[WikiEN-l] a few new wrinkles in the external link issue

[Jeff Raymond]

I've brought this up at the talk page at [[Wikipedia:External links]] 
and ended up with more contempt than actual answers, so maybe some 
people in the know will be nice enough to actually clear some things up 
for us.

1) If we're going to blindly attach "nofollow" to all the external 
links, why are we allowing Wikia links to be propped up artificially? 
Are we in the business of conflict of interest now?

2) Myspace blogs were recently added to the spam blacklist by Raul per 
request of Jimbo, although no one else seems to know why, how, or per 
what rationale.  I won't pretend to know what Jimbo's been up to past 
not having edited Wikipedia since the is-it-or-is-it-not-a decree, but 
perhaps some more explanation on this would be worthwhile?  Seems like 
we're blocking a shitload of otherwise worthwhile primary source 
material for many of our articles for the sake of...well...nothing. 
Meanwhile, a blog ''not'' hosted on MySpace is still a-okay, which is 
patently absurd on its face.  I'm wondering what the thought process was 
on this, since no one else seems to want to chime in.

3) Did you folks know we have a bot that reverts links that are 
arbitrarily considered spam?  I didn't until today. 
[[User:Shadowbot1]].  I convinced him to post the blacklist where we 
could see it, and while some (most?) are useful, others are pretty 
screwy, and I'm not sure this is helpful in the long run.

I'm starting to think that our focus on spam is becoming a problem 
rather than a benefit to the project.  How much collateral damage are we 
willing to accept in the project to take care of this "problem" that 
people think is massive?  One out of every 10?  5% poor hits?  Do we 
have some sort of measurement we're using here?

-Jeff

-- 
Name: Jeff Raymond
E-mail: jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com
WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
IM: badlydrawnjeff
Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the
	Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else."
	- Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.