User talk:Brenleymcintosh

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The Wikipedia Tutorial is a good place to start learning about Wikipedia. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and discussion pages using four tildes, like this: ~~~~ (the software will replace them with your signature and the date). Again, welcome! Fæ (talk) 15:47, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

July 2010[edit]

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Insertion sequence do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used as a platform for advertising or promotion, and doing so is contrary to the goals of this project. Because Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, 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. Fæ (talk) 15:55, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am very sorry - my intention was not to add useless links. I am a post-doc at Texas A&M University & have spent several weeks adding information to EcoliWiki (http://ecoliwiki.net) about the E. coli transposons and insertion sequences. EcoliWiki is a central resource for scientists working on Escherichia coli, its plasmids, phages and mobile genetic elements. The information I added is all properly referenced and is meant as a detailed summary of information about IS elements & Transposons particularly in E. coli, including information that is currently not available on Wikipedia and (to me) seems overly specific, including the exact coordinates of each IS element in each of the sequenced laboratory E. coli strains. We are working on mapping these onto the genomes that are already on EcoliWiki (http://ecoliwiki.net/colipedia/index.php/Category:E._coli_genomes). My intention was definitely NOT to vandalize Wikipedia! If it isn't ok to link to our Insertion Sequence pages, would it be ok to link to the specific IS elements (IS1, IS2, IS3, etc)? These are not on Wikipedia at all and provide information about the genes in each, coordinates, accessions, etc. I'm really sorry - I am a new contributor to Wikipedia. Brenleymcintosh (talk) 16:31, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the way forward is to consider WP:ELNO#12 "Links to open wikis, except those with a substantial history of stability and a substantial number of editors..." It sounds like you have a case for a valid exception and an easy way to prove you have a consensus for inclusion would be to confirm it (one way or the other) on Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard. This would avoid any interpretation that adding the link might be spam, though it might still be challenged and then need discussion on a particular article's talk page. Dropping a note on the article talk page about it first will often avoid problems.

Note that new accounts adding the same link to several articles are highly likely to be spammers and may be automatically flagged for attention; even established accounts need to take care when doing any form of blanket editing. Drop a note on my talk page if you need any further help. Cheers Fæ (talk) 18:39, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]