Use Wikipedia to promote yourself? Don't Bother

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I was checking out twitter and found this tweet about Wikipedia from Muse's Success.

Added our link to the Blog Fiction article on Wikipedia. Let's hope it doesn't get removed!
The link did not last more than a day before being removed as "spam". Compared to how quickly most links get removed from Wikipedia articles that's practically a record. Wikipedia is meant to be used as a research tool, not a promotion tool. The editors have a lot of rules in place to keep the site from being used for promotion.

Wikipedia has a "bot" (computer controlled editor) that looks through all articles and removes the most obvious self-promotion updates. What criteria does it use? I'll let the XLinkBot article answer that:
XLinkBot is primarily intended to deal with domains which may have a legit use on-wiki, but are frequently misused by new and anonymous users (or have a history of being misused). The bot allows established users to add links, while reverting links added by others. IP's and new users can still edit a page that contains links on the bot's revert list, they won't be reverted unless they add or change a link themselves.
So if you add an external link, and you aren't a frequent editor, it will remove your link by reverting the article. So, if you're a blog fiction writer, don't bother trying to promote yourself on the wikipedia page. All that will happen is that you'll add an external link to your site and seconds later it will be gone.

Even if you somehow manage to defeat the XLinkBot's logic, you'll still have to deal with human editors. If they think that your link was either self-serving or irrelevant, guess what? It's gone.

It's not worth trying to get your link on the site. This blog was around for nearly a year and a half before someone finally decided to add me to the external links portion of the Blog Fiction article. Now that I'm listed I get about 1 hit every other day from it. So getting listed on that page is hardly worth the time. Rather than trying to defeat the bot and other wikipedia editors, might I suggest something more constructive, entrecard, Web Fiction Guide, or Muse's Success.

3 comments:

Chris Clarke said...

Yeah, your right it wasn't worth adding it. Not even one hit came in. The site isn't irrelevant though, evil bot. ^_^ I certainly don't blame them for it being removed though.

Isa said...

...Hmmm this is good stuff for people to consider but it's not *always* true. Okay, for example, one of our serials (Martin Ostrowski's Season in the Red) isn't your traditional sci-fi/fantasy online serial ... it's about a Polish hockey player and a good amount of the story line could be classified as historical fiction. The Wikipedia pages on Polish hockey were always kind of ridiculously thin, so I edited them with a whole bunch of factual information about the rise and fall of Polish hockey, threw in a quick reference to its fictionalize portrayal in SiR, a link to SiR in the reference section and in the external link section.

Within a week this bit of content was copied and pasted into the pages about the Polish Olympic team and national team, along with the links. And while multiple edits have removed most references to the content, the external links still stand on multiple pages and we still get hits from them pretty regularly.

The key is, I think, don't just add your link .... add value to the content, details and research that is relevant to Wikipedia users. Then your links will stick around

Chris said...

I think it's pretty good at deciphering what is relevant and what isn't.

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