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

[Andrew Gray]

On 22/01/07, 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.

Good lord. What a novel idea of theirs. I can't believe I've never
seen that happen before; obviously we here have been sheltered from
the hurly-burly of real editing life for years.

> 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

This sounds awfully like the "reliable sources" policy that
arbitrarily decreed Usenet could never be cited. Sure, we're mot in
the business of randomly linking to people's blogs, and we never have
been. That doesn't stop the fact that, occasionally, someone we would
consider reliable may post some information there we would like to
source.

(Indeed, one of our *explicit recommendations* to people we have
articles on is that if there is contradictory information about them
floating around, or basic information which isn't widely known, they
should make sure to mention it on their personal site somewhere...)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk