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

[Steve Summit]

Bogdan Giusca wrote:
> 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.

I'm not sure about "usually".  But those links are a big problem,
because they let the linked-to site ride on the coattails of
Wikipedia's pagerank.  And there's a solution to this problem:
tell google not to look at Wikipedia's outgoing links.
See [[Wikipedia talk:Spam]].  (Specifically, the currently-last
section, "Proposal: Enable rel="nofollow" outside the main
namespace".  But soon enough we'll be discussing turning it off
in the main namespace, as well.)

> 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".

That's because it's extremely easy to confuse verifiability and
notability.  A website reference might be a fine and reliable
verification that the website exists.  But it obviously says
nothing about the site's notability.  What you want to ask for
is not a "reliable reference", but rather an "outside reference
which demonstrates notability".