Talk:Modular building

Linkspam

This article and some similar articles had many links to commercial sites. Such links, sometimes known as linkspam, are not suitable for Wikipedia and will be removed. See WP:EL, WP:NOT, WP:SPAM and WP:WPSPAM for further explanation. --Tom Allen 02:02, 21 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Confusion about linkspam

Tom Allen: I think you may be confused about the definition of linkspam, these were not created by a bot, and not added by a single user as you can see by the article history. I re-added these links because these are links to the manufacturers of the subject of the article and therefore would be the best source of detailed or specialized information about the topic. This not an article about a single product or service, so it is not promotional and is not spam, the article fully complies with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policies. Thank you. --McStyles 21:27, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

When the article is about a particular company, that article should include an external link to the official site. But when the article is about a type of product, the usual practice is not to include a list of links to every site manufacturing or selling that product. The only way to do that and not violate the NPOV would be to include every manufacturer's site, and that would quickly turn Wikipedia into a link repository, which it is not. The (featured) articles on Cheese and Shoe polish are good examples. Neither contains a single external link to a commercial site. The shoe polish article does contain a Wikipedia link to the article on Kiwi (shoe polish), because of the prominence of that company, and trademarks are included in some of the pictures, but there is no long list of shoe polish or cheese manufacturers, as there easily could be. I've reviewed each of the ten links in this article a second time. All of them, in my opinion, violate the Wikipedia:External links policy, specifically "Links normally to be avoided", item #4: "Links that are added to promote a site, that primarily exist to sell products or services, with objectionable amounts of advertising, or that require payment to view the relevant content, colloquially known as external link spamming" (emphasis added). There is presently a lively discussion on the external links policy, but this is not one of the points under dispute. In this case, each of these ten links is to a site that "primarily exists to sell products or services"; none of them is primarily informational in nature. Is there a "modular building manufacturer's guild" or similar organization that we could link to instead? I do think that would be appropriate here. --Tom Allen 12:34, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]