[WikiEN-l] yay external links!

[Andrew Gray]

On 06/06/07, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > http://www.cheezhead.com/2007/06/01/troy-smith-wikipedia/
> >
> > Do we have editors getting vicious on these by default?
>
> Shouldn't the question be why didn't the editors/admins
> catch the PR/spam/bomb before it drove 21% of traffic to a
> site that had 40,000 hits?  Or are you in charge of
> Wikipedia advertiser -SEO spin control?

I know, it's shocking. We didn't spot an astroturfing link added to
one of one point eight million pages until after the fact? Clearly
this is utterly unacceptable, a grave dereliction of duty, and
entirely well below the high standards we are entitled to expect.
Anyone who tries to present it in any other way should be flogged, and
there is nothing we can remotely discuss about this subject except how
many lashes to give them.

----

More practically, it looks pretty innocuous in context - "fans set up
a website [link] urging..." - not the usual house style, but it looks
legitimate. If it had been dropped in as an extlink, it'd probably
have vanished faster.

If there's no obvious context to believe it's spam, it's rather
unlikely we ought to have expected someone to remove it out of hand to
begin with.

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