On 9/5/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/5/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@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.