K P wrote: 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(a)scissor.com> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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.

Better off auto reverting anons? Are you insane? Anon's are our most prolific contributors.

On 9/5/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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 06/09/07, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote: $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!