[GLAM] The right way to add external links?

David and Sumana have passed on info from two outside projects that have added external links to Wikipedia articles and measured the results. I don't doubt the good faith of anybody here, nor the usefulness of the links, but I must note that this type of activity is almost certain to attract the attention of the hardworking (and equally good-faith) anti-spammers at WP:WikiProject SPAM. There's also a question of WP:COI involved. As far as the attention grabbing aspect, please consider the following list from WP:WikiProject Spam of things that the anti-spammers look for: "How to identify spam and spammers 1.User is anonymous (an IP address) 2. User:page and/or User_talk:page are red links 3. No edit summary (other than, perhaps /* External links */) 4. User has made only one edit, which consisted of inserting a link 5. User has made multiple edits to related articles 6. The majority of user's edits are to external links sections" There are 14 more points - but the two projects likely raised at least 3 of these red flags already. Many Wikipedians absolutely hate spammers, and if an outside project raises these red-flags they are likely to get a bad result, just wasting their time. I do not have the complete answer of how to do this right and completely within Wikipedia rules, but I think the question needs to be raised. Another example - just from this week. An anon apparently from the Society of Architectural Historians added a bunch of links to a new feature of their website which gives (gratis) text from their series of expensive books "Buildings of the United States". On my watchlist I saw red flags 1-3 at a glance and my first thought was spam. On closer examination, I saw it had all the attributes of spam, except that I really found the links useful. Others started deleting the links right away, and I had to take some time to defend the links. Clearly there is a problem here, which an uncritical reading of the 2 above projects would fail to address. As I said - I don't completely know how to solve this problem, but my first reaction is that they should try to work with established Wikipedia editors. I think I have to mention some of my recent related Wikipedia activities. I've been working on WP:Glam/smarthistory to insert external links (via the external media template) to Smarthistory's very useful and informative series of videos on art history. As far as I know, only one of these links has been deleted and there have been no complaints to the spam project, but there has been a bit of tension, simply because external links are involved. This is despite the fact that I am a completely independent editor with a long visible history of fighting against COI-editing. In short - a straightforward reading of the 2 outside projects' write-ups is likely to lead to some problems. We should try to thrash out how to avoid these problems. Pete Ekman User:Smallbones