As far as I can tell, journal publishers have been using Wikipedia since 2005 to promote obscure journals, and some notable journals (one of the Trends journals is more notable by far than the others), by using IPs or creating single purpose accounts, generally multiple similarly named, single purpose accounts all on the same day or in a couple of days, to edit Wikipedia articles, mostly along the lines of inserting links to the journals, or wikilinking to articles that contain multiple links to journals, and creating crappy articles on the journals to buffer the internal editing. I've found 3 instances of groups of these groups of sock puppets, leads on others, and I know how to look for more.
It's hard for me to believe that this has ever been good for Wikipedia, being used to send readers to specific journals when there are other more important journals and equally important journals on the topic. And it is hard for me to believe that my making a big deal out of this, and of finding and deleting them is a bad thing.
But again, it's pounce on the established editor to give the spammer and vandal every single benefit of the doubt. I'm getting tired of being told I'm trolling because I have no tolerance for Wikipedia being used in this way, take a chill pill, learn how to do follow the idiotic instructions, drink tea, I'm stupid because I followed the idiot instructions, basically I'm a worthless piece of shit editor compared to the valuable trolls and vandals.
Really, all I do is add carefully selected references to scientific articles--and that's some useless shit.
But I've been told it enough times now to see that I clearly am in the wrong and am in the minority. I wish Elsevier all the luck, because they've been invited to do as much sock puppetry as they want, while Wikipedia administrators call those old crap non-noobie editors trolls and run them off.
Next time someone says that articles need more references, they ought to figure out a way to actually value editors who add references--because as long as editors who add references are of no value to Wikipedia compared to entrenched trolling techniques and groups of sock puppets, it's a lie. Adding good references is not easy, it's not fast, and it requires me to read tons of technival literature to find useful references. In fact, it often takes me hours to add a single reference, because I don't want to add crap. But I should be adding crap, because people would run to my defense rather than telling me I'm trolling.
This SEO article is too late. It's been done for years, and it's obviously worthwhile enough to keep doing it. And nofollow doesn't matter in the least bit, because if it did, Elsevier would not have upped their level of spamming.
KP