--- Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 06/06/07, Cheney Shill
<halliburton_shill(a)yahoo.com>
wrote:
--- David Gerard <dgerard(a)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.
...
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.
This is a better response. Deal with the potential
extremism and practical issues rather than try to claim it
as a non-issue when WP claims to be free of advertising,
which, whether intended or not, suggests that WP is not
serving as a promotional tool of any kind. That and
[[conflict of interest]].
As to extremism, we can't have everyone running around
trying to spot every external link that pops up in 1.8
million pages, even though there seem to be a fair number
of admins dedicated to just that on user pages. User pages
(I'll leave the counting to you) have 0 bombing impact,
though they may contribute to [[astroturfing]] with or
without external links, which, as a reminder, is the
subject. So, maybe we can if we can convince the admins
derelict'n "duty" on the user page external links to check
external links on main pages, regardless of whether they
are explicit (in the external section) or planted elsewhere
in the article.
Not that any PR agent would ever be deceptive enough to
plant an external link outside the area explicitly set for
them. They is ethical folk.
"The real goal was to use the site as a marketing
experiment."
Despite the admission, from Feb 24 until today, that link
is still there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Troy_Smith&diff=110632488&…
The practical: What could work is a bot that identifies
external links inside main articles (but outside the
citation/external space) and auto-removes them, or at least
lists them so admins can easily identify and check. I
don't know why a policy abolishing external links within
the content of the article hasn't already been set.
Outside of making it a little less user friendly in a few
instances, it would mostly eliminate a lot of tedious labor
and get rid of "fan" bombing. How do you know the "fans"
are not shills working for an athlete's contract agent?
Honesty of the PR folk and lawyers, of course! In this
case, where they attend or are alumni of the same
university they are a "fan" of, they by definition have a
[[conflict of interest]] and shouldn't be contributing
[[WP:OR]], whether in the form of external links or otherwise.
~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (Wikia supported site since 2006)
--spam may follow--
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