On 3/20/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
Nothing against Amazon as a source, it's the "click to buy" bit that causes the problem. And that not least because it is but a small step from that to spammer.com publishing the Betamax release date, as the sole site to do so, and then adding itself as a source for this "vital" information.
I disagree - accurate sourcing is more important than trying to prevent spammers from rules-lawyering. I believe it's impossible to write an airtight set of rules to prevent those editing in bad faith from doing bad things that does not also prevent us from doing many good and worthwhile things. Instead, we must rely on the overall good judgment of Wikipedia editors and admins, who ARE sensible enough in the main to distinguish spam from legitimate sourcing.
Perhaps a sensible step would not be to display such a source as a link, thus not getting spammers the click-throughs they want?
-Matt