I can tell you for free (since I went through thousands of them for the WP CD) that an article having a quality flag doesn't reduce the risk of vandalism or spam. It is more attractive than anything else.
And as I'm sure you know when you've finished enjoying your eloquence "wiki-spammers" or "wiki-spam-members" is what the folk at "Project-Wikispam" call themselves. I cannot bring myself to use "spam-member" of someone who is helping the project, hence I use title 1. Removing spam from WP is ever harder work and no one has predicted that "nofollow" will help with making the en better quality or help keep spam away. Phrases involving babies and bathwater come to mind.
As for what's reasonable... a bot with sysop powers may be an issue but plenty of sysops run bots.
btw the suckers were the ones who bought the accounts... ;)
======================== Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates andrew@catesfamily.org.uk wrote:
Okay, okay. As a DMOZ editor I take it on the chin, particularly the technical side there has serious issues.
What, you didn't sell your dmoz account to SEO's during the big rush? Sucker. :)
But in fact that's a red herring. The point is in principle it is relatively easy to maintain a long list via an bot+algo or a harvest or whatever and implement using interwiki and a redirect site. And a nice visible list that wiki-spammers can diff every morning is a compact solution to the zillions of needles in a huge haystack approach.
Oh, our goal is to help spammers track their progress?
I must be confused, because I thought we were trying to make quality articles. .. Remember those article things? The blocks of text that hopefully someone with knowledge about the subject cares about? The sort of folks who might actually have a clue about a link being useful or a worthless advertisement?
As I said, the community can solve the list maintenance when the technology to do one is sorted. A list has to be better than link by link.
So... We can handle writing an encyclopedia on a word by word basis.. but suddenly approving links is too hard?
Do you actually think that it's reasonable to ask admins to continually edit a page which is hundreds of megabytes, and somehow keep up with the thousands of totally valid links added across millions of pages by thousands of non-admins every week? Certainly you can't expect them to use bots to do this, because on enwiki at least it seems that running a bot as with sysop flag is a crime worse than murder.
So far on every other way that you've suggested, Greg, there have been a series of fairly tough to fix problems. I don't think "the answer may well fall out of a tree" is really going to find a way to implement something which has been discussed for at least a year.
What are you talking about? I don't follow you at all here.
Some form of article validation/stabilization feature one of the higher technical priority for the Foundation which directly impacts the quality of our product (unlike passing out pagerank to third party sites). Once implemented it would be utterly trivial to make the links in the approved versions non-nofollow and it wouldn't require overloading adminship with another inappropriate role which the admins can't scale up to perform.