User talk:VAwebteam

Welcome!

Hello, VAwebteam, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me at User talk:Ruakh (my talk page), or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} after the question on your talk page. Again, welcome!

—Ruakh_TALK 14:36, 7 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Spam links

Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia. However, the external links you added to the page Bill Brandt do not comply with our guidelines for external links. Wikipedia is not a mere directory of links; nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you.

May I ask you if you are involved in the Victoria and Albert museum? If so, could you please review WP:COI? Thanks. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 12:55, 15 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Dirk

As you can probably tell I'm new to contributing to Wikipedia! Thank you for your comments they have been useful. I was a little surprised you felt the link I added to the Bill Brandt entry was not seen as helpful to visitors to this page and was used as promotion by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). I hope you'll see the link goes through to pages of further information and images about this photographer that I thought would be of further interest to those reading about Bill Brandt.

I'm a member of the V&A webteam and we hope to add other links, references, pictures and content to Wikipedia pages relating to the objects in the museum and research carried out by our curators. I hope this is not contrary to the Wikipedia spirit as we wish to share the information available on our site. Would it be acceptable to copy content from the V&A site onto Wikipedia, where there are gaps, as we are very happy to give permission for this?

The V&A is not a commercial organisation and it is purely our intention to share images and content available on the museum's site.

I hope this explains things. VAwebteam 15:27, 17 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I am sorry I did not get back to you earlier. Your linkadditions are a problem, per WP:NOT#REPOSITORY, and per conflict of interest. Even if a site is not commercial, wikipedia is not a linkfarm (if there is one library, more will follow etc.), and you do get site-traffic when someone clicks the link. So please do not add the links yourself, but discuss them on the talkpages and let the links be added by uninvolved editors. Or otherwise, please add content to wikipedia articles (where you can use your link as a reference .. though still, please keep a neutral point of view). I have opened a case on this on WP:COIN (here). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 13:49, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please be careful you do not end up like the European Library, which added too many of their own links & then got classed as a "spammer" here, resulting in the removal of ALL links to them (despite my protests). Even perfectly legitimate & relevant links added by you are likely to cause trouble. You should realize that because everybody can add links, many commercial spammers do, and countermeasures are necessarily harsh. Several perfectly legitimate sites have had all links removed. Don't assume being a well known museum means it is ok. Johnbod 14:49, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Proper references and citation templates

Hello, members of the Victoria and Albert Museum webteam … I stumbled across your predicament at WP:COI/N#Victoria and Albert Museum, and thought that I should contribute my 2¢ worth in the spirit of WP:DBTN.

When adding links to your website, please use a {{cite web}} template placed between <ref> … </ref> brackets so that it will appear in the References section at the end of the article … if the article does not already have such a section, or if your new citation does no appear there, then you may have to add the following (before the External Links, as per Wikipedia:Guide to layout#Standard appendices and descriptions):

==References==
<references/>

You must also be editing the article and not just a section of the article in order to see your changes when you click "Show preview," otherwise the References section is not displayed … I remember that it took me a while to figure that out when I was still a nugget.

See WP:FOOT and WP:CITE for more information, and familiarize yourselves with WP:PG in order to avoid a future faux pas … as User:Johnbod already cautioned you, the Senior Partners could have a WP:BOT remove all of your links in less time than that it would take to explain how it is accomplished.

BTW, I'm looking at a souvenir that I purchased in your gift shop during my 1983 honeymoon trip "even as we speak" … the ex-spousal unit may be just a distant and infrequent memory now, but that whimsical trinket has been a daily reminder of my first visit to London for nearly a quarter of a century. :-)

Happy Editing! —68.239.79.82 16:58, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please participate in the COI/N discussion!

Please go to WP:COI/N#Victoria and Albert Museum at your earliest convenience and participate in the discussion ... your silence has become a topic for conversation!

There is also debate about where your links belong, in References or External links ... since Fig leaf had been used as an example, I also decided to use it as an example of a proper citation/reference for your benefit, and ended up doing some Major Surgery on the article, which I documented on its Talk page ... here is what I added for VAM, and you can use this as a template:

{{cite web 
 |url= http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/sculpture/stories/david/index.html
 |title= David's Fig Leaf
 |publisher= [[Victoria and Albert Museum]]
 |accessdate= 2007-05-29 }}

This generates: "David's Fig Leaf". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 2007-05-29.

After further consideration, since your pages don't have authors, dates, or any of the other information that would provide values for the optional fields, then these should be the only fields that you need to use:

|title= — should be the same as the <TITLE> field in the HTML source code for the referenced page
|publisher= [[Victoria and Albert Museum]] — should always be identical to this
|accessdate= — should be the date that you add the template and verify that the link is correct

I recommend the use of ISO 8601 date/time format so that the MediaWiki software can automagically link it to the appropriate date-related articles, … "29th of March, 2007" and "05/29/07" not good ways to enter the date ... I have seen Some Other Editors add dates formatted like that, and I always change them to ISO 8601 format!

My personal opinion is that if you can find an appropriate place to add a ref, then do it that way, otherwise putting it in External links is OK … IMHO, the other editor used the wrong location for their example, so I moved it to where I thought it made more sense, i.e., following the sentence, "During the Hellenistic period, the Renaissance and other periods, nudity was a common feature in art.^[1]" —68.239.79.82 03:00, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]