good to incorporate a fact from your wiki-book into our relevant article each time you want to add a link. I can help you with the formatting of this if you need help. Basically the idea is to add some text and then add a foot-note that lists your wiki-book as a source.
We don't like it when people copy and paste the same exact link to multiple articles. That makes us suspicious. I recommend going slowly with a few articles at a time to see if there are objections raised. If you are using the wiki-book as a source instead of just adding it as a link, this will help with this situation as well. Each fact that you add to each article would presumably be a bit different to suit the individual article. They would not be copy-and-pastes of each other. It would be more apparent to any observer then that you are woking to improve the article.
A third suggestion would be to use the special template indicating that an article has realted content available in the form of a WikiBook: Template:Wikibooks. Since this template was specifically created for this purpose, it may be better accepted. I was unaware of ths template myself when I first contacted Sanjay about his additions.
I cannot over-emphasize the point that all articles are ultimately written by whatever volunteer authors gravitate towards them. Therefore, I encourage you to try a few links and see what kind of reception comes from other editors.
Please let me know if I can be of further assistance and I will try to help out.
Best, Johntex\talk 02:54, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

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