Thanks Guy!
People forget that the rules developed over thousands (if not millions) of man hours are not obvious to new contributors.
The trick which is largely missed is to allow significant contributions without alienating the contributors by embroiling them in detailed technical arguments.
On 6 Nov 2007, at 21:40, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:06:49 -0500, Cary Bass cbass@wikimedia.org wrote:
In hindsight (and having spoken to the user on the phone) he has a limited command of English. A short duration block while some explaining on the talk page would have been the proper response. It doesn't mean that the user is worth having on Wikipedia--but I do know of several individuals who started out as spammers and turned into good contributors.
Stephen B. Streater being an example - but he wasn't a *spammer* as such, just a reasonably notable individual writing about his own endeavours.
I would not like to speculate on the ratio of genuine spammers to well-intentioned people with poor command of English. I suspect that those who add only links are more likely to be evil spammers.
Guy (JzG)
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
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