[Foundation-l] Corporate vanity policy enforcement

[Jeffrey V. Merkey]

Brad,

One very easy solution to all of this is to segregate the live edited 
wikipedia site from the published site scraped by the
search engines.

In other words, setup the community server "anyone can edit" at 
something like draften.wikipedia.org and publish reviewed
dumps of the community server to a read only external server for 
scraping like I am doing at Wikigadugi. I have ZERO
vandalism problems , ZERO content dispute problems, and ZERO vanity page 
problems and I host the entire English
wikipedia as well as several other languages.

Very simple solution. People won't waste the time creating vanity pages 
when they know they may not get published in the
"official" external official site.

Jeff

Brad Patrick wrote:

>Brad Patrick wrote:
>  
>
>>Dear Community:
>>
>>The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on 
>>Wikipedia is overwhelming.  At the office, we are receiving dozens of 
>>phone calls *per week* about company, organization, and marketing 
>>edits which are reverted, causing the non-notable, but 
>>self-aggrandizing authors, to scream bloody murder.  This is as it 
>>should be.  However, I am issuing a call to arms to the community to 
>>act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate 
>>self-editing and vanity page creation.  This is simply out of hand, 
>>and we need your help.
>>
>>We are the #14 website in the world.  We are a big target.  If we are 
>>to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense 
>>cannot be tolerated.  This means the administrators and new page 
>>patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation 
>>which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight.  There should be no 
>>question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and 
>>has exactly 2 Google hits - both their Myspace page - they get nuked.  
>>Ban users who promulgate such garbage for a significant period of 
>>time.  They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate 
>>their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time 
>>they incur.
>>
>>Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go.  I am 
>>here to tell you it is not enough.  We are losing the battle for 
>>encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia 
>>for their own memes.  This scourge is a serious waste of time and 
>>energy.  We must put a stop to this now.
>>Thank you for your help.
>>
>>-Brad Patrick
>>User:BradPatrick
>>Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
>>    
>>
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