Agree lets see something first and talk politics elsewhere. FWIW I put
the no new user pages down to an intelligent change to robots.txt which
seems to have recently been reversed (what links here isn't /w/
anymore... why, that helped). I might take it up on your user page when
I've time
==================
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates
<andrew(a)catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
I can tell you for free (since I went through
thousands of them for the
WP CD) that an article having a quality flag doesn't reduce the risk of
vandalism or spam. It is more attractive than anything else.
Yes, as I said in my initial post.. I do not believe that simply
overloading the not-vandalized flag by itself is sufficient, mostly
because people don't bother looking at the externals.. and often
people feel uncomfortable removing them. The same mechanism, however,
could be easily applied to collect data on link reviews as they are
performed... Even without that it would still give us a point of
attack (i.e. when you validate a page, be sure to check new links),
today we don't have such a hook.
[snip]
Removing spam from WP is ever harder work and no
one has predicted
that "nofollow" will help with making the en better quality or help keep
spam away. Phrases involving babies and bathwater come to mind.
We saw an almost complete end of User: pages created by otherwise
inactive users which were filled with nothing but external links after
turning on nofollow for user: namespace a few months back.
I'd comment more, but this is going offtopic into the land of local
wiki politics.
Perhaps this discussion should be continued once someone has actually
coded something?