Sujato

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Hello, Sujato, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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October 2015

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did to Suttavibhanga. Wikipedia is not a collection of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include, but are not limited to, links to personal websites, links to websites with which you are affiliated (whether as a link in article text, or a citation in an article), and links that attract visitors to a website or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Because Wikipedia uses the nofollow attribute value, its external links are disregarded by most search engines. If you feel the link should be added to the page, please discuss it on the associated talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you. Aoidh (talk) 06:09, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Aoidh. I'm not a major Wikipedia editor, so I am not sure how to respond to this, so please let me know if I should do so in a better place.

I appreciate the feedback. However I would point out that the page currently has one external link, which does not in fact contain the Suttavibhanga, but merely points to various sources which themselves do not contain the text. It is desirable in discussion of such a text to include a link to an available translation of the text, and this is what I did. Removing this reduces the usability of the page considerably, to no advantage that I can see. These links are not spam: they are up to date, relevant resources.

It is true, I am affiliated with Suttacentral, so this goes against the relevant Wikipedia guidelines. Like I said earlier, I'm not a regular Wikipedia user, and I was not aware of this guideline, I simply added these links because I thought the pages would be improved by them. In many cases, the links to Buddhist texts are inadequate, broken, or simply mistaken.

The Buddhist pages tend to not attract a lot of interest, so the chances of getting a reasonable discussion are slim. I posted a lengthy entry in the talk page for Buddhist Mythology several months ago, and so far not a single response.

These links should be there. The only problem is that they were added by me, a site owner. So may I suggest that you replace them, then there is no problem.

Sujato (talk) 09:44, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

To add to my previous message, I have now looked in more detail at Wikipedia's policy, and I do not believe I have violated anything. What I did was clearly not Citation spam which, in accord with the guidelines there, “should not be confused with legitimate good-faith additions intended to verify article content and help build the encyclopedia.” Furthermore, uncontroversial edits include repairing broken links, which is mostly what I did. These guidelines seem reasonable to me, and I now do not believe that I have broken any of them. Unless I hear otherwise, I will revert your changes. Sujato (talk) 07:46, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Please "avoid creating new articles about yourself or your organization." (Or adding references/external links to SuttaCentral). Please see WP:COI and WP:BESTCOI for more information. Thank you JimRenge (talk) 11:17, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for responding. But this does not address the issues that I mentioned. The links I added were legitimate good faith edits, and were in addition uncontroversial, and should be reverted. Nobody gains by keeping Wikipedia pages full of broken and irrelevant links, or by lacking references to essential resources.

On WP:COI it says “Editors who have a general conflict of interest may make unambiguously uncontroversial edits. They may … repair broken links,”

On WP:BESTCOI it says: “making totally uncontroversial updates like removing typos, correcting or updating simple data, and removing blatant vandalism is fine.”

Please support me by reverting the links, or else I will do so myself. Sujato (talk) 00:00, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Reparing broken links means correcting a url that is misspelled or out of date with the same link, or adding an archived link (such as via archive.org). It does not refer to going through and replacing other links with a link to a different website, specifically your own website. Nobody said your edits were not made in good faith, but they were certainly not uncontroversial, as evidenced by the simple fact that this discussion is taking place. - Aoidh (talk) 00:12, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

This does not address the basic issue: the links I corrected were to broken sites, were inaccurate, did not work, or were missing. The controversy has been over whether I should have made these changes myself, not about whether these are appropriate changes that improve the articles in question. Since the changes themselves are not controversial, there is no violation of WP:COI. From WP:COI (my emphasis): “Editors with close associations to the topic or subject may be in conflict of interest if they contribute to an article in any manner that removes relevant, well sourced information, adds un-sourced contentious claims or attempts to push a single point of view in a less than neutral manner.” These edits do none of these things. And I'm sorry, but thanks to these edits that you made, I have been accused of spamming Wikipedia. As a long time user of Wikipedia, I have actually tried to make it a better place, and it is disheartening to see such responses. This is why I, as a new editor of Wikipedia, ask you to support me and encourage my participation by acknowledging that the links are appropriate, and reverting the changes yourself. Sujato (talk) 00:34, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

You misunderstand, the fact that you should not be promoting your own website on Wikipedia is the most relevant issue, but that doesn't make it the only issue. This addition does not improve the article in any way, but it does serve to promote your website. That would indeed make the change controversial. My edits did not cause you to be accused of spamming Wikipedia, your actions did that. You were promoting your website on dozens of articles on Wikipedia, please explain how you being accused of spamming is somehow my fault? The addition of that website does not improve the articles so I will not be reverting my edits. - Aoidh (talk) 05:12, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Also, when you quoted WP:COI above about uncontroverial edits, the sentencing following that says "If another editor objects for any reason, it is not an uncontroversial edit." - Aoidh (talk) 05:34, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, but this addition which you referred to does indeed improve the article. The article deals with the Pratimoksha generally, as a text shared by all schools. There is a list of external links at the bottom of the article. One of those is to a book, which coincidentally I wrote. The other three all point to links for the Mulasarvastivada lineage, as practiced in the Tibetan tradition. This is clearly biassed, and against Wikipedia policy. By adding a link to SuttaCentral, I enabled readers to access the texts and parallels for all the editions of the text in all schools. SuttaCentral is the only website that does this, there is no alternative. I repeat, this is not spam, nor were any of my other contributions, and they have been unfairly described as such. Do you have any other examples?

Since you ask why this is your fault, I will answer in good faith. I don't think that you have considered the actual merits of these changes. It appears to me that you have made these changes in good faith by applying a Wikipedia rule. However when I read the rules in question, they seem to be nuanced and allow for grey areas. Yet when I try to talk about such grey areas, I just get a legalistic one-upmanship that goes nowhere. The guidelines also frequently emphasize that newcomers should be bold, and that they should be supported and encouraged, and I certainly do not feel that this is the case. I have read many articles talking about how Wikipedia is declining because of over-zealous applications of the rules which discourage newcomers, and this has been exactly my experience. To be honest, I really couldn't care whether these links are there or not. I am human, and I don't like being accused of acting badly when all I have done is try to help. But more to the point, I have considered for some time taking a more active role in editing Wikipedia, since, as an experienced scholar of Buddhism, I frequently find that the existing articles are very poor. But I want to learn how this process goes, what kind of community I will find myself in. I'm happy to do work if it will be helpful, but otherwise, I'll just find somewhere else to publish. And so when I have been looking at the responses by yourself and others, I have been trying to feel out what is going on. So far, I have no indication that anyone, including yourself, has seriously looked at the changes and how they work in context. As per my explanation above, the articles are clearly deficient, and I tried to improve them. I know this, and I know, from my own experience both as a Buddhist scholar and a Wikipedia user, that these changes improve the relevant pages. I can't see how anyone benefits by ignoring this.

Anyway, I've had a little time to reflect on this, and I've decided that Wikipedia is not the place for me. I'm sorry if I've wasted anyone's time or caused any grief: please forgive me. Helping Wikipedia was something I've wanted to do for a long time, and you've helped me realize that this was a mistake. So thank you. Sujato (talk) 12:16, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Adding your website to an article is not the way to fix perceived issues, and does not improve the article in any way. All that link does is promote your website, it does nothing to aid in the understanding of the prātimokṣa. Whether it is spam or not is not the issue, all of your article edits in the past year or two have been towards the sole purpose of adding your website to Wikipedia; you have a conflict of interest, are biased towards its inclusion, and should not be adding the links to any article, as you have a vested interest in promoting the website. - Aoidh (talk) 06:13, 21 January 2016 (UTC)