*Good, the journals now take my being shot down for trying to stop them for spamming Wikipedia as an open invitation to add any academic journals and books to all articles all over Wikipedia. And create as many sock puppet accounts, or use as many IPs as they want to do it. Forget it that I work over these articles to try to make sure that every outside source and link is directly related and important and useful to readers. Forget that we discuss them for weeks on WP:Plants and on the article talk pages. It's clear that it's more important to let these people spam the fuck out of Wikipedia.
KP
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.62.138.21*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.62.138.21
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
On 9/3/07, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
*Good, the journals now take my being shot down for trying to stop them for spamming Wikipedia as an open invitation to add any academic journals and books to all articles all over Wikipedia. And create as many sock puppet accounts, or use as many IPs as they want to do it. Forget it that I work over these articles to try to make sure that every outside source and link is directly related and important and useful to readers. Forget that we discuss them for weeks on WP:Plants and on the article talk pages. It's clear that it's more important to let these people spam the fuck out of Wikipedia.
KP
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.62.138.21*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.62.138.21
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
I asked them to post and discuss their additions on the article's talk page already.
KP
The journals that were added in the first instance were only about 20 titles in a number of fields, from a range of publishers including the leading scientific society in the subject, and not unreasonable. I advised the person adding them, reminding him he had to show notability for the journals, and how to go about it.
The ones in the second batch are not anywhere near as important or carefully selected, and the guy needs to be spoken to about the meaning of notability--and I will. Adding things this way makes it harder to support the addition of the important ones. As anyone can edit, I will simply go through myself using the appropriate sources and remove the ones that ought to be removed and justify the others, since I think I have the ability to tell on the basis of the proper sources.
I am, incidentally, unable to figure out the affiliation. He is almost certainly not from a commercial publisher, and tracing yields only a major ISP in Chicago. I have asked him, of course. Adding large amounts of material from an ip address is always a little suspicious--and a little naive. But at this point we have no real reason to assume that is is other than an overenthusiastic plant-science related student or scientist.
This is not the sort of spam that I count as a major problem, frankly. Had he been adding material from primarily a single commercial publisher, I would of course have warned that I would block, and would have blocked upon seeing the continued addition--as I have blocked in a number of such instances. As is I will warn that this could be misinterpreted, and that I will block unless he stops and explains.
I agree with Durova's approach in this, but that's only to be expected since I have formed my own approach quite specifically on the basis of her earlier postings. Basically I want good content, if it is actually good content, and I don't particularly care who adds it as long as they do it right.
David G DGG
On 9/3/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/3/07, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
*Good, the journals now take my being shot down for trying to stop them for spamming Wikipedia as an open invitation to add any academic journals and books to all articles all over Wikipedia. And create as many sock puppet accounts, or use as many IPs as they want to do it. Forget it that I work over these articles to try to make sure that every outside source and link is directly related and important and useful to readers. Forget that we discuss them for weeks on WP:Plants and on the article talk pages. It's clear that it's more important to let these people spam the fuck out of Wikipedia.
KP
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.62.138.21*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.62.138.21
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
I asked them to post and discuss their additions on the article's talk page already.
KP
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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
There are several hundred major university libraries, each of which has significant collections on probably a few thousand of the topics covered in wikipedia. Wikipedia is not WorldCat. Truly distinctive collections are another matter; I think we might well be able to justify articles on some of the most famous. The strongest library collections o=n a subject might well bean appropriate section of an article or conceivably an article, but this should be done from a subject point of view, with objective consideration of all the libraries, not by the addition by individual libraries of its name wherever possible. That's like a university adding its name to every subject where it offers a degree--that's been tried as well.
Academic journals on a subject are listed in a page usually called something like List of journals in chemistry (etc); they lists include those thought important enough to be in wikipedia, for many of which the articles are still being written. There will be a few cases where a particular journal is worth citing as a whole as a key source of information--there will certainly not be many. Probably not a single one of the ones spammed would be in this exalted group. The distinctive nature of a journal is that it is the individual articles that are relevant to a subject--when they are, the articles will be cited among the references to a subject article--and so they are. If a section is to be prepared of the key journals in a subject, which is certainly acceptable, then they must be selected by objective criteria and not the random addition by commercial spammers.
In this particular case, I am working with the representative of one of the companies to try to identify the spammer. The company was quite startled that the activity was being done, and is instructing its staff to never edit WP anonymously or without declaration of their COI.
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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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