On 9/5/07, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/3/07, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
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
Citation? I'm curious about the campaign you mention... Adding links to relevant online library collections in appropriate articles is something I've advocated for in the past; certainly having links to good resources (which libraries often provide) is good for Wikipedia. And while I do appreciate KP's de-spamming efforts, the "further reading" section has a place.... providing a list of academic journals on a topic as broad as "food safety" doesn't seem unreasonable. The contributor's actions seemed confused, but not necessarily like true spam. A new contributor wouldn't really know about the discussions that happen elsewhere, would they?
-- phoebe
Except that the contributor was only listing publications they represented, and in one case listed some half dozen, but omitted the major publication in the field, because it was published by a different publisher--is this a service to our readers to mislead them? I asked every one of them to discuss it on the talk page with editors of the article--this would have resulted in the leading publications being listed from all publishers, not just the current spammers.
That's why spam is bad, it gives weight to things that don't necessarily have it.
KP