I support you there Fennec. I do not think bots should be used in such a way.
There is another thing bugging me with RamMan drive. Not only is it asking editors to do dual-licensing on his geographic article, but it is first asking that editors do it in a more general way.
Whether we like it or not, the current license IS gfdl. And changing license under which we offer information should be a global decision, not the decision of one person only.
I understand well why RamMan is doing this, but indeed the geographic articles are special and the relationship/reusability with wikitravel is special as well. But I do think RamMan should only make a call for THOSE articles, not for the whole wikipedia articles.
Since I am at it, I regularly have editors asking me to fix my image license (I uploaded them before any tagging existed). While I understand the need to tag images extremely well (I worked on such policy on fr a year ago) it is bugging me that the spam message proposes me either to tag them gfdl, or to tag them fairuse under the USA law.
I do not think we should encourage tagging with a fairuse mention. And I do not think we should encourage a tag for a system existing only in US law.
If there were choices to make, could not be the spam propose gfdl and other free licenses ?
Ant
Hello. I'd just like to draw attention to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambota discussion about whether Ram-Man should be permitted to use rambotto send unsolicited bulk messages (soliciting participation in a"dual-licensing drive") to thousands of user-talk pages. The bot iscurrently blocked indefinitely, pending the resolution of this issue.Ram-Man seems to believe that an implicit community consens exists andapproves of his use of the bot in this fashion. Currently, he claimsto have "over 70% support" of users who responded to the message,although I believe this figure to be skewed by the "users whoresponded" part. I therefore would appreciate it if otherwiseuninterested individuals provide Ram-Man with a more concrete measureof the level of community support which exists regarding this message.Others have expressed concerns regarding the precedent which this setsfor distribution of unsolicited user-talk messages, and suggest that amore concrete policy be formed to deal with this form of userpagespam.
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less.