User talk:Antonwg

Welcome
Hello Antonwg, and welcome to Wikiversity! If you need help, feel free to visit my talk page, or contact us and ask questions. After you leave a comment on a talk page, remember to sign and date; it helps everyone follow the threads of the discussion. The signature icon in the edit window makes it simple. To get started, you may
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Note to other admins
I've had a communication from this user in response to the above requests. I suggest very strongly to assume good faith. I'm finishing off the new draft external links policy and will ask this user to read it when complete. --McCormack 20:10, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Response to your email
Hi, Antonwg. If you are an experienced and retired educator, I am sure you would prove a very valuable member of the Wikiversity community. Please find out about Wikiversity first by learning about learning projects or reading an introduction. If you have written free books on useful topics, you may wish to talk about this with the people on http://www.wikibooks.org (a sister project) and discuss importing your material onto that project rather than using external links. If you wish to add external links, please read the external links proposed policy first and then discuss below whether or not you think your links are permitted. Please do not add any further links until you have secured agreement with this. Thank you. --McCormack 10:39, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Your emails
Hi, Antonwg. I would be grateful if you would stop sending me emails via the mediawiki email system and post messages here on the talk page instead. I don't have much time to deal with this, and generally here at Wikiversity, many of us look at and thing about a problem together. If you send me email, this is private, and I don't feel I'm allowed to publish the emails without your permission. But I think everyone else needs to see what you said. Can you give me permission to post your emails here, so that others can express their opinions and help you too? Thanks. --McCormack 10:26, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Sure, please add my e-mail.
 * Sorry - I missed this reply from a couple of weeks ago. I've added your emails below as per your permission. I've formatted them with box edges for clarity. --McCormack 17:15, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Good day! I received a message from you questioning the addition of my commercial pages to the University. As a retired college teacher/administrator, my hobby is to help people learn. My 40 plus free commercial Internet libraries have 1,000 plus pages with free material to helps people learn. The most popular accounting page from the Accounting Internet Librarywas downloaded 20,000 time in 2006. It contains my three free accounting books. My Statistics Internet Library is the most popular. It contains my two free Internet books Statistics and Excel Statistics Lab Manual. Most libraries contain free Internet books. My Free Business Books Internet Library is also popular. About 40,000 unique visitors per month from all over the world visit the libraries located at  http://www.textbooksfree.org/Free%20Internet%20Libraries.htm. One of my recent projects is designed to speed the the change to free Internet Learning materials. To this end I have created textbooks free.org and affordable textbooks.org. Please advise! Thanks Walter For information about me and my company visit

The reason I didn't respond earlier is I didn't understand how talk worked. I am 63 and very impatient! Read the material suggested and see no reason not to add links to my libraries and books. Please visit one or two of the libraries at http://www.textbooksfree.org/Free%20Internet%20Libraries.htm and let me know. I spent some time adding links and they have all been taken away? I put them back and again they were taken away! Thanks! Walter

Clarification: when he says "Read the material suggested and see no reason not to add links to my libraries and books" he means that he read the WV external links policy. --McCormack 17:15, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Further note: I've added some comments about the status of the block and where we should go from here at the bottom of this page. --McCormack 17:27, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Question
I added a link to free MBA prerequisite textbooks that can be found on the Internet to the MBA page and someone took it off. I don't know who or why? Thanks! --[[User: Antoniotti] 11:25 3 February 2008
 * Here is the info you requested:
 * 16:24, 1 February 2008 Remi (Talk | contribs | block) blocked Antonwg (Talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 1 year (account creation disabled) ‎ (Spamming links to external sites: spam- if you believe these links are not spam, please bring up discussion, or unblock as nessisary.) (unblock)
 * Retrieved from "http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Special:Blockip
 * Since we always Assume Good Faith and you had already contact with a custodian (see above), perhaps we can find a solution which makes everybody happy. Erkan Yilmaz ( Wikiversity:Chat, wiki blog ) 16:48, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Response
Just because a site is commercial, doesn't mean the free information isn't very valuable. For example, my Statistics Internet Library receives about 20,000 unique visitors a month. The big draw is my free 248 page Internet book Statistics using the Quick Notes learning system. People use it all over the world for free.

I also provide other free statistics learning materials and links to about ten other free Internet books at the Statistics library. Last month I had 40,000 plus unique visitor to my 46 libraries and 1% clicked on a Google ad, bought learning materials through amazon.com, signed up for a free Excel learning trial, or tried a free trial for a tutor. The other 99% used the free stuff. Interesting, the only material on the MBA page is someone trying to sell business books through amazon.com for a referral fee. The only material worth anything on the MBA page was my free internet MBA prerequisites book and the program take the link away.

Thanks Walter Antoniotti 12:22 3 February 2008


 * Hi Walter. Thanks for all your replies. Please read this carefully so that you understand how things work here. Firstly, I rather tend to think that my colleague's 1 year block on your editing was a little hasty and I would like to lift it as soon as possible; on the other hand, I did ask you to stop posting links until there was mutual agreement. Secondly, I've looked at your free text books site and as far as I can see, it is what we call a link farm (click on the link), and in general we would not allow links to link farms. If you were to add the links themselves to Wikiversity - i.e. the references to the 3rd party educational sites which you have so carefully collected over the years - this might be a good move. But please do not add "link farm" pages. If you have any original material of your own which Wikiversity should link to, then please provide a direct URL in reply to this post so that I or my colleagues can inspect it and suggest how we might proceed. I hope this sounds like a positive way forward. I will lift the block as soon as you can assure me that you will not add any further links without express prior agreement with us. --McCormack 17:38, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Fine. If you lift the block, I will send you a link to my accounting book and you can check it out.
 * OK. I will take this as a promise that you will not post any more links (except below this post) until you have our explicit agreement, and I will lift your block in a few minutes. This is a matter of trust. If you break this trust, you will be blocked again. I look forward to reviewing your URL's and hope we can find a good way forward. --McCormack 20:41, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

* Here it is. Note I left off the http:// to fool the spam blocker which is still on. Please type in the URL or Google free stuff accounting and my Accounting Internet library will come up first and all my free accounting books are listed below the library name.

www.businessbookmall.com/Financial%20Accounting%20Book.htm Financial Accounting

antonwg 7:27 PM 4 February 2008

Results of analysis
''Please do not insert comments into this list; add comments beneath. Thank you.''


 * 1) I went to the above URL and reviewed some of the material briefly.
 * 2) The initial page was a little confusing due the glaring colours; ads around the edge somewhat; and little text to advise me on my next choices. Poor design and Google ads shouldn't really be a factor in assessing possible linkspam, but it is very offputting.
 * 3) I dug down to Part I The Accounting Cycle and then Unit 1 Introduction to  Financial Accounting. I didn't like the number of clicks required and each page was similar to the initial one in terms of distracting design and marketing items inserted. The amount of marketing of other items increased, without my having found any useful content yet. By this stage I was feeling like a guinea pig in a marketing experiment.
 * 4) Finally I found a short list of PDF files, which appeared to be the actual content. Each PDF file was only a very few pages in length, consisting of typed pages (1960's, 1970's -style?) scanned into a computer, poorly annotated in a word processor and with a few text-based ads glued into remaining spaces. I found the quality disappointing. If one tries to ignore the poor presentation and ads, and concentrate on the information/educational content only, there might be hope, but not in this context.
 * 5) Conclusions:
 * 6) Does linking to this material make Wikiversity a better place? No. Why not? Probably the main reason is that a WV user is never going to have the patience to actually find their way through to the content, although there are other reasons (e.g. too much marketing).
 * 7) Is this linkspam, in that these links lead to a commercial site? A slightly less obvious call. There are sites worse than this. The poor navigation paths and distracting design are more of a problem and create the impression the site is more spammy than it is (but it is still spammy).
 * 8) What if the PDF files were directly linked instead of the HTML pages - would this make Wikiversity a better place? No. The main reason here is the quality/design of the material, which is really just too low. One can't link WV to just any outside materials - the external link must make WV a better place.
 * 9) The number of hits received by the site is no indication of its value and is irrelevant.
 * 10) Final point: the copyright status of just about everything is totally missing; no author or permissions are visible.
 * 11) Possible way forward:
 * 12) If the present user is the author of these materials, then he could convert the educational content for re-use on Wikiversity (obviously with total removal of advertising). Wikification would be a great improvement in terms of presentation and usability.
 * 13) The present user might then replace his PDF links with links to his material on Wikiversity; but links from Wikiversity in the other direction should not be permitted.
 * --McCormack 07:26, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Addendum. My recommendation on this user's editing status: Walter should be welcome to create real content on Wikiversity, drawing on his long experience in education. He may become a valuable and respected editor. However he should not be permitted to link from Wikiversity to his outside sites. If he attempts to do so, he should be blocked - initially for shorter periods as a warning, but after the 3rd strike an infinite block would be right. Note: other Wikiversitarians may take a different view on this, so if Walter is not in agreement, a consensus may have to be built on the action to take. --McCormack 07:26, 5 February 2008 (UTC)