[WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Horologium]

On 5/19/2012 8:00 AM, Andrew Grey wrote:
>> I just went through 19 random pages (9 of them didn't have any ELs, so I
>> didn't count them, and I found three articles in which the last EL was not a
>> useful link. One of them was a spam link to a (non-WMF) wikiproject, one was
> Did you test first links, incidentally? My anecdotal experience has
> been that someone adding a spammy link is more likely to add it to the
> top of the list than someone adding a non-spammy one would be...
>
Actually, I did look at all of the links in each article, and it was 
coincidental that in each case, the only low-utility links were the 
last. None of the 19 random articles I checked had more than four 
external links (only one of those), and it looked like only one was a 
spam-like link, which was added apparently in good-faith by an 
infrequent contributor who also contributes to the other project. I have 
seen pages with endless external links, and in those, there seems to be 
an equal number of spam links at the top and the bottom of the list. 
Usually the links in the middle are the best, but of course, YMMV.