--- Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/06/07, Cheney Shill halliburton_shill@yahoo.com wrote:
--- David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.cheezhead.com/2007/06/01/troy-smith-wikipedia/
Do we have editors getting vicious on these by
default?
Shouldn't the question be why didn't the editors/admins catch the PR/spam/bomb before it drove 21% of traffic
to a
site that had 40,000 hits? Or are you in charge of Wikipedia advertiser -SEO spin control?
I know, it's shocking. We didn't spot an astroturfing link added to one of one point eight million pages until after the fact? Clearly this is utterly unacceptable, a grave dereliction of duty, and entirely well below the high standards we are entitled to expect. ... More practically, it looks pretty innocuous in context - "fans set up a website [link] urging..." - not the usual house style, but it looks legitimate. If it had been dropped in as an extlink, it'd probably have vanished faster.
If there's no obvious context to believe it's spam, it's rather unlikely we ought to have expected someone to remove it out of hand to begin with.
This is a better response. Deal with the potential extremism and practical issues rather than try to claim it as a non-issue when WP claims to be free of advertising, which, whether intended or not, suggests that WP is not serving as a promotional tool of any kind. That and [[conflict of interest]].
As to extremism, we can't have everyone running around trying to spot every external link that pops up in 1.8 million pages, even though there seem to be a fair number of admins dedicated to just that on user pages. User pages (I'll leave the counting to you) have 0 bombing impact, though they may contribute to [[astroturfing]] with or without external links, which, as a reminder, is the subject. So, maybe we can if we can convince the admins derelict'n "duty" on the user page external links to check external links on main pages, regardless of whether they are explicit (in the external section) or planted elsewhere in the article.
Not that any PR agent would ever be deceptive enough to plant an external link outside the area explicitly set for them. They is ethical folk.
"The real goal was to use the site as a marketing experiment." Despite the admission, from Feb 24 until today, that link is still there: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Troy_Smith&diff=110632488&...
The practical: What could work is a bot that identifies external links inside main articles (but outside the citation/external space) and auto-removes them, or at least lists them so admins can easily identify and check. I don't know why a policy abolishing external links within the content of the article hasn't already been set. Outside of making it a little less user friendly in a few instances, it would mostly eliminate a lot of tedious labor and get rid of "fan" bombing. How do you know the "fans" are not shills working for an athlete's contract agent? Honesty of the PR folk and lawyers, of course! In this case, where they attend or are alumni of the same university they are a "fan" of, they by definition have a [[conflict of interest]] and shouldn't be contributing [[WP:OR]], whether in the form of external links or otherwise.
~~Pro-Lick http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (Wikia supported site since 2006)
--spam may follow--
____________________________________________________________________________________ Got a little couch potato? Check out fun summer activities for kids. http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=oni_on_mail&p=summer+activities+for+ki...