[WikiEN-l] Viral swarming teenage vanity spam

[Mark Gallagher]

G'day Gregory,

> Is every random spammer who hits 'edit' automatically a member of the
> 'community'?

No, you have to put a userbox saying "This user masturbates with his/her 
left hand only" on your userpage before you can consider yourself a 
member of the "community".

> Why would we give automatic suffrage to folks who have not yet
> demonstrated a significant degree of support or even understanding of
> the goals of the project?

Greg, Greg, Greg!  Tut, tut.  You of all people ...

The concept of "suffrage" is not relevant to AfD, because *xfD is not a 
vote*.  Newbies flooding an AfD discussion and needing to be ignored is 
a Big Problem ... if you're one of those few silly billy closers who 
count votes and make poor decisions and let the side down badly.

We let people edit articles with no community standing at all.  Why 
wouldn't we let them add evidence to an AfD discussion?  Newbies, it's 
true, don't usually contribute anything worthwhile to an AfD --- and if 
they don't, I'll ignore them on that particular discussion on that basis 
alone.  If a new user *does* have something of value to say, then I'll 
take their views into account, whether they have 50 article edits or 5000.

<snip/>

> Almost any form of edit count or tenure weighing would leave this a
> clear consensus for delete. Even more importantly, the arguments on
> the delete side are far more compelling in my view: for example,
> Thatcher131's observation that "eon8 gets one hit on Google News and
> one hit on Lexis/Nexis; both are blog-related hits based solely on the
> claims of the website itself". With that in mind, how can you claim
> that the article isn't an attempt to spread an idea as opposed to
> merely documenting already popular idea?

"Even more importantly"?  I'd say the argument of the alleged strength 
of the "delete" case (I haven't read the subpage myself) far outweighs 
any "they don't have suffrage!"-type comments.


<snip/>

-- 
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse