Those of you whose spam filters work as badly as mine are no doubt familiar with the genre of 419 spam emails. You know the thing, "Dear Respected Sir. I am the Minister for Trade of Nigeria, and I wish to embezzle a BILLION dollars AMERICAN..." One element of these that you occasionally see is "supporting evidence" - the writer tries to give the impression the email is legitimate by linking to an entirely respectable but irrelevant news story which proves the person they're claiming to be actually exists, in the hope that this will make the whole thing seem legit. Last month, I got one purporting to be from Maria das Neves, the former Prime Minister of São Tomé and Principe. What immediately caught my attention, as I went to hit delete, was that it linked not to a newspaper article about her, but the Wikipedia article (which it referred to as "my profile") This was on 15th December. And sure enough, if we look at the December statistics for that page, we find that about four hundred people followed the link over a couple of days: http://stats.grok.se/en/200811/Maria_das_Neves There's a second, smaller, spike at the end of the month; a second run? If we look back there's also one around November 24th, and one yesterday (January 17th). An entirely unexpected application of stats.grok.se, there! On a more relevant content note, it seems most of these "waves" led people to add warnings about it to the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=25816198… http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=26097998… http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=26479184… ...so the "you can edit" idea must be getting fairly apparent even among people who read spam :-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l