[WikiEN-l] GFDL link spam

[Angela]

On 10/2/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> I noticed that there's a user who is making minor changes, then adds a
> template which links his website, claiming that the article uses
> content from his website

I've emailed Joe Kiff, the user who was adding these links, so he may
be able to explain why he was adding them. All of the templates have
now been removed by Tawker's bot.

I expect the confusion about the need to attribute the wiki came from
the large number of similar templates. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Attribution_templates for a
collection of these. Wikia has similar templates for content from
Wikipedia: http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Wikipedia

The difference in this case is that the template was not legally
necessary since Joe was the author of the original content anyway.
I've added a note about this to Wikia's copyrights policy to make it
clearer for other Wikians wanting to copy their own content to
Wikipedia: http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_copyrights#Attribution_templates

I'm not aware of any Wikipedia policy on using these attribution
templates. In some cases the spam policy may apply but there are
certainly cases where it doesn't and where these need to be used. I
think this needs to be looked into, especially if Wikipedia wants to
benefit from content of other wikis and even from forks from itself.
For example, the PR around Citizendium has had various Wikimedians
saying this is fine since Wikipedia can benefit from any improvements
to the content which that project makes, but that may involve linking
to it with these sorts of templates.

Some way of adding attribution on the history page (which isn't
indexed by Google and therefore useless to spammers) may be a better
solution than adding these to the article. It probably also makes more
sense in terms of the GFDL if the history is all on the history page
and not partly there, partly on the talk page, and partly on the
article itself.

Angela