User talk:Mistyobrien

Dear Misty, Thank you for creating the article for It Takes All Kinds and for your own article, and any others you have done. We really appreciate having them, and we appreciate your efforts at keeping them up-to-date!

In regards to your question about why I removed the links to individual contributors in the It Takes All Kinds article, there are several reasons, which I will attempt to explain. We try to follow a consistent format at Zine Wiki (check the Manual of Style for any questions); all external links fall under the heading "External Links" and are placed at the bottom of the page for every article. When there are so many external links it becomes a job in itself to regularly check each of the three thousand articles to see if all these links still function, so that Zine Wiki won't merely be a collection of outdated links! As it is, we do try to check the links in all the External Links sections regularly, and the task is much easier if they are all in one place rather than dispersed throughout an article. If you would like to add these links back under the "External Links" section of the article, please feel free to do so. However, please bear in mind that Zine Wiki wasn't created with the purpose of promoting the activities and websites of zine editors and contributors - rather, we are attempting to compile an encyclopedia of zines and zine culture. For his reason, we tend to discourage the placing of too many links which may become outdated, or references to "upcoming issues" that may never be created, or anything that will not stand the test of time. Since Zine Wiki has been around, we have already seen the migration of people from Friendster to My Space to Facebook; these networking sites are ephemeral, but we would like Zine Wiki to stand the test of time.

Thanks for your understanding and I hope I have not discouraged you from contributing more articles in the future, since we do really appreciate your contributions! InvisibleFriend 04:39, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, as you will have noticed when you edited your own articles, there were many out of date links that had originally been inserted in 2006-2007. If you consider that for the last three years people have been visiting links to websites you are no longer affiliated with, and how quickly lives and occupations can change, then you can see why we are actively discouraging the placing of external links ;) InvisibleFriend 04:47, 2 April 2010 (UTC)