On 5/28/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Heh, ok, but by "what's the lesson", I mean, in what way, if any, should Wikipedia consider changing its policies considering there is now such a big payoff for people adding vanity information.
Sorry I'm replying to this weeks-old message, but ... "big payoff"? How is the payoff any bigger than before? I think you're forgetting that if Google gets faster at indexing new articles, it also gets faster at removing articles from its index as they get deleted from Wikipedia.
Let's presume that any piece of vandalism gets cleaned within 12 hours. Let's presume that "before" Google indexed a given page every month, and now it's every day. My statistics isn't very good, but I guess that means that the average time your vandalism appears on google doesn't change, but the variance is much lower now. Now, you had a 50% chance of being on Google for 24 hours. Before, you probably had a 1 in 60 chance of being on there for a month.
I have now idea how much spammers take stuff like this into account though.
Steve