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

[George Herbert]

On 1/21/07, John Doe <phoenixoverride at gmail.com> wrote:
> regarding this HAVE YOU NO CLUE what spam is? there have been massive
> attacks by spammers recently there was one user that added 142 links to the
> same site, the reason? to increase the sites rank in google. as for blog,
> myspace.com the reason is simple there is no need to link to jimbobs blog as
> per my reasoning at WT:EL
> Betacommand
>
> On 1/21/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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?


Let's assume for the moment that everyone reading knows what spam is
and what the level of spam problem is for WP.

What we don't all know, is enough about what's being done about it,
and how it's implemented.

As that can bite anyone, and in particular more experienced editors
and admins working on problem issues, it might be better if there was
more communications regarding anti-spam measures taken...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com