On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew(a)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.