To discourage link-spamming, one way could be:
- Have a notion of stable revisions, either marked by hand, or in the future I hope via a collaboration of hand marking and trust (algorithmic marking).
- Sell to search engines a stable revision feed. I believe that search engines would much rather index stable revisions of articles, and they would be willing to pay for it, giving the visibility of the Wikipedia as a search target.
The advantages of this scheme are:
- Link spamming becomes useless - We raise money - We can continue to present visitors the latest version whenever we feel this is appropriate for the Wikipedia evolution, without regards to spammer behavior.
Luca
This is a circular argument, though :-) , as the current last
edit/default view policy is what makes things such as link-spamming effective.