The journals that were added in the first instance were only about 20 titles in a number of fields, from a range of publishers including the leading scientific society in the subject, and not unreasonable. I advised the person adding them, reminding him he had to show notability for the journals, and how to go about it.
The ones in the second batch are not anywhere near as important or carefully selected, and the guy needs to be spoken to about the meaning of notability--and I will. Adding things this way makes it harder to support the addition of the important ones. As anyone can edit, I will simply go through myself using the appropriate sources and remove the ones that ought to be removed and justify the others, since I think I have the ability to tell on the basis of the proper sources.
I am, incidentally, unable to figure out the affiliation. He is almost certainly not from a commercial publisher, and tracing yields only a major ISP in Chicago. I have asked him, of course. Adding large amounts of material from an ip address is always a little suspicious--and a little naive. But at this point we have no real reason to assume that is is other than an overenthusiastic plant-science related student or scientist.
This is not the sort of spam that I count as a major problem, frankly. Had he been adding material from primarily a single commercial publisher, I would of course have warned that I would block, and would have blocked upon seeing the continued addition--as I have blocked in a number of such instances. As is I will warn that this could be misinterpreted, and that I will block unless he stops and explains.
I agree with Durova's approach in this, but that's only to be expected since I have formed my own approach quite specifically on the basis of her earlier postings. Basically I want good content, if it is actually good content, and I don't particularly care who adds it as long as they do it right.
David G DGG
On 9/3/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/3/07, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
*Good, the journals now take my being shot down for trying to stop them for spamming Wikipedia as an open invitation to add any academic journals and books to all articles all over Wikipedia. And create as many sock puppet accounts, or use as many IPs as they want to do it. Forget it that I work over these articles to try to make sure that every outside source and link is directly related and important and useful to readers. Forget that we discuss them for weeks on WP:Plants and on the article talk pages. It's clear that it's more important to let these people spam the fuck out of Wikipedia.
KP
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.62.138.21*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.62.138.21
Where were you shot down for trying to stop journals from spamming? Although actual referencing is welcome, spam is still spam. I favor a softer approach with this sort of poster because there's a better possibility that the individual will become a useful contributor, but I also recall a deliberate and rather baldfaced campaign by one university library to boost its site traffic by adding low quality links to Wikipedia articles.
-Durova
I asked them to post and discuss their additions on the article's talk page already.
KP
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