On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:58:32 -0700, "Luna" lunasantin@gmail.com said:
Any link blacklist will involve a certain amount of arguing and bureaucracy -- the meta blacklist affects all languages and all projects (the stakes are higher), and the relationship between people making requests and people maintaining the list is different. It's my understanding is that local blacklists allow us to manage things "in house" and hopefully avoid a lot of the policy arguments from meta -- the restrictive policy of one wiki is not a huge concern, anymore, if it doesn't directly affect the other wikis, for example.
If we keep things local, we keep things simple for the "end user" (editor), which I guess is the way to go. Treating meta as a "last resort" is probably a bit much, as you've said, but I don't know that we gain anything by using the central blacklist all that often.
How often do spammers go after multiple wikis? Multiple languages? How quickly will we notice, if they do? Those questions seem important to me, in terms of deciding how often to use/consider the meta blacklist. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of statistics on the first two. As far as "how quickly will we notice?" I'm guessing we're counting on people to notice these things (people heavily active in multiple projects and languages, especially), which probably means not very quickly. It might be helpful to have some software try and keep track of cross-wiki spamming -- beyond my ability, but I bet it'd be helpful, here.
At least a couple of sites I've blocked have spammed 20+ wiki. There are some folk on en wp spam project that are very hot on checking/chasing cross wiki spammers. I followed one across es, it & fr wikis a week ago. There are some great tools out there for cross wiki contributions (http://tools.wikimedia.de/~luxo/contributions/contributions.php?lang=en) and links (eagle's one - can't find the link instantly).
It certainly happens and a few folk are very dedicated to keeping foundation sites as clean as possible. I know it isn't a main stream aspect of the project but keeping porn, gambling, finance links out of pages seems a worthwhile activity and worth finding a "good" or even "best" way to deal with it.
Cheers Herby