Wikipedia:Village pump (policy): Difference between revisions
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==Policy on ?ref in commercial external links and general Talk Page issues==
I'm not really all that HTML literate, but ?ref in a url appears to me to be an attempt to track links that come in to that external site from Wikipedia, which I assume is against a Wikipedia policy or guideline. However, I didn't see anything about it in [[Wikipedia:External links]], although there is a lot of discussion of similar external link quality issues on [[Wikipedia_talk:External links]]. <small>(posted by [[User:Spalding]] —[[User:Wahoofive|Wahoofive]] ([[User talk:Wahoofive|talk]]))</small>
:CGI scripts can use any variable name, not just "ref", to specify the referring page -- the key is what comes after the "ref=" part. If it says <nowiki>"ref=http://wikipedia.org"</nowiki>, that might be a clue. Conversely, it could be a reference to a particular page on the target site, and therefore necessary (and harmless). Depending on your browser, a CGI script might be able to determine the referring page regardless of the content of the URL (see "HTTP_REFERER" on [http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.php#reserved.variables.globals]). Anyway, I don't see why it's important to conceal it. —[[User:Wahoofive|Wahoofive]] ([[User talk:Wahoofive|talk]]) 22:01, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
Also, in general, is there a way to search just the [[Wikipedia:Project namespace]]? And is anyone else a little disillusioned with the usefulness of Talk pages? They seem to suffer from a lack of traffic, so questions asked there often languish and get no real resolution, which is the main reason I am asking this here instead of on that Talk page. Thanks. [[User:Spalding|Spalding]] 11:40, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
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