[WikiEN-l] SEO

[Charlotte Webb]

On 9/5/07, Brock Weller <brock.weller at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/5/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Solution: when mediawiki detects that most of a change consists of
> > adding an external link, it reads them the riot act. It takes them to
> > another page confirming that, yes, they really really really think
> > it's in Wikipedia's best interests to be adding this external link.
> >
> > On the whole, we'd be better off just automatically reverting urls
> > submitted by anons.
> >
> > Steve
>
> Better off auto reverting anons? Are you insane? Anon's are our most
> prolific contributors. Much vandalism comes from them, to be sure, but as of
> a couple years ago, the *majority* of our actual content was initially
> submitted by anonymous and new users. I don't have updated numbers, but I'd
> imagine it's still quite high. Throwing out and discouraging anonymous
> contributors because undesireable content comes from other anons as well is
> the height of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and incredibly
> elitist.
> --
> -Brock

Yeah, that idea was way over the top.

Suppose I try to replace a [citation needed] tag with the URL of an
online news article, like I'd done so many times before, and I get a
big angry salad riot act boilerplate warning cleverly tailored to
insult both my intelligence and my motives...[1]

On the other hand this negative energy could be harnessed and applied
to the Special:Upload page which yields a greater proportion of "stuff
we're better off without".

[1] Seriously though, what would/could I do about something like that
besides complain about it right here on the mailing list...

—C.W.