Template talk:McGrawHillAnimation

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Template to reference McGraw Hill Animation

Adapted to have an optional 3rd parameter which is the plain text. Codec 08:33, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spam-related Wikipedia Template?

Caution: this template is used throughout wikipedia science articles, but instead links to 'Max Animations' GoogleAds advertising front-end for McGraw-Hill's biology animations (which does indeed eventually link to a relevant animation). What's going on?

1. are these links used with permission of McGraw-Hill? I haven't been able to find them via the McGraw-Hill websites.
2. what is the relationship of MaxAnimations / GoogleAds / McGraw-Hill?
3. why is maxanim so prevelant?
4. why are these almost always just listed in the 'external links' categories, but not referenced in the articles
5. what happened to the original urls that people added, such as: http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/olc/dl/120078/micro50.swf which is now irreversably replaced with: {{McGrawHillAnimation|genetics|microarray}} Jethero^Talk 17:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC) (post-dated signature)

• highered.mcgraw-hill.com (search for links) Jethero^Talk 17:11, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
• www.maxanim.com (search for links) Jethero^Talk 17:11, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm the person who added many (probably most) of the original links to maxanim over a year ago because I found the animations very useful. I'm also the person who created this template on Feb. 10th to provide a standardized appearance to link to the site, and to make it easier for people to identify the source. At that time, the flash animations were displayed directly on maxanim.com, with a prominent logo for McGraw Hill, and no google ads. Since then, the site has changed so that Google ads are now displayed on the maxanim site, with a redirect to McGraw hill available after a mouse click. If you want to delete or reformat the links, I won't stand in your way. Please in the future sign your posts. --Arcadian 00:19, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

To amend my previous comments -- I spot checked several, and (1) all that I checked were originally linked at maxanim.com, not mcgraw-hill.com. Per your last bullet point -- do you have an example of some that were added at mcgraw-hill.com? And (2) taking a closer look, most of the original maxanim.com links were not added by me. --Arcadian 00:34, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Arcadian, first off, thank you very much for taking the initiative for this in the first place! Organizing these useful animations into the science articles has definitely been a service. I must admit my conjectures into what specifically was happening were unfounded because I didn't take enough time to investigate (in fact this posting plus www searching is my investigation so far). The page I was working on was Microarray, and I've put the direct McGraw-Hill link there now. I don't know in what form it was originally submitted, and I can't seem to find another way to 'get' that link other than through MaxAnimations. The insertion of the GoogleAds intermediate is my major concern, and the link-jumping rather than directly linking to McGraw-Hill is also a concern, and the license status of these works may also be a concern. I thought perhaps it was a MaxAnimations scheme to collect traffic (and indirectly it might still be). For all I know, McGraw-Hill and MaxAnimations could be the same thing. I wanted to raise a flag to see if someone knew more. Thank you for replying promptly and civily. I think you addressed point 5. I take and trust from your response that you were acting constructively, and were not propogating advertising intentionally, and I am by no means accusing you of that. In fact, having a template makes it much easier to modify all the links at once. Jethero^Talk 17:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Do you mind the change to the template that I made that indicates the MaxAnim intermediate? Jethero^Talk 17:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Is the GoogleAds intermediate a problem, and if so, what can be done to fix this? Jethero^Talk 17:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template Commented Out

I clicked through to one of these pages and all I saw were ads. This is a very bad user experience, so I have disabled the template by commenting out the code. Thus, anyone with time can go back through the articles and replace this template with a link (or new template) to the animation. Landing Wikipedia users on an interstitial page with ads is totally unacceptable, and surely violates WP:SPAM. Links need to go directly to the resource, or else be deleted. Jehochman (^Talk/_Contrib) 13:41, 5 April 2007 (UTC)