Hi,

Without getting into the whole issue of attack sites, I want to put in a request not to encumber link removal.

I don't know the current statistics, but earlier this year, we had just over 3 million external links (including references). I estimate at least 1 million were inappropriate -- the majority added in good faith but with poor judgement by editors unaware of what [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:EL]] say. There were also hundreds of thousands of hard-core spam links.

My estimates are based on making 1000s of link deletions and probably reviewing even more 1000s in connection with WikiProject Spam.

If you look at this page of link additions made within just 24 hours in January, you'll see the volume of links we receive daily: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Veinor/Link_count/January_18,_2007

It's unclear whether we're presently slowly losing ground to spam or slowly gaining ground (the nofollow decision helped some). Whichever it is, I'd hate to suddenly start tilting the playing field in the wrong direction.

User:A. B. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:A._B. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:A._B. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/A._B.