Talk:American World University

message: For a previous debate over the deletion of this article see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/American World University.
You shouldn't change external links into an image "to prevent AWU link from factoring into Google pagerank".  Or can I do this to the George W. Bush article? anthony 警告 13:52, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't exactly remove them. I'm assuming you've examined what I actually did. I've since found what I think is better way to deal with this issue, namely the use of links such as link removed because it is blacklisted -- Mzlla 14:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You did remove them when you changed them into an image.  Your new change, utilizing tinyurl, is less harmful, but I still think it's POV to intentionally boost links to one site at the expense of another.  Furthermore, I don't think your change will work the way you intend it to.  Tinyurl returns a 302, and google will follow the 302 and boost the pagerank of the linked-to page, not tinyurl. anthony 警告 20:02, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: http://www.laksamana.net/vnews.cfm?ncat=25&news_id=6551 says "American World University is not accredited by the United States Secretary of Education. It [is] also blacklisted by the Indonesian Education Ministry." However, I don't know how credible the source is. The context of the article is an attack on Vice President Hamzah Haz. (Other things I've encountered while Googling suggest that AWU has been particularly active in Indonesia). Dpbsmith (talk) 19:40, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blacklisted by the Indonesian Education Ministry??? 

message: The second deletion debate for this article may be found at Talk:American World University/delete -- Graham  ☺ | Talk 15:42, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vfd debate 

message: The issue of promotional links is similar to the issue of deleting copyright violations, which we delete even if they are factual and encyclopedic.  We customarily remove link spam from unrelated articles. However, it does seem as if an article that is about AWU should have an easily followed reference to AWU's website.
The original reason for deleting this article was that it was advertising, which is considered a valid reason for deletion. Many of us believe that the purpose of the article's creation was to promote AWU. 
The issue is not with relevant external links placed by editors of pages in general. The issue relates to a specific technical issue. A factor in the Google weighting of sites, originally one of the most important factors, was links from other sites, which were in effect assumed to be independent endorsements of the value of the site. The existence of open Wikis allows the system to be gamed, by allowing people to directly place links to their own sites on Wikis. Because Wikipedia is relatively important, such links have relatively great weight. 
This is a growing issue and the systematic exploitation of Wikis in this way is already occurring: see Wikis the next frontier for spammers and Nigritude Ultramarine and the Wiki Sandbox Effect. 
I feel very strongly that we need to find ways to make it unattractive to use Wikipedia in this way. I really don't see how there can be any serious objection to the use of a tinyurl link, since it does not change the appearance or the functionality of the page. The page is exactly as useful to our readers as it was before. I personally have no objection to the substitution of tinyurl links anywhere, in the George W. Bush article or the John F. Kerry article or anywhere. To show the sincerity of this remark, I've replaced the direct link to my personal web page at User:Dpbsmith with a tinyurl substitute. 
Refining this, yes, the page text should contain HTML comments that are a) not quite valid URLs but b) allow the original URL to be recovered in the event of a tinyurl failure, although my guess is that the longevity of tinyurl is likely to be quite comparable to the longevity of any particular link. I would suggest considering tinyurl as a stopgap and seeing whether the developers would consider engineering a similar feature as part of MediaWiki, running on our WikiMedia servers under WikiMedia control. 
I ask that anthony, User:L33tminion, and Dr Zen as a personal courtesy to me, let me have my way with this particular edit on this particular page. Building on User:L33tminion's constructive start, I made significant improvements that resulted in the page being kept, which I believe was one of your goals. I have no intention of using tinyurl links on a large scale, only in rare cases comparable to this one.
(Does anyone have any better ideas on how we can serve our readership without promoting AWU's self-serving goals?)
There are no rules about such things, but this would be a act of kindness which I would appreciate. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:35, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: This would only work if you force the forks to link through Wikipedia as well, which seems like something Google wouldn't appreciate.  In any case, I think it's better than selectively removing some links and not others based on whether or not we approve morally of those links.  On the other hand, I think the best solution is to just remove links which serve no purpose other than advertising.  In the case of AWU, we're increasing the liklihood of someone finding the home page for American World University by searching for "American World University".  So what? anthony 警告 16:32, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: I agree with anthony. If we're going to have an article on this, we should link to it. I express no opinion on the propriety of using a tinyurl, however. Johnleemk | Talk 11:47, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: I didn't exactly remove them. I'm assuming you've examined what I actually did. I've since found what I think is better way to deal with this issue, namely the use of tinyurl links in place of this AWU's website. Try both. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:42, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You did remove them when you changed them into an image.  Your new change, utilizing tinyurl, is less harmful, but I still think it's POV to intentionally boost links to one site at the expense of another.  Furthermore, I don't think your change will work the way you intend it to.  Tinyurl returns a 302, and google will follow the 302 and boost the pagerank of the linked-to page, not tinyurl. anthony 警告 20:02, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Handling promotional links

message: http://www.laksamana.net/vnews.cfm?ncat=25&news_id=6551 says "American World University is not accredited by the United States Secretary of Education. It [is] also blacklisted by the Indonesian Education Ministry." However, I don't know how credible the source is. The context of the article is an attack on Vice President Hamzah Haz. (Other things I've encountered while Googling suggest that AWU has been particularly active in Indonesia). Dpbsmith (talk) 19:40, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blacklisted by the Indonesian Education Ministry??? 

message: The second deletion debate for this article may be found at Talk:American World University/delete -- Graham  ☺ | Talk 15:42, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vfd debate 

message: The issue of promotional links is similar to the issue of deleting copyright violations, which we delete even if they are factual and encyclopedic.  We customarily remove link spam from unrelated articles. However, it does seem as if an article that is about AWU should have an easily followed reference to AWU's website.
The original reason for deleting this article was that it was advertising, which is considered a valid reason for deletion. Many of us believe that the purpose of the article's creation was to promote AWU. 
The issue is not with relevant external links placed by editors of pages in general. The issue relates to a specific technical issue. A factor in the Google weighting of sites, originally one of the most important factors, was links from other sites, which were in effect assumed to be independent endorsements of the value of the site. The existence of open Wikis allows the system to be gamed, by allowing people to directly place links to their own sites on Wikis. Because Wikipedia is relatively important, such links have relatively great weight. 
This is a growing issue and the systematic exploitation of Wikis in this way is already occurring: see Wikis the next frontier for spammers and Nigritude Ultramarine and the Wiki Sandbox Effect. 
I feel very strongly that we need to find ways to make it unattractive to use Wikipedia in this way. I really don't see how there can be any serious objection to the use of a tinyurl link, since it does not change the appearance or the functionality of the page. The page is exactly as useful to our readers as it was before. I personally have no objection to the substitution of tinyurl links anywhere, in the George W. Bush article or the John F. Kerry article or anywhere. To show the sincerity of this remark, I've replaced the direct link to my personal web page at User:Dpbsmith with a tinyurl substitute. 
Refining this, yes, the page text should contain HTML comments that are a) not quite valid URLs but b) allow the original URL to be recovered in the event of a tinyurl failure, although my guess is that the longevity of tinyurl is likely to be quite comparable to the longevity of any particular link. I would suggest considering tinyurl as a stopgap and seeing whether the developers would consider engineering a similar feature as part of MediaWiki, running on our WikiMedia servers under WikiMedia control. 
I ask that anthony, User:L33tminion, and Dr Zen as a personal courtesy to me, let me have my way with this particular edit on this particular page. Building on User:L33tminion's constructive start, I made significant improvements that resulted in the page being kept, which I believe was one of your goals. I have no intention of using tinyurl links on a large scale, only in rare cases comparable to this one.
(Does anyone have any better ideas on how we can serve our readership without promoting AWU's self-serving goals?)
There are no rules about such things, but this would be a act of kindness which I would appreciate. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:35, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: This would only work if you force the forks to link through Wikipedia as well, which seems like something Google wouldn't appreciate.  In any case, I think it's better than selectively removing some links and not others based on whether or not we approve morally of those links.  On the other hand, I think the best solution is to just remove links which serve no purpose other than advertising.  In the case of AWU, we're increasing the liklihood of someone finding the home page for American World University by searching for "American World University".  So what? anthony 警告 16:32, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: I agree with anthony. If we're going to have an article on this, we should link to it. I express no opinion on the propriety of using a tinyurl, however. Johnleemk | Talk 11:47, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Handling promotional links

message: Very sorry, but I can't confirm the BBB report so I'm snipping that item for now.
I went to http://www.labbb.org/, the cited office, and tried (separate) searches on
Name contains American World University,
on Website contains awu,
and on "type of business" = colleges and university,
and none of them turned up any hits (except the last, which came up with Cal State University Parking Services).
(See below for update)
I find the email convincing and personally think it is likely authentic, but we need something better than that. Dpbsmith (talk) 12:30, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Better Business Bureau reports 

message: Actually, I've found this:
http://www.bbbmississippi.org/commonreport.html?compid=6001227
This seems to me to be inconsistent with the material inserted. It says "Based on BBB files, this company has a satisfactory record with the Bureau. Any complaints processed by the Bureau in its three-year reporting period have been resolved. The number and type of complaints are not unusual for a company in this industry." It says the Mississippi BBB received only one complaint in three years and that "Company made every reasonable effort to resolve." Dpbsmith (talk) 13:01, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Update

message: Someone keeps trying to add links that I don't see the relevance to AWU. Please review wp:EL and wp:NOTLINK. TallMagic (talk) 18:46, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  External Links 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified  on American World University. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://awu.edu/
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20041101013820/http://www.web-hed.com:80/wauc/universities.htm to http://www.web-hed.com/wauc/universities.htm
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070928174107/http://www.bbbmississippi.org/commonreport.html?compid=6001227 to http://www.bbbmississippi.org/commonreport.html?compid=6001227
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 14:09, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: American World University (AWU) is an accredited online university which is recognized by Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC), which is a private, non-profit organization that accredits distance education institutions in the United States. It is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a legitimate accrediting agency and is responsible for evaluating and accrediting institutions that offer distance education programs.
DEAC is a recognized accrediting agency in the United States that accredits distance education institutions. AWU has been accredited by DEAC since 2001, which means that DEAC has evaluated AWU's educational programs, faculty, student services, and other aspects of its operations and determined that they meet certain standards of quality.
DEAC accreditation is a voluntary process that requires institutions to meet certain standards of quality in their educational programs, faculty, student services, and other aspects of their operations. Institutions that are accredited by DEAC have undergone a rigorous evaluation process and have demonstrated their commitment to providing a quality education to their students.
DEAC accreditation is important because it can help students identify legitimate educational institutions that meet certain standards of quality. Accreditation can also be important for students who are seeking financial aid, as many forms of financial aid require attendance at an accredited institution.
It's important to note that DEAC accreditation is not the same as regional accreditation, which is typically considered the gold standard of accreditation in the United States. However, DEAC is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a legitimate accrediting agency and can provide a valuable form of accreditation for distance education institutions.
DEAC accreditation is important because it indicates that an institution is committed to providing a quality education to its students and that its programs are recognized by employers and other academic institutions. Accreditation can also be important for students who are seeking financial aid, as many forms of financial aid require attendance at an accredited institution.
It's important to note that while DEAC accreditation is a legitimate form of accreditation, it's not the same as regional accreditation, which is typically considered the gold standard of accreditation in the United States. However, DEAC is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as an accrediting agency and is a legitimate option for distance education institutions. Qqlam1972 (talk) 04:07, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Not done: It isn't clear what changes you want to be made. Are you looking for this to be added somewhere? There also appear to be multiple sections you have provided which are almost the same as each other - was this intended? Tollens (talk) 05:51, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 13 April 2023