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
On 9/3/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
It's clear that it's more important to let these people spam the fuck out of Wikipedia.
KP: Perhaps it's hard to see it at the coal face, but your work in trying to stop spamming like this is appreciated and important. Don't let it get you down.
-Matt
K P 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.
I too appreciate anti-spam work and encourage you not to get worn down. Thanks for your efforts!
Let me tell you about meeting a Wikipedia spammer in person.
Last year I was doing a little work for a 25-person company. When I went to look something up on Wikipedia from one of their computers, I saw the new messages box, and clicked through to an IP userpage with a fresh new spam warning. When I looked at the contribution log, the warning was entirely justified! Somebody in the company had added links to perhaps a dozen Wikipedia articles, links that I saw as clearly promotional.
Naturally, I almost blew a gasket. I tried to play it cool, but I was visibly angry when I went office to office trying to find the culprit. When I eventually collared the guy -- let's call him John -- it was clear that he was clueless. John was a low-level marketing employee who was looking something up on Wikipedia. He saw some articles where they company's published material related. And heck, there were only three external links: plenty of room for more. So John just popped his company's links in.
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.
William
And there's another group that I find the most difficult--a well meaning but unsophisticated student who will stat adding links to all the journals in his subject, or all the textbooks, or everything mentioned in his pharmacology book. They can do a great deal of damage very fast, they get offended if accused of spamming because they see it as adding good information, and they are after all in good faith and could become very valuable contributors. I have no tricks to offer here, except pointing out workgroups to join and articles to work on.
For organizations there is now a very powerful tool we did not have a few months ago: the amount of publicity that can ensue. They are very well aware of the wide readership of slashdot. Further, if there is a public controversy that reaches Reliable Sources about what a organization is doing, a paragraph can be added to that article. I'd never threaten that--editing has to be kept free of such feelings, but i wouldn't hesitate to write such a paragraph if it were a notable instance but where I had not been involved.
On 9/3/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
K P 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.
I too appreciate anti-spam work and encourage you not to get worn down. Thanks for your efforts!
Let me tell you about meeting a Wikipedia spammer in person.
Last year I was doing a little work for a 25-person company. When I went to look something up on Wikipedia from one of their computers, I saw the new messages box, and clicked through to an IP userpage with a fresh new spam warning. When I looked at the contribution log, the warning was entirely justified! Somebody in the company had added links to perhaps a dozen Wikipedia articles, links that I saw as clearly promotional.
Naturally, I almost blew a gasket. I tried to play it cool, but I was visibly angry when I went office to office trying to find the culprit. When I eventually collared the guy -- let's call him John -- it was clear that he was clueless. John was a low-level marketing employee who was looking something up on Wikipedia. He saw some articles where they company's published material related. And heck, there were only three external links: plenty of room for more. So John just popped his company's links in.
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.
William
-- William Pietri william@scissor.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri
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On 9/3/07, William Pietri william@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
On 05/09/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/3/07, William Pietri william@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.
There's already a captcha when anons try to add a new external link. Presumably some "are you QUITE sure?" text can be added in an appropriate MediaWiki: message.
- d.
On 9/5/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/3/07, William Pietri william@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
On 9/6/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
Better off auto reverting anons? Are you insane? Anon's are our most prolific contributors.
Not when all they're doing is adding an external link.
Steve
On 9/5/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/5/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/3/07, William Pietri william@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
The publisher SEOs aren't all anons, anyhow. In fact most of the ones I've uncovered aren't anons.
KP
On 9/5/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/5/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
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
Yeah, that idea was way over the top.
Suppose I try to replace a [citation needed] tag with the URL of an online news article, like I'd done so many times before, and I get a big angry salad riot act boilerplate warning cleverly tailored to insult both my intelligence and my motives...[1]
On the other hand this negative energy could be harnessed and applied to the Special:Upload page which yields a greater proportion of "stuff we're better off without".
[1] Seriously though, what would/could I do about something like that besides complain about it right here on the mailing list...
—C.W.
On 06/09/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand this negative energy could be harnessed and applied to the Special:Upload page which yields a greater proportion of "stuff we're better off without".
$5 deposit for upload, refundable when your upload is assessed as validly free content. That'll nip the excess fair use problem in the bud!
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
On 06/09/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand this negative energy could be harnessed and applied to the Special:Upload page which yields a greater proportion of "stuff we're better off without".
$5 deposit for upload, refundable when your upload is assessed as validly free content. That'll nip the excess fair use problem in the bud!
Sounds like some kind of a reverse class-action process. Rather than refunding the $5, it would be more in the spirit of free knowledge to put that money in a "fair-use defence fund" to beat back spurious allegations of copyvio.
Ec
David Gerard wrote:
On 06/09/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand this negative energy could be harnessed and applied to the Special:Upload page which yields a greater proportion of "stuff we're better off without".
$5 deposit for upload, refundable when your upload is assessed as validly free content. That'll nip the excess fair use problem in the bud!
Sounds like some kind of a reverse class-action process. Rather than refunding the $5, it would be more in the spirit of free knowledge to put that money in a "fair-use defence fund" to beat back spurious allegations of copyvio. Let the fair-use claimants put their money where their mouths are.
Ec