Talk:Fred Reichheld

External link to blog post

Fairsing has removed the external link to an article that details the merits and potential drawbacks of the NPS model. Before removing this link as "spam", please discuss here. Perhaps we can get a vote together for consensus, as well as on the NPS page. Thekohser 17:41, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I assume good motives here -- Thekosher no doubt believes that the link to his Blog posting on the topic is relevant and helpful to Wikipedia readers. But it is in general violation of Wikipedia policy: See: Wikipedia:External links#Links to normally avoid, particularly points number 11 (no linking to a site you yourself maintain), 12 (generally avoid linking to Blogs), and the following paragraph. As stated there: "a primary policy of Wikipedia is that no one from a particular site/organization should post links to that organization/site" to promote neutrality. If you believe your Blog post is particularly relevant to the topic, good Wikipedia practice is to open a discussion on the talk page of the article and allow other Wikipedians to make that determination. So when I saw the link added by the Wikipedian who runs the blog, I removed it as it violates that Wikipedia policy. I believe that doing so was a proper action.

What I did poorly, however, was refer to the link as "link spam," in my edit summary. "Link spam" is a technically not the most proper label here because link spam in the conventional sense is usually added to WP by a bot, not an individual. A better (although perhaps overly lengthy) edit summary would have been: "Remove link to blog in violation of WP policy because it was added by the editor who maintains the blog."

In any case, if other Wikipedians feel strongly that the blog posting is especially relevant and useful (despite the general guideline that links to blogs should be avoided), they can add back the link. As it stands, I will again remove the link and politely request that the blog author refrain from adding it back again himself. For the record, if a discussion about the actual usefulness of linking to this blog post does occur, I will recuse myself from that discussion and accept community consensus to avoid the appearance of bias given that my original edit was reverted. Fairsing 20:50, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

You, Sir, are a scholar and a gentleman. I concur with your thorough assessment, and I will abide by the removal of said link. If anyone else starts a "consensus vote" on the matter, I too will recuse myself. ==> Thekohser 21:01, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I have edited the above comment to remove the external link. We've given Gregory Kohs enough free advertising. --Gmaxwell 04:49, 12 August 2006 (UTC)