[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 5/1/06, Jan Kulveit <jk-wikifound at ks.cz> wrote:
[snip]
> 3. still, there is the risk of RC patrol. solution? spam indirectly e.g.,
> create "useful" and "noncommercial" pages which won't be removed by RC
> patrollers on sight (what about list of useful telephone numbers...
> yet another weather service... seen in practice )

A point here.. this is a common form of spam. For example, at one
point in time someone made mirror of all the linux documentation
project content, slathered it with ads, and replaced links in
Wikipedia.  When I found it months later, their LDP mirroring was out
of date... still no one else had fixed them.

We see people doing the same sort of thing with Wikipedia content.

> 4. link from such lower-profile pages would be less effective because
> lower keyword density & lower inter-Wikipedia page rank
> 5. so... let's do some inter-wiki SEO, create wikilinks so the spammed
> wiki pages get higher interwiki rank, optimize the text for keywords...
>
> results:
> -> spam will be on pages with little editorial review
> -> masked as noncommercial / informative pages
> -> editing with malicious agenda of influencing interlink
> structure

And even when no one is doing this, editors are left paranoid about
people doing it... because the incentives for corrupting out site in
this manner are so great.

It really is miserable.