Jeff Raymond wrote:
I've brought this up at the talk page at [[Wikipedia:External links]] and ended up with more contempt than actual answers, so maybe some people in the know will be nice enough to actually clear some things up for us.
It looks like yet another POV zoo. Sometimes the swath of destruction from these rule-mongers is beyond belief. I can no longer be bothered with these rules debates, because unlike the rule-mongers I find there are more interesting things to do. Left to their own devices they can invent whatever silly rule they want by sheer brute force. No stretch of the imagination will conclude that any type of consensus has been reached. Most of these rules are unlikely to affect what I do, but that does not prevent me from being troubled by the fundamental disrespect of fairness that these rule-mongers practise.
I'm starting to think that our focus on spam is becoming a problem rather than a benefit to the project. How much collateral damage are we willing to accept in the project to take care of this "problem" that people think is massive? One out of every 10? 5% poor hits? Do we have some sort of measurement we're using here?
No problem like spam can ever be eradicated completely. When some people become obsessed with removing any link that might seem to be promoting a product, no matter how relevant to the article things have probably gone too far. I am very much aware of the dangers of excess advertising, and how easy it would be to be overrun by it, but once it has gone below a certain threshhold maybe there are other priorities.
Ec