Re: [WikiEN-l] GFDL link spam

On 10/2/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste(a)dapyx.com> wrote: 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