On 5/2/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 02/05/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Well, I guess I see your point. I don't think we should let spammers dictate the content of our articles for any amount of time (*), but a month isn't all that long in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah. The "wait" solution is bolstered by its clear effectiveness on [[Brian Peppers]] - after a year, it was obvious "oh, he's not really notable after all." Just some poor bugger with a weird condition.
Actually [[Brian Peppers]] is a good example of the problem with the "wait" solution. There wasn't a consensus to delete the article in the first place, then Jimbo deleted it, then a year later there still wasn't consensus to delete the article (*), but since the status quo had changed, there didn't need to be consensus to delete, but consensus to restore.
Another example of the failure of the "wait" solution is the whole Article Creation Experiment. Last I heard even Jimmy wasn't convinced that it was the right decision, but because it is now the status quo, no one is willing to revert back to the old status quo.
(*) There are still more people searching for info on Brian Peppers than Jimmy Wales [http://www.google.com/trends?q=brian+peppers%2Cjimmy+wales]
(*) And that's the point I'm bringing up to my question about what would we do if spammers decided to add "George Bush" to every single page. I'm not saying I'm going to do it, although I suppose I would support others doing it if it gets them to rethink this spam blacklist policy.
It's an immediate developer response to a distributed spam attack. I still don't see what's intrinsically wrong with having done this in the situation.
If it's just a short-term hack, then we should be coming up with a longer-term solution now. How about turning the ban off a handful of articles, for instance?
Anthony