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.
1) If we're going to blindly attach "nofollow" to all the external links, why are we allowing Wikia links to be propped up artificially? Are we in the business of conflict of interest now?
2) Myspace blogs were recently added to the spam blacklist by Raul per request of Jimbo, although no one else seems to know why, how, or per what rationale. I won't pretend to know what Jimbo's been up to past not having edited Wikipedia since the is-it-or-is-it-not-a decree, but perhaps some more explanation on this would be worthwhile? Seems like we're blocking a shitload of otherwise worthwhile primary source material for many of our articles for the sake of...well...nothing. Meanwhile, a blog ''not'' hosted on MySpace is still a-okay, which is patently absurd on its face. I'm wondering what the thought process was on this, since no one else seems to want to chime in.
3) Did you folks know we have a bot that reverts links that are arbitrarily considered spam? I didn't until today. [[User:Shadowbot1]]. I convinced him to post the blacklist where we could see it, and while some (most?) are useful, others are pretty screwy, and I'm not sure this is helpful in the long run.
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?
-Jeff