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

[Parker Peters]

On 1/24/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> 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.
> We should develop more effective spam control rather than targetting all
> the
> links as one.
>
> Mgm
>
>

Here's a stupid suggestion.

Code it so that *NEW* links are nofollow by default (thus stopping
linkspammers from being rewarded for linkspamming), but allow a process
(request to an admin or something) whereby a link can simply be followed and
then the "nofollow" tag removed from it if it's verified to not be a spam
link.

Wouldn't that be better than uniformly tagging all links Nofollow?

Unless of course the goal isn't really about stopping spammers, but about
trying to game Google's algorithm because someone got jealous that someone
else's site came up before en-wikipedia's in a google search somewhere.

I'll note that Nofollow was uniformly rejected by the community in previous
discussions.

Parker