Tony wrote:
I can't see the point. Look at the losses and gains:
Gain: prevents a *tiny* amount of spamming (tiny, because the average lifespan of linkspam on the 'pedia is maybe 2 minutes - our editors watch this stuff like hawks.
People complain to me all the time that they spend too long reverting spam. I've written 3 anti-spam features in the last 6 months or so, in response to popular demand. Someone in #mediawiki two days ago asked me to help him set up a spam blacklist on his own MediaWiki installation, because his wiki had been spammed to the point where he was left with no choice but to take it offline.
Loss:
(1) extra complication to the code. (Small and slim is *always* best.)
It's just a few extra characters.
(2) even more crud to mess up the HTML output. If we keep on adding "features" in this manner, a page of MediaWiki output HTML is going to be harder to read and consume more bandwidth than a page produced by Frontpage.
XHTML isn't meant to be readable, readability has never been a design goal for the parser. We can afford the extra bandwidth.
To me, that says that, on balance, the best option is fairly clearly to do nothing.
Small is beautiful. Simple is best.
I think it would be better if we joined with the major blog software developers and the three biggest search engines in this effort to improve index quality and reduce spam. It's not as big an issue for Wikipedia as it is for the hundreds of smaller wikis which use our software, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be implemented.
-- Tim Starling