User talk:125.54.210.236

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Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a mere directory of links nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that exist to attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam policies for further explanations of links that are considered appropriate. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. See the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thank you. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 05:37, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] September 2007

Please stop adding inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did to Chinese language. It is considered spamming and Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or promotion. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, additions of links to Wikipedia will not alter search engine rankings. If you continue spamming, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 06:11, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion inappropriate

The links are intended for learners to get a speedy and valuable direction. They were not intended to provide extensive directory listings. Rather than deleting the links, I suggest reviewing and evaluation of the individual sites. (19 Sept 07)

I believe your addition of the links was well-meant, but we hope you can understand that spamming is a very sensitive issue on Wikipedia. Only the highly relevant links are allowed to appear in an article, and any less relevant link, though non-commercial, can smell of spamming. The links you added are certainly not irrevelant, but Wikipedia is probably not the best place for listing these e-learning resources. There're many ways for us to contribute to Wikipedia, if we're interested in the project; so I hope you won't be frustrated by the revert, and keep contributing to the project in other ways (e.g. copyediting, revert vandalism etc). Best Regards.--K.C. Tang 08:43, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. My contribution was not bad intentioned. There are many people looking for appropriate material that would help them learning a language. Creating an entry about Chinese available on the internet does not seem inappropriate to me. There are sites assembled both by private persons and by governmental institutions. Why do you resist making a page introducing e-learning tools to ones not knowlegeable about them? It takes quite some time to find and evaluate the directories, not to speak about individual tools. Encyclopedia should be useful to people. The present entries on both "Learning Chinese" and "Western study of the Chinese language" do not seem sufficiently developed to a "learner". Do you consider the present state "highly" relevant and sufficient? For a "learner"! I suggest making an entry that would appropriately deal with the concerns stated above. This may meet the demand of those who try to make use of Wikipedia. Not only "learners" ready to visit universities in Beijing or Taipei. 10:19, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

While your addition of the links may have been well-intentioned, there are already quite a few links to "Learn Chinese online" sites in the article (probably too many as it is). All we need is a representative sample of a site or two. Those looking to find everything available can certainly use Google, but we don't intend articles to be link directories or repositories. If you are knowledgeable in the area of Chinese language, I would encourage you to work on adding well-referenced information to the articles themselves instead. Thanks! Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 20:35, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I must've expressed myself clumsily (as I always do), and I think Seraphimblade has pointed out the crux of the problem more clearly: of course it's wonderful to have a directory of online recourses (as an armchair linguist, I'm always looking for those directories desperately), but Wikipedia is just not meant to be the place to contain such a directory. In fact, there're other sites which are meant to serve that very purpose (e.g. this one). I hope you understand that our reverts were only made to conform to the current Wikipedia policy, just as your edits were meant to help the readers. Regards.--K.C. Tang 01:33, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Certainly. Allowing wikipedia to expand into a myriad of endless links denies it its original purpose. As a user who just thought to have a tea-break in Chinese, I certainly am not in position to create anything like an authoritative list. Neither from the perspective of a professional linguist nor from that of a computer scientist. But I assume most learners start this way. I think I showed where the demand is and how it should be filled. I do not agree with Seraphimblade that all the current links in Chinese Language website are sufficient and the most useful ones. But I appreciate your directory. It is well built and quite useful.

The real purpose of my entry was to induce somebody as professional as you, to create a page introducing the ways of Learning Chinese on Internet and Comparison of Commercial and Free Utilities for e-Learning Chinese. I believe such a website requires a lot background information on history and intentions of individual e-learning website makers. However it first of all requires INTERACTIVE evaluation, re-ranking and discussions by users, not by individual linguists or developers alone.

So my original purpose was to create something like List_of_PDF_software, PDFCreator, File_manager, or Comparison_of_file_managers. These all are in the category that one might call "D.I.R.E.C.T.O.R.Y." Thus they would probably figure as INAPPROPRIATE items for an encyclopedia like Wiki. Somehow they made it into Wikipedia, despite its "current policy". Obviously some people felt an urgent need to make some kind of order in mushrooming numbers of directories. Order that they themselves may make some contribution to, and not rely on the tastes of the provider. Proper ordering and explanation might be more valuable than gold. This does not mean I am against using commercial utilities. I just need to know they will be useful to me once I buy them!

Finally, as the Chinese language website corroborates, since the number of Chinese language learners is growing almost exponentially, I believe establishment of a portal such as Portal:Free_software might also be quite useful. What do you think? --02:50, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

As I said above, I'm only an armchair linguist, someone who learn languages as a hobby; I'd never pretend to be a professional. But I'd be glad to discuss with you about linguistics, just don't count my opinions as professional (whatever it means). I don't see anything barring you from creating such articles as Learning Chinese on Internet or Comparison of Commercial and Free Utilities for e-Learning Chinese, as long as you have good references. Just be careful of the trap of Original Research. I understand that some of the current Wikipedia policies are open to debate, but I think most of the policies make sense. So it might be worthwhile to read Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines before creating the articles. (And, of course, you might want to create a user account first, for easier communication between you and other users :)). As to the vandalism on the Chinese language page, I think you've fixed them all. Thanks a lot. (But are you aware that you can click into the version before vandalism, and then save it, to revert the vandalism once and for all?) Best Regards.--K.C. Tang 03:08, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

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