Cheney Shill wrote:
--- Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
Believe it or not, you have bacteria on your skin whose survival depends upon you. Some of them are harmful, some helpful, and some serve no purpose at all. If you want to burn them all off with a blow torch, go right ahead.
So, patrolling for obvious and insignificant vandalism inserted into articles like "Charlotte is bonkers!!!" or "Bill Gates sucks!!!" is, like, way more important? That doesn't even qualify as serving no purpose?
I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, but if you're saying that the removal of a commercial link from the "external links" section of an article related to that product is always more important than the removal of "obvious vandalism" like the examples you present I'd have to dispute that. When J. Random Reader visits an article with obvious vandalism, he snorts and thinks "man, Wikipedia sucks." When he visits an article with a spam link, he will likely not even notice it. So IMO it's more important to get rid of the obvious vandalism first. Fortunately the very obviousness that makes it important also makes it easier to deal with.
Or are you admitting that Wikipedia or at least you personally not only disregard embedded advertisments and shilling but find it helpful? Or just less worthwhile than spending large amounts of time on immeasurables like morale and patrolling search-engine-ignored user pages for external links?
In some cases a link to a commercial website _can_ be helpful, IMO. A number of years back I recall using a commercial chemical supply business' website as references for a bunch of articles on chemicals they sold, since they had a collection of MSDS pages online giving various properties of the chemicals in question.
I think the point that Charlotte is trying to make is not that this one particular link is necessarily a good thing (I haven't looked at it myself so I don't have an opinion on it myself) but rather that an unmoderated reaction of "OMG commercial link on Wikipedia die die die!" is going to throw out some pieces of the baby along with the bathwater.