Summary: Timwi asked to have a policy against talkpage spamming. I disagreed. Timwi replied stating "It is annoying to be bothered with impersonal requests that you have nothing to do with."
My message:
Since you had edited the article, you had some connection with the case, so it was not spamming.
Personally I was very happy to get this user's message regarding Lucid dreaming, and I wouldn't like people to stop informing me about articles where I have contributed because of some "spamming" policy.
I wouldn't like if some user will use the talk pages for real spamming (i.e. "buy my product" etc). But I just don't understand how the cases you described can be considered spamming.
I wouldn't object a spamming policy if it could define properly what spamming is.
--Optim
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One thing that happened recently was that a user, I actually forget his name and the issue, decided he would crosspost some concern to all the members of the arbitration committee. He had no case under consideration, just wanted to cover his bases by "informing" all of us. Not too serious but just nonsense.
The policy, if any, need to contain language like "excessive", "irrelevant", etc. to properly characterize the nuisance character of spamming.
Fred
From: Optim optim81@yahoo.co.uk Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 07:34:34 -0800 (PST) To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] User talk page spamming (policy suggestion)
I wouldn't object a spamming policy if it could define properly what spamming is.
Optim wrote:
Summary: Timwi asked to have a policy against talkpage spamming. I disagreed. Timwi replied stating "It is annoying to be bothered with impersonal requests that you have nothing to do with."
My message:
Since you had edited the article, you had some connection with the case, so it was not spamming.
This was also their (the spammer's) argument, but it's a very bad argument. I do *not* automatically have a connection with an article just because I corrected a spelling mistake. As I said, if correcting a spelling mistake automatically means I have some sort of connection to the article and people were allowed to mass-post a request to hundreds of User talk pages of spelling correctors, then I will be heavily discouraged from correcting spelling mistakes again. I cannot believe you want this to happen.
The correct place to draw attention to the Lucid dreaming Wikibook would have been [[Talk:Lucid dreaming]]. Someone who has edited the article *and* is interested in the topic -- and hence, the intended audience -- will have that article on their Watchlist.
Personally I was very happy to get this user's message regarding Lucid dreaming, and I wouldn't like people to stop informing me about articles where I have contributed because of some "spamming" policy.
Again, this is what your Watchlist is for.
Timwi
Optim wrote:
Summary: Timwi asked to have a policy against talkpage spamming. I disagreed. Timwi replied stating "It is annoying to be bothered with impersonal requests that you have nothing to do with."
My message:
Since you had edited the article, you had some connection with the case, so it was not spamming.
Personally I was very happy to get this user's message regarding Lucid dreaming, and I wouldn't like people to stop informing me about articles where I have contributed because of some "spamming" policy.
I wouldn't like if some user will use the talk pages for real spamming (i.e. "buy my product" etc). But I just don't understand how the cases you described can be considered spamming.
I wouldn't object a spamming policy if it could define properly what spamming is.
Soliciting other members for help in developing an article or topic seems fair in a project this size. None of us can otherwise be fully aware of all potentially interesting developments. It's true that many people who helped with the article may only have corrected a misspelling. If that's the case they should just delete the message and go on with life. This kind of "spam" is trivial when compared to what goes on elsewhere.
Ec