On 9/5/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/3/07, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
You and I know that's the road to hell, of
course. Meaning well is no
excuse. But when dealing with them, it does keep my blood pressure lower
to imagine that most of Wikipedia's spammers are like that: clueless but
well-intentioned.
Solution: when mediawiki detects that most of a change consists of
adding an external link, it reads them the riot act. It takes them to
another page confirming that, yes, they really really really think
it's in Wikipedia's best interests to be adding this external link.
On the whole, we'd be better off just automatically reverting urls
submitted by anons.
Steve
Better off auto reverting anons? Are you insane? Anon's are our most
prolific contributors. Much vandalism comes from them,
to be sure, but as of
a couple years ago, the *majority* of our actual content was initially
submitted by anonymous and new users. I don't have updated numbers, but I'd
imagine it's still quite high. Throwing out and discouraging anonymous
contributors because undesireable content comes from other anons as well is
the height of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and incredibly
elitist.
--
-Brock