User talk:Wanda Folan

Hello, Wanda Folan! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! XLinkBot (talk) 20:32, 16 August 2009 (UTC) Getting started A tutorial • Our five pillars • Getting mentored How to: edit a page • upload and use images Intuitive guide to Wikipedia Getting help Frequently asked questions • Tips Where to ask questions or make comments Request administrator attention Policies and guidelines Neutral point of view • No original research Verifiability • Reliable sources • Citing sources What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons List of policies • Three-revert rule • Sock puppetry Copyrights • Policy for non-free content • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism • List of guidelines Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The community Build consensus • Resolve disputes Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • No legal threats Community portal • Village pump Signpost • IRC channels • Mailing lists Writing articles Be bold in editing • Develop an article The perfect article • Manual of style Stubs • Categories • Disambiguation Pages needing attention • Peer review Miscellaneous User name • User pages • Talk pages Clean up: General • Spam • Vandalism Join a WikiProject • Translation Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

August 2009

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Amanda Baggs has been reverted.
Your edit here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove unwanted links and spam from Wikipedia. The external link you added or changed is on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. The external links I reverted were matching the following regex rule(s): \bblog(?:cu|fa|harbor|mybrain|post|savy|spot|townhall)?\.com\b (links: http://www.amandabaggscontroversy.blogspot.com/:, http://autisminnb.blogspot.com/2009/07/cnn-cbc-and-amanda-baggs-controversy.html:, http://stephanielynnkeil.blogspot.com/2009/07/amanda-baggs-controversy.html:). If the external link you inserted or changed was to a blog, forum, free web hosting service, or similar site, then please check the information on the external site thoroughly. Note that such sites should probably not be linked to if they contain information that is in violation of the creator's copyright (see Linking to copyrighted works), or they are not written by a recognised, reliable source. Linking to sites that you are involved with is also strongly discouraged (see conflict of interest).
If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 20:32, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Your questions

Hi. To answer your first question, if you feel a comment is an attack you can remove it yourself, as you apparently did. However, suggesting that someone might be a sockpuppet isn't always a personal attack, so in this case it might have been better to just leave the comment be and respond, if you felt it warranted a response. Particularly since you yourself invited anyone to check your IP address, it comes across as a little petty to remove the comment of someone who takes up that suggestion.

To answer your second question, there are two relevant sections of the external link policy that suggest that the links you want to add are not acceptable: Links normally to be avoided and the specific section treating biographies of living persons. #11 of the "links normally to be avoided" includes blogs, unless they are written by a recognized authority - if Stephen Hawking had a physics blog, it might be acceptable to use that as a source or an external link in an article about physics. If I had a physics blog, it would not be an acceptable source or external link because I'm not a recognized authority on physics. Similarly, the blogs you are linking to do not appears to be authored by recognized authorities on the subject of autism in general or Amanda Baggs specifically.

In addition, the BLP section of the external links policy warns against linking to sources of dubious value. An anonymous blog is pretty much the epitome of a dubious source. The Wikipedia community takes the Biography of Living Persons policy very seriously, due to some high profile incidents where dubious defamatory information remained in articles for extensive periods of time. Read the Wikipedia biography controversy article if you would like some background information on why that policy exists.

Feel free to ask me any further questions you may have. I don't edit Wikipedia all that frequently these days, but I do try to check in every few days or so. Natalie (talk) 22:57, 17 August 2009 (UTC)