[WikiEN-l] Viral swarming teenage vanity spam

[Lord Voldemort]

On 7/5/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is every random spammer who hits 'edit' automatically a member of the
> 'community'?
>
> Why would we give automatic suffrage to folks who have not yet
> demonstrated a significant degree of support or even understanding of
> the goals of the project?
>
> Why do I ask?
> Going down the VFD page it would appear that a large number, if not a
> majority, of the 'keep' voters have less than 50 article edits. Some
> have no article edits at all.
>
> Almost any form of edit count or tenure weighing would leave this a
> clear consensus for delete. Even more importantly, the arguments on
> the delete side are far more compelling in my view: for example,
> Thatcher131's observation that "eon8 gets one hit on Google News and
> one hit on Lexis/Nexis; both are blog-related hits based solely on the
> claims of the website itself". With that in mind, how can you claim
> that the article isn't an attempt to spread an idea as opposed to
> merely documenting already popular idea?
>
> This is not the clear cut case of ignoring consensus that you make it out to be.

I just think we need to select admins who we can trust to make the
decision to take these types of editors into less account than others.
 Admins are chosen because the community trusts them to be able to
determine consensus (along with a few other minor things ;-)).  So we
need to make sure the quality of admins remains high.  We need admins
that are willing to do a little research into the "voters".  And look
at the discusison, not just the numbers on either side of the
keep/delete line.  Admins that base things on numbers alone should be
censured (or some other analogous procedure).  --LV