[WikiEN-l] Gosh darn it, those spammers^Wmarketers will show us what for

[Bryan Derksen]

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the sentiment.
> It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made Wikipedia
> great just to get rid of a few spammers.

Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within
Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the
external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the
article in a significant way.

> We should develop more effective spam control rather than targetting all the
> links as one.

Internal links and interwiki links are still exempt from nofollow so we
already don't target all links as one. Further refinement is of course
possible but whether it's worth the effort is another question. If we
had version flagging I could see a distinction being made on that basis,
but other than that I can't think of anything that'd be particularly
easy to code.