[WikiEN-l] Spam, advertising, websites and the lack of sources

[Bogdan Giusca]

Wikipedia has a *very* good rank on google (PR 9 on main page), which
means that more and more webmasters want links from it. One way is to
add an external link, however, these are usually spotted by editors.

The alternate way is to create an article about the site itself. Yes,
this is very common: there are thousands of articles on websites on
wikipedia, most of them non-notable, without sources or simply spam.

Then, there is the kind of editors who visit some obscure website and
think "wow! this is a cool site, let's make an article about that
site", disregarding the verifiability policy.

I noticed a trend: on such articles about websites, when I ask for reliable
references, according to our policy, the answer is often: "why would we
need references for this article? the website itself is used as a reference".

As a solution, I propose a system similar to {{prod}}, just for websites,
weblogs, webcomics and various such internet things: a tag which says that
if in 15 days no *reliable* sources are found and added, the article
should be deleted. This is consistent with our Verifiability policy.

The problem with AfD is that even if it is absolutely clear that
the subject of the article has absolutely no reliable sources, (or
even more than three google hits), it may still be "kept" for various
reasons (cliques, not enough votes etc).