Wikipedia Links: Removal of Links by Over Zealous Users

Wikipedia is beginning to get a bad reputation for over zealous users. These users usually have some pet peave and go about eliminating that pet peave with a single minded focus. These aggressive users removed a bunch of edits and links I’d posted to Wikipedia (my experience). Obviously Wikipedia does no one any good if it becomes a link farm for spammers. However, I feel that these users are chasing away quality content with their over zealous removal of others’ edits. Especially in technical fields they know nothing about.

Wikipedia Links: Removal of Quality Links

Wikipedians that followed my links were on my site for an average almost 3 minutes and viewed approximately 3 pages.  Many of my current user list are Wikipedians that followed my links.  I feel like my site stats justified my links on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Links: Getting around over zealous Wikipedia users

So I’ve decided to help you get around these irritating users.  If you have a quality site with quality content using the following steps for posting Wikipedia links:

1. Create multiple users for posting links – harder to remove all of your external links
2. Create templates for you external links – consider incorporating the Extlink template into your link posting template – this hides your external links from over zealous users
3. Post some text before and after the external link – this makes it harder for those previewing you posts (contributions) quickly to see that you included a link

Wikipedia Links: Guidelines for external link posting

Guidelines:

1. Post no more than 3 links per each of your user per day
2. Do not post from each user each day
3. Post external links to content on your site that directly relates to the Wikipedia page you are posting to – someone will get angry, for good reason, if you just post to a generic page
4. Since you are limited in how many quality links you can really provide think carefully about which pages will serve your purposes best and only post once on these targeted pages

Wikipedia Links: Link to honest, quality content

If you link to a link farm or to garbage then word will get around.  You external links will go down before you can post another one.  Your site will get a bad reputation.  Your multiple users will immediately be recognized as sockpuppets.  You can’t get around 1000s of people looking to remove any sign of your existence from Wikipedia.