Wikipedia talk:Spam/Archive 1

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Archive 01 – 02

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Retaliatory idea

user:142.177.etc suggested some stronger measures against corporate shills and the like, such as "no new articles on any commercial enterprises except when scandals occur and the initial article can be entirely or mostly negative in tone - this ensures that any attempts at spamming are likely to be diverted into spin control". Responses follow:

These solutions are not good. While I agree that spam is a problem on Wikipedia because it can lead to biased articles, the solution is to write unbiased articles, not to begin applying different measures to different subjects. Tuf-Kat 03:31, Dec 18, 2003 (UTC)

One concern that I have about these policies is that someone could post spam posing as one of their competitors, with the hope of negative retaliation. The same currently happens with email spam. -jackson

I dislike these measures. Optim 03:15, 23 Jan 2004 (UTC)

There is now way that the NPOV policy is going to be trumped by an anti-spam policy. At the current time only tin-pot little companies are spamming wikipedia and that is unlikely to change, so its not a big deal. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 10:24, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't see wikispam as that big of a problem. One must take for granted that the articles in Wikipedia are of uneven quality. Any intelligent person should be able to detect the bias of a wikispam article. Finally, I think articles on products or companies are a useful addition to Wikipedia. pstudier 20:41, 2004 Apr 30 (UTC)

How about adding the message to the top of the page (just like for a stub):
This article is Wikispam. You can help Wikipedia by providing a NPOV.
pstudier 20:56, 2004 Apr 30 (UTC)

This proposal sounds something like adding more plastic wrap and duct tape to our houses every time we're attacked with poison; eventually, we will suffocate ourselves. Let's rewrite every advertising article spammers add with a better, NPOV one. If anything, the spam can motivate us to write. Eurleif 21:03, Apr 30, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Eurleif. There's no reason to have separate policies for spam as opposed to nations, people, or objects. Meelar 01:49, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

  • I found an interesting idea: If an ad is posted as an "article", rewrite it with the fact that the company spammed this article or something. KirbyMeister 18:41, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
    • We can't know it's them. Better to just leave it out. Most companies willing to spam won't deserve articles anyway. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 18:43, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

from pump

I just thought the word wikispam might be a good catch-phrase to describe those dubious and sinister articles that are thinly-veiled commercial solicitations. See Eyeplaygames.com, an article that should be deleted precisely because it is "wikispam". Anyway, I'd be interested to know what wikians think of wikispam, how to make it std. jargon if enough like it (ie add it to some admin page somewhere), or if there's already a word for these types of articles. Alcarillo 06:47, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I like that word, I just added one article at WP:VfD of that kind and used the term for it. There are two kinds of wikispamming I came across so far - one is to create an advertisement article, the other is trying to sneak in external links to the spammer's website. The second one may also just be trying to get a better google ranking by having more incoming links. andy 07:52, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Glad you liked it! Hopefully it will gain further acceptance and be inshrined in wikipedia jargon with its own description. (BTW, this is an example of what's best about wikipedia, and it reminds me why I still come here.) Alcarillo 08:11, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Anyway, I took the lead and created a page describing Wikispam (since merged into wikipedia:spam). Alcarillo 08:28, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Note that the word WikiSpam has been used fairly widely for a few years now, I don't think Alcarillo can claim credit for coining it. -- Tim Starling 01:50, May 1, 2004 (UTC)
Well, apparently not. C'est la guerre. Alcarillo 14:56, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

What's in a name

We call it Wikispam in our discussions; wouldn't it be more accurate to rename the article Wikipedia:Wikispam? We are talking about a different, specific beast altogether: commercial solicitations disguised as wikipedia articles. Just calling this "Spam" isn't entirely correct. Alcarillo 18:04, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

wikipedia:advertising would be less jargony. Martin 22:55, 3 May 2004 (UTC)
I disagree. wikipedia:advertising isn't as comprehensive. Remember, this category also includes those puff-pieces obviously written by PR hacks, typically used to promote some unknown entertainer. And spam is already understood as unwanted content. Alcarillo 14:34, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
Maybe the page name 'Wikipedia:Spam' is OK, but I was confused by it, because I followed a link here (from an external website), and didn't realise at first that this was a 'project page'. How about a disambigation sentence?
e.g. This is a 'project page' about spam on wikipedia. See also articles on Spamming and Link spam
-- Halz 14:42, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

'guideline' message at the top

I was also confused about the 'guideline' message at the top. Anyone know why that is there? The page doesn't really seem like a particulary great guideline (no better than any other page particularly) Maybe it was placed there to settle some edit war. I suggest we remove it, unless anyone knows a reason. -- Halz 14:42, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Retaliation for SEO spam

Currently our anti-spam system works by ignoring edits containing certain text items. For example, if you try to save a page linking to hukuki dot net, your edit will be ignored. The problem comes when before starting large-scale spamming, the spammer added a few vaguely relevant links to external links sections in various articles. These articles then can't be edited, unless the offending external link is removed. Currently it's necessary to manually search for these links, but I'd like to know the community's opinion on doing this automatically. Presumably some sort of server-side script would search for the links and remove them. I'd also like to add the following statement to this page:

Note to spammers: spamming Wikimedia wikis, including sandboxes, may lead to the automated removal of all links to your site, even those which were in articles before the attack began.

Hopefully this policy will have a deterrent effect. Any thoughts? -- Tim Starling 04:04, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)

The danger is that sites may spam their competitors sites instead in order to have them removed from Wikipedia. If it's done, I don't think it should be done automatically, or people may start using it purposefully as a way of removing links from the site. Angela. 04:21, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Links should be in an article if they are relevent to the article. They should not be there if they are not. Jdavidb 20:56, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Once we've put something in our anti-spam system, though, we've effectively prevented it from being in any future edits in Wikipedia in any case. Usually, this happens because someone with authority over the blacklist has examined the site in question, and has either determined that it will never be the most useful link out of all possibilities on a Wikipedia article, or that it is not worth the risk of allowing spam links on Wikipedia to survive (since Wikipedia-spamming, if it became profitable enough, could easily overcome our community's ability to remove fight it on a one-by-one basis.) --Aquillion 04:23, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

paperlessarchives dot com wikispam

I am currently tracking down many links in the external links sections (and others) to paperlessarchives dot com. In many cases the regulars of the articles block these out, but many have not been caught. I'm unfamiliar with the mediawiki upgrades for handling wikispam, but I think this site's URL needs to be added into the regex for blocking wikispam. Additionally, a robot-assisted removal would be nice. I could write one, I suppose, but probably lack the time and can better help by removing what I can find.

Can someone please direct me to the appropriate place to submit this URL for wikispam blocking?

If anyone disagrees that this commercial site does not constitute a legitimate external link, by all means please discuss with me here or on my user talk page or wherever is appropriate. Jdavidb 20:52, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I've added this request to the new non-development tasks for developers page at Meta. Angela. 19:13, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hukuki

An answer : (altinmas@yahoo.com) - 23.9.2004I'm the owner of -www.hukuki.net- (Turkish Law site) . You think we are spammers. Unfortunately we are not spammers. We add some of articles or rules about wiki to many international pages in their languages. Because they are empty pages. And then we add our link to contact us. It is a mistake for you and for me... Best regards. AND THERE IS NO ATTENTION LIKE THIS: DO NOT ADD YOUR EXTERNAL LINKS TO THIS PAGE ...

You are joking? You added this link to at least 43 Wikipedias and hundreds of other wikis on pages that have nothing to with Hukuki, often pasting in pages in English to other language Wikipedias with your link sneakily hidden in the middle of the text. Hukuki is on dozens of blacklists. I fail to see how you do not regard this as spam. Angela. 19:57, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)
He also complained at chongqed.org about being listed as a spammer and asked to be removed. After we pointed out some evidence in Google and told him he would not be removed from the list he started spamming our link as well as several other wikis that list him as a spammer on many non-english wikipedias. The front page of our site gives more details. JoeChongq 06:32, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia as a link farm ?

Before writing this message, I have browsed through a few Wikipedia: series page to see what was already written on this topic ; I found nothing. More surprisingly, I found very little on the general theme of Wikipedia pollution by unfair use of its articles for Google ranking promotion. This does not seem a "hot" issue, but I fear it could become in a near future as long as Wikipedia gets better known and gets higher (together with its clones) on Google.

Indeed I became aware of the problem when googling http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+asinah&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 to see what was already written about a (non GFDL compliant) Singapurese clone of WP. Look : they have linked about twenty of their pages from WP articles ; in each case, the page is not blatantly irrelevant, simply it is a poor page and indeed in reality a link farm.

Then I have kept looking for similar abuse. Watch out this interesting one (I link to a diff page, since I removed it) : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Tourism&diff=5861245&oldid=5802398 An anonymous user adds two links ; the first one is irrelevant but not shocking ; the second one is blatant self-promotion. Probably naive from a good-faith editor (he also wrote a "real" sentence on a talk page), and not too dangerous (though the links remained more than one week with nobody noticing the problem).

Now, browse through the various links in the "Commercial travel sites" of Tourism. Some are indeed relevant, like http://www.letsgo.com/ . A few others are self-promotion of sites which are in no way nasty, but not remarkable enough to justify a link from a very general encyclopedy page, e.g. http://www.luggage-life.com/. Lastly and more annoyingly, some are simply there to help link farms sucking Google ranking, see http://www.asinah.net/ (the WP clone which made me conscious of the problem) or http://www.insidetraveltips.com/, still more blatant.

What should be done ? Nothing, hoping that I overestimate the danger and that this kind of parasiting can be contained by the editors as teenager vandalism is effectively contained ? Listing offender domaine names and forbidding external links towards them ? Adding a "nofollow" tag in WK pages, finding another way to have our articles archived ? Something else ? --French Tourist 12:48, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

We already, controversially, ban links to a number of locations where active link-farmers were hitting us. It's controversial because it causes problems when editing some real pages and because it's easy to work around it. Wikipedia is an effective device for artifically raising page rank, but is also an important source for Google of authoritative links. At this point, we pretty much hope that the usual wiki process will take care of such links (often, once such a user is noticed once, their other contributions will be checked and all their changes are then easy to revert.) Derrick Coetzee 23:13, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This is an issue that I have an interest in. I've been building a website, schema-root.org that is an encyclopedia of current events. It currently has over 3,000 page topics, each with its own current news feed, links to main stream news sources that relate to the topic, and pre-defined google searches against topic-relevant resource sites. As a matter of fact, Wikipedia is a "root" level resource for my site; so links to specific Wikipedia pages appear on any of my pages where my page-defined google search argument finds Wikipedia content. My site has very good Google pagerank generally, and it receives several hundred hits a day coming from Google searches, as well as several hundred more that come from Yahoo, MSN and approximately 100 other search engines. I'm mentioning this because I believe it indicates that my site is generally taken seriously. Anyway, on about a dozen Wikipedia pages I had put "external links" to related pages on my site. This seemed completely above-board to me, since my pages are resource rich pages with current news, and each was specifically relevant to the Wikipedia page in question. However I received a notice accusing me of spamming, and self promotion, and a recommendation to "quit while you are ahead." However, only two of my links were actually removed. From the remaining pages, I get 30 to 40 hits each day. So apparently at least some Wikipedia users are finding them useful. My question is this: Is Wikipedia interested in preventing any one site, like mine, from getting too much exposure on Wikipedia, even if the external links add considerable value to the encyclopedia? John Tinker 03:55, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

self promotion is often considered spam even if it add something usefull to the article. even if you legitametely belive that your resource on something is of a sufficiantly high quality and/or relavence to be listed in the article then you should get at least a second opinion before going forward. Plugwash 16:58, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Internal spamming (1st)

I think DV wanted to discuss this - it's come up w.r.t. the arbcom elections, and possibly other cases. Certainly something I think we should think about. That's not to say we necessarilly need to make any actual policies about it. Martin 23:45, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

On second thoughts, since DV has (ironically) been cross-posting his views about excessive cross-posting, I've taken the liberty of consolidating all this onto Wikipedia talk:Spam/arbcom elections.

Other situations that have involved "internal spam": adminship/bureaucratship candidates inviting support for their nominations, critics trying to mobilize opposition, and editors in a dispute recruiting new participants, especially when a survey/poll is involved. With respect to this last case in particular, some people have complained about "selective spamming" to those likely to be sympathetic to the spammer's perspective, even though this practice is fairly common and it should not be surprising that few people feel inclined to "get out the other side's vote". So these are some of the situations that can be considered in formulating any kind of internal spam policy. --Michael Snow 02:53, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Culture of brazil article

(http://www.ju li and i bbell.com/brazil/brazil.html Julian Dibbel) is a englishman who lived in brazil many years and wrote fantastic, profound and light hearted essays on brazilian culture, specially the (http://www.juli andi bbel l.com/texts/brasilia.html) mysticisms of brasilia, (http://www.juli an di bbell.com/tex ts/ gil_tropicalismo.html)tropicalismo, and even http://www.wired.com/wired/arc hive/12.11/linux.html open-source soft

I can't add those links on the article. our spam filter thinks nice guy dibbel is a spammer. How do I fix it?--Alexandre Van de Sande 22:45, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Automated posting to user talk pages

I wonder if I could start a discussion here that would hopefully lead to a specific policy on whether we want to allow the use of bots to mass-post on user talk pages. This has come up as the result of the recent mass-posting run by Rambot (information here, here and here), which seems the first use of a bot to mass-post on user-pages. (On the other hand, it's also been suggested that this is already covered by existing bot policy.) PRiis 01:09, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I've just posted this to User_talk:Anthony_DiPierro#Wording_of_bots_clause_on_spamming, but I'll also copy and paste it here because it's absolutely relevant to this topic:
Hi Anthony, With the proposal on Wikipedia:Spam about bots, would you consider rewording it to be something like "Don't use a bot to post to talk pages, unless the message left by the bot clearly relates to the content in that specific article"? The reason for this qualification is LinkBot, which I'm revising now so that it'll leave a 2 line message on talk pages, pointing to a specific LinkBot user page, and that page in turn will contain specific link suggestions just relevant to that article. In other words, I'm trying to walk a line between not annoying people by filling up the talk page with suggestions, but on the other hand I also want to let them know that there are suggestions, that are specific just to that particular article. I don't think that should be considered spam, because it's completely consistent with the whole purpose of a talk page (defined as: 'a special Wikipedia page containing discussion about the contents of its associated "subject" page'). Suggesting links specific to that page is completely in keeping with the whole reason for having talk pages (this then becomes a discussion about whether the Wikipedia should even have talk pages, not about whether link suggestions should be placed on those pages). Note that I'm more than happy for there to be a spam policy, as long as the language of the policy is specific enough that bots leaving messages that are consistent with the purpose of talk pages could not be accused of being spammers. Sorry for waffling on, and I hope that I've made sense! :-) All the best, -- Nickj 01:32, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Doh! PRiis's message was about user talk pages, not general talk pages, so it's not as on-topic as I first thought ... Sorry! All the best, -- Nickj 01:37, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
It's unclear to me just how this would work. If you're posting the exact same link to all these talk pages, I don't think it's a very good idea. anthony 警告 02:11, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
No problem, please let me explain. It'll be a different link for each talk page. Probably the best way to illustrate is with a mock-up example, rather than discussing it in the abstract. Please see Talk:Abraham_Lincoln#Link_suggestions for such an example of what's being proposed. So what you get is a brief note on the talk page, pointing to a customized page with link suggestions that are just specific to that particular article. I hope I'm explaining this OK! :-) All the best, -- Nickj 02:56, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
That's pretty neat. As an obNitPick, dancing is not a verb :). (User:Nickj/Link Suggester calls it one) anthony 警告 03:04, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Because dancing is both a noun and a verb? (e.g. in "I was dancing" dancing is part of the verb, whereas in "I hate dancing", hate is the verb and dancing is the noun) ... Good point. OK, I've changed it to "suggesting", a transitive verb (i.e. it's incomplete without a direct object), so it shouldn't have this problem. All the best, -- Nickj 03:38, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Bleh, I'm a moron. OK... Dancing is (at least, can be) a verb. I was thinking of the noun. Incidently, it's probably used more often as a noun, but I'm still a moron for not thinking of the verb.  :) anthony 警告 03:45, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hey, as you said to me, no need for personal attacks :) All the best, -- Nickj 04:05, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Ah, internal spambots. Frankly, if you can't take the time to write me a message yourself, and if I didn't specifically ask you to do something to my user talk page, keep your insert expletive here, where I removed it bot off of my user talk page. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:22, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)

Malfunctioning spam filter

Has anyone else had problems with the wiki spam filter? Every once in awhile, it seems to go on the blink and start blocking a bunch of legitimate links. 69.243.41.28 02:28, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)


From Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

Recently someone posted a substantially identical message on over 50 user talk pages. Immediate issues aside (it was an attempt to pack a vote) it concerns me that there is no policy explicitly saying you can't round up a targetted list of talk pages (user talk, article space talk, whatever) and spamming substantially identical text on them.

This may be something that will be more important in future than it is now--such spamming is rare and sometimes done by hand (although sometimes it has been done using a bot).

I'd like to canvas for ideas on whether this kind of thing merits new policy, or whether existing policy is sufficient to treat any abuses that might arise. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:10, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't think we have any existing policy that consensus agrees covers this issue. I also don't think that a hard-limit would work on its own as I can see people attmepting to get around this by posting the messages to a batch of (limit-1) pages, substantially rephrasing it and then doing another batch of (limit-1) pages. Thryduulf 13:14, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Problem is that some people are interested in things that are put on a large number talk pages (colabiration of the week is the first example to come to mind). I'd like to see template nospam become inforced by policy with admins being left to decide if something is spamGeni 15:09, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Maybe we could implement some system were users themselves decide what they want to stay informed about? Spam is by definition unwanted, but with this kind of messages it's kinda hard to find out. On the other hands, mailings from the COTW are useful and shouldn't be restricted by such rules. Mgm|(talk) 18:44, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)

That's what WP:Watch is aiming to achieve, at least partly. violet/riga (t) 18:51, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
But I don't want to know about every COTW I just want to know if the one I voted on won so I know I should do some work on itGeni 20:39, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't want to see a "template nospam" system because it gives the yellow light to spammers. Why should I *have* to put something on my talk page, which a spammer would ignore anyhow, just to say I don't want spam? Of course I don't want spam, few sane people do! --Tony Sidaway|Talk 20:51, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that not all mass messageing (and mass messageing is really what we are dealing with) is spam.Geni 01:02, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If a problem editor is sending unsolicited bulk messages (either very large numbers, or repeated mailings) shouldn't it be possible to use the regular dispute resolution mechanisms? Certainly it seems like a breach of Wikiquette and maybe WP:POINT and so forth. ArbCom can impose anything up to a hard ban on users who do this sort of thing, I would imagine, depending on how disruptive the acts were. Less egregious offenders might be allowed only a certain number of user talk page edits per day, or a ban on sending substantially similar messages to more than one or two users.

If someone is sending the same message to lots of people—but none of them are complaining—then we don't seem to have a problem. Do we? If the objection is because the mass messaging is encouraging a cohort of editors to act in concert for some bad-faith objective, that is a fit subject for RfC or arbitration. Again, a ban on mass-messaging might be appropriate under such circumstances within the framework of a larger solution. But again no new rules need be created. Policy creep is to be avoided! As Thruyduulf notes, such a policy would likely have loopholes anyway, and we'd be back where we started. --TenOfAllTrades | Talk 04:37, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Indeed. I was one of the spammed people - my annoyance was because the poster had not bothered to check that I had already done what he was asking me to do. -- Arwel 16:58, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I strongly agree that policy creep is a major consideration--which is why I'm not at the stage of saying "all talk page spamming is utterly evil." My problems with using this method to coordinate campaigns are pretty much solved by Violetriga's excellent (and timely!) WP:W. If I see people spamming I'll simply recommend that they use that more benign and equitable method instead. Factionalization and politicking are much bigger issues than spamming which is why I'm deliberately separating them out from this proposal--there are many good, noncontentious reasons to want to contact a group of people, so the question is just whether we could or should reach agreement on the when and the where. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 17:11, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

How not to be a spammer

There was a case recently on our article Spyware where a new user posted a large number of links to pages on his own commercial Web site. This was interpreted by other editors (including myself) as an act of spamming.

The user professed to have good intentions, as his Web site is indeed somewhat useful. I suspect that he simply did not know the standards of content expected here, and expected that adding links to what he regarded as useful material would be eagerly received. He didn't, in other words, realize that his action (adding a large number of links to the same site) would be interpreted as spam.

I'd like to suggest a few guidelines on how not to be a spammer. -- or, in other words, how to mention a Web site or other resource without appearing to the Wikipedia community that you are trying to abuse Wikipedia for self-promotion.

  1. Review your intentions. Wikipedia is not a space for the promotion of products, Web sites, fandoms, ideologies, or other memes. If you're here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for an idea or product that nobody's heard of yet, you're in the wrong place. Likewise, if you're here to make sure that the famous Wikipedia cites you as the authority on something (and possibly pull up your sagging PageRank) you'll probably be disappointed.
  2. Contribute cited text, not bare links. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a link farm. If you have a source to contribute, first contribute some facts that you learned from that source, then cite the source. Don't simply direct readers to another site for the useful facts; add useful facts to the article, then cite the site where you found them. You're here to improve Wikipedia -- not just to funnel readers off of Wikipedia and onto some other site, right? (If not, see #1 above.)
  3. The References section is for references. A reference directs the reader to a work that the writer(s) referred to whilst writing the article. It isn't just a list of related works; it is specifically the list of works used as sources. Therefore, it can never be correct to add a link or reference to References sections if nobody editing the text of the article has actually referred to it.
  4. Don't make a new article for your own product or Web site. Most often, when a person creates a new article describing their own work, it's because the work is not yet notable enough to have attracted anyone else's attention. Articles of this sort are known as vanity pages and are usually deleted. Wikipedia does indeed have articles about popular products and Web sites, but it is not acceptable to use Wikipedia to popularize them.
  5. Don't gratuitously set off our spam radar. There are certain stylistic behaviors that will say "spam!" loud and clear to anyone who's watching:
    • Adding a link to the top of an unordered list. This is an A-number-1, red-flag, hot-button spam sign. It suggests that you want people to look at your link FIRST FIRST FIRST! You wouldn't butt in at the head of a queue; don't put your link first.
    • Adding a link that's snazzier than any of the others. If there's a list of products that gives just their names, and you add a product with a short blurb about how great it is, we'll all know why you did it.
    • Adding many links to (or mentions of) the same site or product. Going through an article and adding the name of your product to every paragraph where it seems relevant is just going to attract the revert button.
    • Adding the same link to many articles. The first person who notices you doing this will go through all your recent contributions with an itchy trigger finger on the revert button. And that's not very much fun.

Thoughts? --FOo 21:49, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Proposal updated in light of the below discussion on vanity. --FOo 03:24, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

It is very hard to deal with spammers, they have no reason to follow any guidelines except promoting their site. The guidelines are right but target audience won't read it. Pavel Vozenilek 22:55, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
The target audience is not concerted spammers, but rather users who do not understand Wikipedia etiquette. There have been at least a few cases of well-intentioned users whose actions were interpreted as spam, but who did not intend to spam and who changed their ways when corrected. The recent case on Spyware should be illustrative.
Calling a spammer a spammer will not change his behavior, nor will asking him not to spam. In that, you are correct. However, a user who doesn't realize that his contemplated actions constitute "spamming" by our standards, can be educated. I do not propose to teach malicious spammers the error of their ways. I propose rather to use the opprobrium of the term "spammer" to teach well-intentioned new users to do better. --FOo 23:23, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

On vanity

  • You say Don't make an article for your own product or Web site. These are called vanity articles, and they're automatically eligible for deletion. Wikipedia does indeed have articles about popular products and Web sites, but it is not acceptable to use Wikipedia to popularize them. This is not strictly accurate. If Bill Gates choses to add an article about a Microsoft product (or about himself) it is not automitaccly delatable for that reason. If a subject is suitible for an article, it doesn't matter who adds it. The problem is that most articles added by people about themselves or their own projects, products, or buisnesses are not notable, and would and should be deleted no matter who adds them. The fact that the creator adds the article makes it look more suspicious, yes. but this needs to be reworded. DES 00:50, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
    I agree that it is not a problem for a person to contribute to a page on themselves or their own work, as in the Gates/Microsoft example you describe. Nor does such a contribution transform an otherwise notable article into a vanity page.
    However, vanity page is listed on the deletion policy as a grounds for deletion. In regards to deletion, Wikipedia:Vanity page states as follows:
    Vanity pages are usually sent to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. Deletion of the page normally ensues, although sometimes it may be moved to the user's user-page. Even famous Wikipedians have had pages about them judged to be vanity pages and deleted.
    I believe this supports the above contention that vanity articles are eligible for deletion. I don't mean that they must be deleted or that they are candidates for speedy deletion; rather, I mean that may be reasonably nominated for deletion; a person listing a vanity page on VfD is doing something both acceptable and expected. --FOo 01:20, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
    I wonder if the following phrasing might work better:
    Don't make an article for your own product or Web site. Most often, when a person creates a new article describing their own work, it's because the work is not yet notable enough to have attracted anyone else's attention. Articles of this sort are known as vanity pages and are usually deleted. Wikipedia does indeed have articles about popular products and Web sites, but it is not acceptable to use Wikipedia to popularize them.
    Now that text I would endorse. It was just the previous wording which implied -- or seemed to me to imply -- that any text by a person about that person or his or her own work was automatically vanity. Most such are, but not all.DES 01:52, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
    Otherwise, this item could just be dropped from the guideline. Vanity pages are usually a separate phenomenon from Wiki-spam -- while sometimes an editor creates a vanity page and spams links to it across many pages, it seems more common to simply spam links to an external site. --FOo 01:20, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

FWIW, my own policy is that if I think something I wrote elsewhere is worth being linked from an article, I mention it on the relevant talk page, I'm clear that it's my work, and invite people to link if they think it is useful. Sometimes someone does, sometimes not, which is fine. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:09, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

This is a great suggestion. What do you think of this phrasing?
If your product is truly relevant to an article, others will agree -- try the talk page. We usually recommend that editors be bold in adding directly to articles. But if the above advice makes you concerned that others will regard your contribution as spam, you can find out without taking that risk: Describe your work on the article's talk page, asking other editors if it is relevant.
--FOo 05:13, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
Now that is a suggestion that I like. --Paul Laudanski 15:30, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
The text looks great to me. Be bold, and add it to wikipedia namespace at a page like Wikipedia:How not to be a spammer... JesseW
Done. --FOo 05:11, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Potemkin villages

This may be interesting to those watching this page: Talk:Department of Motor Vehicles Rl 08:16, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Re-merged

After development and approval at Wikipedia:How not to be a spammer, this guideline has been merged into Wikipedia:Spam. --FOo 22:55, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Third kind of wikispam

The article says there are two types of wikispam: advertisements masquerading as articles, and wide-scale external link spamming.

I think there is a third kind: Adding a link to your companys website on the Wkipedia page about the field of your business. For example, I just reverted these two: [1], [2] --Apoc2400 20:32, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

I suspect this was omitted because of the frequent perception that "spam" involves a message repeated many times. I happen to agree with you, though: Wikipedia is a popular enough resource that adding an irrelevant link for the purpose of driving traffic to a site should be considered, if not "spam", then something very similar. "Vanity linking", we could call it, but we might as well just say "spam". --FOo 22:26, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

my changes

Today I made some changes but they were removed because they were considerd too major to happen without discussion. (I don't know how to link these edits, can someone link them for me?) The current linking policy doesn't describe when you should link to blogs. It recommends incoportating information rather than adding externals, but the value of a blog is it's dynamic nature... So such a practice is not possible. 12.111.139.2 01:38, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Spam is a policy page. That means it is intended to reflect a consensus or established understanding of accepted practice among Wikipedia editors. A major change made without any discussion is not going to reflect a consensus or established understanding. Take a look at how the Wikipedia:How not to be a spammer guidelines were integrated into this policy -- with advice and consensus from other contributors, organized via the talk pages.
It is hardly ever appropriate for a person who has violated a policy to come around and change the policy page so it seems like they didn't violate it. Remember, the real policy is the consensus understanding among other editors -- not what the page says. Policy pages are not law that can be amended by editing the page; they are descriptions of what policy is. So changing the page doesn't change the fact that you broke (or perhaps merely bent) the rules. Trying to do so is taken as a sign of bad faith, which is why you got repeated warnings on your talk page.
There is rarely any reason for a non-logged-in user to try to contribute to Wikipedia policy discussons. Go get yourself an account. It's free, and it means we can think of you by a username rather than thinking of you as "yet another random IP address with no name, probably a vandal."
Repeatedly adding a link that other editors have removed, without discussing it and waiting for others to respond in support, is considered bad behavior here. Whether it's useful to call that "spam" or simply "revert warring" is another matter. In either event, it is unacceptable behavior, and it is not going to get you anywhere here. --FOo 03:57, 31 August 2005 (UTC)


External links criteria and lyrics sites

Many external links are links to sites such as lyrics or guitar tab pages. I'm trying to decide whether these could be considered spam.

Argument that such links are spam:

  • The same site can appear in many different articles.
  • Often such sites are low-quality or commercial or ad-based sites.

Arguments that such links are not spam:

  • Such links are useful to each individual article.

What do other users think? DDerby | Talk 19:42, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

In my opinion, any site that has something to do with the individual, whether they contain something that is in the article or not (unless it's virtually identical) should be considered valid to the artist and fans. I.e., this is especially in the case of tabs and lyric sites that may have Google ads on them, but otherwise contain relevant content. But it is also relative to the case whereby a site may not add much to the article, but may be used as a reference so that someone may conveniently access information that won't change as much as articles that are commonly changed one way or another by maybe vandalism and edit wars. It's difficult to trust some of the information any more by articles on celebrities where of course these types of external links would be placed. That said, low quality, high commercial sites should be removed promptly. Drdr1989 20:51, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Two facts I'd like to toss in about this issue:

  1. Many lyrics sites are copyright violators. Songwriters hold the copyright on published song lyrics, and reprinting them without permission is a copyright violation. Reprinting them for commercial gain (by carrying advertisements on a lyrics site) can be a criminal offense. Compare the issue of Wikipedia mirror sites: we expect that sites which mirror Wikipedia content will do so in a way that is compliant with our copyright license. Wikipedia is harmed by mirror sites which use our content, plastered with ads, in violation of our license. We should not use sites which are engaging in similar offenses as a resource.
    1. Corollary: Lyrics sites will not last long. Any given lyrics site is likely to eventually be taken down as a copyright infringer. Therefore, they do not form good references for Wikipedia's purposes -- they are not long-lasting.
  2. Lyrics sites are frequently commercial (ad-sponsored) sites which are likely to wish to use Wikipedia to drive up their Google PageRank or otherwise to drive traffic to their sites. Any systematic pushing of a given lyrics site is likely to represent a commercial spamming activity against Wikipedia.

In short, I think links to lyrics sites should be regarded with a heaping helping of suspicion. First off, commercial (ad-sponsored) lyrics sites are likely operating in violation of criminal law. Second, Wikipedia contributors are copyright holders and expect the protection of copyright, and so should not help copyright violators as a matter of equity. Third, links to lyrics sites are likely to be added for the purpose of driving revenue to those sites, which is equivalent to spamming Wikipedia. --FOo 22:27, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Need more specific criteria as to what constitutes spam

The criteria are not defined clearly enough to provide unambiguous guidance as to what constitutes spam. Is it the intent of the writer that determines it, or is it some objective aspect of the article? Theoretically, you could write about any small or medium-sized company, or non-ubiquitous commercial product, and people could regard it as spam. It is rather frustrating for those whose articles get put up for AFD when they had no intent to spam. 24.54.208.177 04:37, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

That's why we added the How not to be a spammer section -- to provide some guidelines about what things frequently get identified as spam. The purpose is both to deter spammers (by letting them know we're onto them) and to help non-spammers keep their articles from being mistaken for spam.
Nonetheless, any article can get listed on AfD. If it's really not spam, it shouldn't be too hard to convince people there of it. In the case of the DoYouDo article, it looks like there was some malfeasance in the AfD including (what's claimed to be) deletion of other people's comments, so I don't think that's likely to be a very good basis to argue for policy changes. Generally as soon as there's sneakiness going on, people are a lot less likely to believe assertions about intent.
If you're looking for a set of clear-cut content rules that you can follow and thereby guarantee that nobody's allowed to call the result spam or try to get it deleted, you aren't gonna find one. We don't have too many of that kind of rules here. We have a lot of recommendations and guidelines (like this one) and procedures (like AfD).
To answer your question, "Is it the intent of the writer that determines it, or is it some objective aspect of the article?" -- it's neither, in a way. Wikipedia is run by rough consensus. Wikipedia guidelines (such as this one) describe what consensus seems to have settled upon. If people object to an article because it comes across as promoting a product rather than describing something notable neutrally, then they're likely to try to get it deleted as spam. This is a feature, not a bug; it's part of how Wikipedia maintains its neutrality; by public review. --FOo 05:47, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
Judging from this version of that article, I'd consider it notable, if only because someone apparently paid almost two million dollars for it. My advice is to restart that article with a lead section that documents the most notable aspects of the company -- the focus in the version I linked to appears to be the technology behind a website that apparently doesn't exist anymore, and who wants to read about that? Start off talking about what makes it notable, and I'd vote to keep. Of course, I can't guarantee there won't be consensus to delete it anyway, so if you don't want to waste your time on something that may go away soon, then don't. I agree with Fubar though that spam ought not be specifically described; we should discuss borderline cases, like this one, and come to a consensus. Tuf-Kat 07:21, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
Is it really desirable to include something as subjective as "spam" as a legitimate reason for article deletion? In my opinion, in a case of suspected spam it would be better to either delete as "non-notable" or add an NPOV notice to the article. NPOV can be fixed by adding more content to balance out the article; non-notability can't. 205.217.105.2 12:04, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

One rule of thumb I use is that anonymous users whose edit histories consist of 95-100% edits to add articles about or links to sites deemed spamming have no standing in the discussion. People need to show that they are committed to Wikipedia by making a number of unambiguously non-spamming beneficial edits if they want that kind of respect. People who clearly have only one purpose, adding in references to their favorite site or company, don't hold opinions about what is and is not spam that hold any weight. Jdavidb 13:08, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

I changed the text of the article to read:
Since there can be a fine line between articles that are promotional and those that are simply informational, it is better to avoid listing "spam" or "advertisement" as the sole basis for article deletion. Articles posted on Wikipedia about products, companies, bands, etc. that do not meet established notability criteria can be dealt with by listing them on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion as "non-notable."
205.217.105.2 16:43, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
  • If the subject of an article is a notable company, product, or service, then yes, the correct way to address an article that reads like an advertisement is cleanup (e.g. {{advert}}, {{NPOV}}, or {{cleanup-tone}}) not deletion, with the exception that one always applies Copyright Judo to delete/rollback copyrighted advertisements. When the subject is notable, dealing with advertising becomes a matter of adhering to the neutral point of view policy and using an appropriate tone for an encyclopaedia article, both of which are cleanup matters, not deletion matters. Uncle G 01:45, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

"Delete. Spam" and "Delete. Advertisement"

I don't think we should encourage people to put articles up for deletion, or vote Delete, just because they start out as an advertisement. To take an extreme example, suppose a Microsoft marketer writes a glowing Wikipedia article about the company, detailing its great products and service and all the great things people are saying about it. In my opinion, that should not merit deletion; it should be revised to make it NPOV. What matters is notability, and the guideline should clarify that it is better in the case of an advertisement to: (1) If it is a non-notable subject, AFD it for non-notability; or, (2) If it is notable, rewrite it to be NPOV. The text that Aaron Brenneman reinstated[3], says "Advertisements posted on Wikipedia should be dealt with by listing them on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion." Even though below, it says, "It is also possible, and appropriate in some cases, to rewrite the article from a neutral point of view," it doesn't really specify what those cases are. I like Plugwash's clarification better, which says, "If an article is about a notable company or product but is written like an advertisement, it is more appropriate, to rewrite the article from a neutral point of view." 24.54.208.177 13:56, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

And I don't think anonymous editors who show up and generate said advertisement articles should have much of a say in the matter.
If an article can be NPOV'ed, and there's someone around who wants to and has time to NPOV it, great. I have personally seen some AFD requests turn into NPOV'ing of the article, and everyone benefits. But just because some vandal shows up to advertise his company does not obligate us to put "clean up this guy's mess" on our todo list. If nobody can or wants to NPOV it, we're going to delete it. Wikipedia is not a blank wall for people to put their billboards up on. We are justly and rightly angry when people try to use it for advertising. People who come by for a day and plant their advertising have no say on the subject; the people who remain have every right to clean up the mess. Jdavidb 14:49, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
Thoroughly agreed. We need to recognize that spamming Wikipedia is not a good-faith attempt to contribute an encyclopedia article. It is an abuse of the medium, just as spamming email, blog comments, or instant messages are abuses of those media.
What the anonymous contributor (who has been accused of spamming) suggests is that spam should be treated like NPOV problems. I suggest that spam should instead be treated like vandalism. Both spam and vandalism are disruptive abuses of the Wiki system. They occur when someone posts to Wikipedia for purposes contrary to the goal of producing an encyclopedia: in the vandalism case, they have the goal of disrupting or simply of seeing their name or words "in print"; in the spam case, of making money by diverting people to their Web site or product.
We don't respond to vandalism by "attempting to NPOV it." We just revert or delete it; and administrators block people who continually vandalize. Spamming should be treated the same way -- revert or delete the content, and block people who persistently spam. --FOo 17:27, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
What is with the ad hominem attacks? No one has any evidence at all that I have spammed. Moreover, the articles that I created that were supposedly spam appear about to survive their respective AFDs (see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/DoYouDo and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ECRUSH. I think incorrect assumptions were made as to my motives. That's the problem with AFD'ing articles based on who created them or what their motives might have been; sometimes, you're bound to be wrong. By the way, I am the primary author of pet skunk, cannabis rescheduling in the United States, Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, Convention on Psychotropic Substances, as well as wildlife crossing and numerous other articles that are not featured – they just weren't created under this IP address. So, I have made plenty of contributions. In short, just judge articles on their merits, and not based on the author. When we delete articles, it should be based on non-notability, copyvio, and other criteria that can be established reasonably objectively. "Spam" is too subjective. Just my opinion. I just don't like to see people try to undo my work because for no good reason, they think I'm a spammer. 24.54.208.177 02:07, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
It's not an ad hominem attack. It's an assertion of a lack of credibility. The fact that articles you created are currently embroiled in AFD proceedings means we're less likely to feel you're making a good faith attempt to improve Wikipedia in this policy discussion, rather than an attempt to ensure the success of your (possibly spam) articles. If your articles survive AFD, that certainly improves your credibility. In addition, it proves that things are already the way you want them to be: your non-spam articles survive AFD, and all is good. The fact that they underwent AFD is not a problem; it just means that several editors looked at the article to decide if it really belongs here. That is exactly what we want! Not all AFD requests result in deletion; that is as it should be. It doesn't mean the person who put the article up for AFD is "wrong." It just means we needed to take a collectively look at that article.
Your credibility could certainly be enhanced if you would create an account and log in, and allow your edit history to accrue your accomplishments. Somebody coming from a random IP address and concerned about our standards for what is and not spam certainly looks suspicious. Somebody with an account who has been here awhile and created several visibly good articles is much more worth listening to. It's not our fault you've chosen to allow your edit history to be dispersed among several anonymous IP addresses. That's your choice.
We do judge articles based on their merits. An article that is deleted for being spam is generally also non-notable (and/or a copyvio or whatever). Jdavidb 17:07, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
Except that things often labelled "spam" here are a mix of two different things. 1) Attempts to promote non-notable companies, products or organizations; 2) Attempts to promote notable companies, products or organizations. The first should be delted, but the second should (ideally) be converted into NPOV articles. Simple linkspamming (i.e. addign links that do not enhance articels, and are often of dubious relevance) is vandalism and is normally reverted as asuch. Simuilarly an article that is little or nothing but a promotional link is already subject to speedy deletion under A3. But an articel with significant content, but a highly promotional tone, is another matter. Perhaps it should be deleted, but perhaps it should be rewitten -- and IMO only a consensus procvess such as AfD can make that decision. Thus a general speedy deletion criterion for "spam" would IMO be a mistake. DES (talk) 17:34, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
DES makes a good point -- there are certainly going to be cases where we want an article about some company or product (since it is notable) but where the article is created as a spam article first. In these cases, I agree that we do not want to refuse to cover the company or product just because it was spammed about. We want there to be a non-spam article, even though the article was created as spam.
However, I think deletion or speedy deletion of the spam article can be a step in the process. Just because a spam article entitled Foocorp is speedy-deleted, doesn't prevent someone from creating a non-spam article under the same title. Deletion of spam articles about notable companies or products could be accompanied by listing the title at WP:RA, for instance.
My reading of DES's suggestion is that spam articles about notable subjects should not be deleted; they should be left up until someone gets around to "NPOVing" them. (If that's a mistaken reading, please correct me.) I don't see why the spam should be left up at all. NPOVing a lengthy spam article is more time-consuming than speedy-and-WP:RA, and so DES's suggestion is more likely to yield ill-gotten gains for the spammer in the meantime.
I'll freely admit I have a hardcore attitude towards spam. I think it's necessary to deter spammers by making it clear that spamming Wikipedia is a waste of time -- that they will be denied the ability to extract any benefit by doing so, and will just get themselves in trouble. Deleting the spam article (and allowing or encouraging others to create a non-spam article) seems to me to be the best way to do this. --FOo 18:31, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
I didn't intend to say that "spam articles about notable subjects" should be "left up until someone gets around to "NPOVing" them". My feeling is that spam articles should be taken to AfD, not speedied, assuming they don't qualify under an existing CSD such as A3. In the course of an AfD, if the subject is notable, it may well get cleaned up promptly. If the subject is notable but a prompt cleanup does not happen a consensus may form to leave it up (perhaps with a suitable clean up tag, and active links removed, to avoid rewarding the spammer) or to delete it, depending on the exact circumstances involved. If the subject is deeemd not-notable, i would expect it to be delted no matter how it gets cleaned up. In short I think AfD offers the needed flexability and time to develop a proper way of dealing with such thinngs case-by-case. Things that don't need this should already be speedy deleteable under G1 or A3. DES (talk) 18:41, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
OK! This sounds pretty reasonable to me. --FOo 20:10, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
I understood DES' point was to use AFD instead of speedy for spam, but that's what I usually do anyway unless something is just complete junk. The Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion don't mention spam, though they do permit speedy-deleting an article that consists of nothing but an external link. IMO, DES is warning of a mistake that is not made that often. Jdavidb 19:01, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
I was interpreting this as part of an argument to add a speedy delete criterion for spam -- or for (IMO) mis-using the existing speedy criteria (mostly Patent nonsense or vandalism) to speedy delete articles. There are surely a number of editors who have advocated using speedy delete for most or all spam. I was not really responding to the question of whether on AfD a person ought to vote for deletion purely or largely on the basis of whether an article started as, or is currently percived as, spam. IMO that involves enough case-by-case judgement that I don't find a general rule useful. I hope that calrifies my comments a bit. DES (talk) 19:10, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I think we should be able to speedy delete an article on a company with little meaningful content and no assertion of notability in precisely the same circumstances under which it would be allowed for an article on a person. Is there a reason the two are different in this context? -- SCZenz 18:16, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Unacceptable conduct by User:24.54.208.177

Several people have attempted to communicate to this user that they are not to make controversial alterations to a Wikipedia policy or guideline page without establishing consensus first. Wikipedia guidelines are supposed to reflect consensus among editors. Therefore, altering a guideline to bring it in line with one's own preferences without consulting other editors is simply a form of deceit: it is creating the false appearance that the alteration has been agreed upon, by placing it under the heading of a Wikipedia guideline.

So far, the clue has not sunk in. This user persists in reverting the guideline page to a version which does not represent the consensus of editors in discussion. It doesn't seem to reflect anyone's position other than that of an anonymous user ... a person who created some articles that a number of people considered spammy, and therefore seems to have a vested interest in altering the rules against spam.

I consider User:24.54.208.177's reverting to be unacceptable conduct for a Wikipedia editor. I invite him/her to demonstrate some good faith: quit reverting. Either convince us that your changes to this guideline are worthwhile, or quit trying to change the rules. --FOo 20:44, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

All right, I'll leave it alone. 205.217.105.2 20:59, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

"Advert" tag

I encourage users to make use of the advert tag as a substitute for AFD of suspected advertisements. 24.54.208.177 02:28, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

noindex, nofollow

Why don't they just added noindex, nofollow to the tags of all external links? That way, if any spam, borderline spam or otherwise bad links were put on Wikipedia, they wouldn't be promoted by Wikipedia's PageRank. Nathan J. Yoder 03:59, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

As I understand, "they" already do. --DDerby-(talk) 06:43, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Because "they" (devs) did put nofollow on external links, and there followed an outcry and much indignation, moaning about unilateralism, and a vote. The result is that en.wikipedia no longer uses nofollow. -- Jeronim 18:12, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Proposed Wikiproject:External links

One major annoyance I have with Wikipedia is linkspam, as well as long lists of mediocre-quality external links at the end of articles. I believe the length of external link lists should be limited and include only a small number of the highest-quality, reputable, and informative websites. Preferably the linked websites would also be ad-free or minimize use of ads. I have come across articles with 50+ external links (e.g. Hybrid vehicle), sorted through them (a tedious process) to only find 6 links that were truly informative and worthy. How do we expect readers to discern those 6 informative references out of such a lengthy list?

I propose a WikiProject where we nominate and work on such articles that need their external links weeded through to get rid of linkspam and be quality-checked. I have also put forth guidelines and philosophy regarding external links — primarily drawn upon "official" Wikipedia policies set forth here and on Wikipedia:External links. I expanded on "What should not be included in external links" and welcome discussion on these ideas. Maybe we could use these to improve the "official" Wikipedia external link policy.

Further information: User:Kmf164/External_links and Wikipedia:Wikiproject/List_of_proposed_projects

If interested in helping out, please indicate your interest on the List of proposed projects. --Aude 23:59, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

There are plenty of perfectly good and useful Web sites that also carry ads. We depend on some of them regularly for citations -- newspaper or magazine sites, for instance; or even search engines. We can't expect all the resources in the world to be offered by volunteers, just because Wikipedia is. The problem with for-profit link spam isn't the ads; it's that the editor who adds it is acting in bad faith -- they aren't adding the link in order to improve the article, but rather to get money.
I would suggest that something like the last "how not to be a spammer" guideline might apply. If a person runs or profits from a Web site, then they should consider not creating a link to it themselves. They can always propose the link on the talk page and see if others agree that their site is useful and relevant. --FOo 06:19, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I agree that many good and useful websites contain ads. There should be no hard-and-fast rule regarding ads, as its more of a case-by-case judgment. The consideration should be the ratio of ads vs. useful content. If a site has more ads than content and information, then I'd favor deleting it. Or it the topic is less notable, maybe an ad-supported site is the only (or one of few) references and then would be okay. --Aude 14:34, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Multiple requests for help.

What about requesting help from lots of users simultaniously? Like the translations of Encyclopædia Britannica articles User:Armour were asking for. Doesn't it count as spam in some way? How should it be dealt with? --Boivie 22:10, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Cleanup-spam

Is {{Cleanup-spam}} really necessary for most of the articles that it is on? If it must be used, please only put it down in the External links section, rather used as the article header.

My personal opinion is that for articles that are permanent spam magnets (e.g. Search engine optimization), it would be better to have a "hidden" template that gets substituted in the External links section that adds an HTML comment warning spammers that they will get promptly reverted and possibly banned for multiple link spamming, and add the Category:Wikipedia spam cleanup to the article.

Any halfway intelligent link-spammmer will remove the template and category, so you also need to create a Wikipedia:List of frequently spammed articles. BlankVerse 00:28, 18 December 2005 (UTC)


OTR Spam

I've been noticing a lot of spam from a mailing list calling themselves OTR digest Could we get a removal bot or a block for this site thanks. Deathawk 19:00, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Spamming in progress

User:166.82.88.109 is adding to the external links section for a lot of articles related to Half-Life. I reverted one, but don't have time at the moment to go after the rest. Can anyone lend a hand? --Wrathchild (talk) 19:51, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

CounterCulture Wikia

Can someone please look at the recent contributions of User:Alpheus and decide whether the additions of this link is appropriate? Thanks. Deli nk 14:22, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I would say it's not appropriate. It serves no encyclopedic purpose and is just advertising for people to come edit it. Generally I am not in favor of linking to other wikis as by their nature they aren't going to be all that encyclopedic (anything they do that would be encyclopedic should be done here instead of linking there), and in this case it's not even trying to be info but a call to action. I'd say remove them all. DreamGuy 19:43, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
I have a response to this matter on my talk page, under 'External links'. Good day. Alpheus 01:49, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
And your response does nothing to justify the links at all and shows a crass disdain for our policies. DreamGuy 03:39, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
My response admits my error, DreamGuy. Alpheus 04:08, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Spam on talk pages?

We need to clarify what constitutes spam on talk pages. There is some disagreement on WP:ANI about this, see this discussion. JoshuaZ 18:52, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

From WP:SPAM#External link spamming: their aim is to improve their search engine rankings, not to directly advertise their product. What sparked the current discussion at ANI was a user putting a link on the talk page and the same message requesting that he place a link in the article to worldofbiography, "probably the most famous portal of biography to this article", on over 70 talk pages- which boosts search engine rankings in the same manner as putting it in the article itself. There is dispute over whether or not these links should remain on the talk pages (although as of right now, an anon has removed them all.) My own feeling is that we should have the ability to remove these in such a situation; the user should be treated no differently than any other spammer, with warnings and an eventual block if they continue. Link spam doesn't just make our articles ugly, it is an abusive use of wikipedia for advertising purposes and linkspamming works on talk pages just as well as in articles. The problem is that this user did just technically follow policy by asking first on talk; but i don't see why the response cannot be "no, this link is not qualified for inclusion, and please do not continue posting it to talk pages" . . . --He:ah? 22:11, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I recently wrote a MediaWiki patch (bug 5523 on bugzilla) to allow adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to links on talk pages. If there's consensus to enable it, it shouldn't take much effort from the devs. (See also discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list: [4]) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:35, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good. But we should have somewhere on the spam page a note that we have that set up (so spammers don't try to use the talk pages) and a note that even if such spamming is unsuccesful, doing it to many pages can still constitute disruption. JoshuaZ 02:02, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Certainly. Of course, many spammers probably won't read the note, or won't care. But the value of the patch is that it makes the job of tracking down and reverting such talk page spam less urgent. And, incidentally, it allows us to discuss spam sites on talk pages without having to worry about accidentally contributing to the pagerank of said sites. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 10:52, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

While technical fixes would be nice, I think that much of the problem goes away when the spam policy is looked at as a whole. Before directing spammers to How not to be a spammer item six, we should direct them to How not to be a spammer item 1: If you're here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for an idea or product that nobody's heard of yet, you're in the wrong place. Anyone trying to mass-add links here has completely the wrong end of the stick. It's pointless to try to apply to those people suggestions designed for the adder of a single link. (Whatever we do, we don't want our talkpage to look like this!) HenryFlower 11:41, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Editors are clearly told that they shouldn't add links to their own site directly to articles, but should place the links on Talk pages for other editors to judge and add if appropriate. If a site is relevant to a large number of articles, then that clearly implies that the editor should place such links at all those Talk pages (and this has been precisely the advice given in previous cases, such as the recent Librivox problem). Now editors are saying that that's spam, and to be forbidden — so essentially we're saying to editors who think that their sites are relevant that they should just shut up and go away. i don't think that that's helpful to the project.
One possibility would be to set up a central page where such people could add a mention of their sites, with an account of the breadth of relevance and the articles to which links might be added. Of course, new editors won't know about this — but better to tell them and point them in the right direction than (as happened in the incident that set off this discussion) to delete all their comments, threaten them with edit blocks (and finally, briefly to block them for doing what the Wikipedia guidlines say that they should do. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:13, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
When will a site be relevant to a large number of articles? The very, very few sites that are relevant to a large number of articles have been added by many editors, like links to IMDB and Project Gutenberg. If you feel like adding a link to 70 articles, it's likely to be spam or at least not valuable.--Prosfilaes 21:30, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I see 1 good thing and the rest are problems with this.
rel="nofollow" Is good for valid links related to the talkpage articles posted in.

However the rest are bad...

  1. It will only promote allowing spam because admin, rc patrollers and CVU people will get to lax in controlling the spam.
  2. It still does not clarify the no-spam no-link farm policy seeing that this can over take all talkpages since there is still no clear policy on stopping this.
  3. Will only be a open door to allow links that do nothing but sucker people into clicking on them and no telling what they could lead to.

A policy change is in order along with the new patch to circumvent these actions. If it smells like spam, looks like spam its usually spam. --Scott Grayban 10:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Forgot to add that its disruptive. Your just asking for mass complaints that no one is stopping the spammers from listing that stuff on there talkpages and no one is removing it. --Scott Grayban 10:59, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Link spamming

Recently I have been accused of link spamming because I was putting links to articles at mises.org. Other user deleted following links:

- from Criticisms of socialism:

- from Marxism:

Mises Institute is not a company and they don’t have adverts on pages. Linked articles are written by university professors and published authors and they can’t be found anywhere else on web. Is putting these links in the “External links” section link spamming? -- Vision Thing -- 14:53, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Internal spamming, take 2

This section hasn't changed significantly since User:MyRedDice wrote it in November 2004. Recently, it seems to be increasingly the opinion of the community that internal spamming is strongly discouraged, and there is a discussion at WP:AN/I currently about an admin blocking users for internally spamming notifications of deletion discussions, presumably in an effort to "stack votes".

It has become apparent that we have no policy or guideline explicitly proscribing vote-stacking, and that WP:Spam here seems to condone it, by telling us how to do it politely. On the other hand, there is an argument that it's disruptive, no matter how politely done, and we have the experience of having seen things like Wikipedia:Catholic Alliance of wikipedia by now. I thought it might be a good idea to start a discussion here, not of the recent events at the Administrators' noticeboard, but about whether this guideline needs to be revised in some way to reflect what we've learned as a community in the last 18 months. -GTBacchus(talk) 02:57, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

  • We should encourage forms of internal discussion and notification. This includes a user contacting 2 or 20 or 200 people that she has reason to think will be interested in a topic. Whether or not she notifies people who are likely to have a given opion or not is immaterial. Whether or not she encourages them to vote in a certain way is immaterial. It is not spamming if the people have been deliberately selected because they are likely to be interested. The only thing that should be considered SPAM is if the notices are given out indiscrimitely (randomly) to users who have never shown any indication they may be interested in the topic. Johntex\talk 03:16, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    I disagree. Watchlists are a form of entirely self-selective notification, and are sufficient. Remember that Wikipedia is not a democracy, and an attempt to flood a discussion as if it's a vote is disruptive to the process that's supposed ot be occurring, which is a careful consideration of the ideas involved, not a weighing of the most popular. It is the case that discussion flooding is often effective, but this is a disfunction of process, an example of abuse of the system, and not how Wikipedia is supposed to work. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:23, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    Watchlists are not sufficient. There are a million pages on Wikipedia; far less than one percent of them are on my watchlist. There are discussions I have been glad to know of, and I hope have been helpful at, that I would not have known of if someone had not asked me for an opinion. (They have not always gotten the one they wanted, either.) The correct response to the Catholic Alliance of Wikipedia is to discount their voice: one opinion is one vote, even if typed in at several keyboards. Septentrionalis 05:49, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Suggested rewrite

I'm thinking we should change the current wording:

Internal spam
By internal spamming, we mean cross-posting of messages to a large number of user talk pages, by Wikipedians, in order to promote Wikipedia matters such as elections, disputes, discussions, etc. It also includes the use of a custom signature to automatically append some promotional message to every signed post.
It's too early to make any definitive rules about this, but some general guidelines are:
  • Clean up your mess. For example, after engaging in cross-posting to promote some election, be sure to remove those cross-posts after the election is complete.
  • Be open. Don't make cross-posts that initially appear to be individual messages.
  • Be polite. Wikiquette issues are extra-important when a message is likely to be read by many people.
  • Less redundancy. Rather than copying the same five page essay to twenty talk pages, write it once, in the place where it is most relevant, and then link to it.
  • Don't use a bot. If you're not willing to spend the time personally sending the messages, don't force us to spend the time reading it (or throwing it away).
There are often better alternatives to internal spamming. For example, suppose you've written a cool new article, and you want lots of people to read it. Simply add links to it from other encyclopedia articles, where it is relevant, and also add it to appropriate categories. This increases the exposure of your article, while simultaneously benefiting the encyclopedia, without annoying your fellow contributors.

...to something like the following:

Internal spam
By internal spamming, we mean cross-posting of messages to a large number of user talk pages, by Wikipedians, in order to promote Wikipedia matters such as elections, disputes, discussions, etc. It also includes the use of a custom signature to automatically append some promotional message to every signed post.
Internal spamming for the purpose of influencing discussions is strongly discouraged at Wikipedia. It is considered disruption; users have been blocked for spamming links to discussions at Articles for deletion and Deletion review. See also Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy, and m:Polls are evil.
There are often better alternatives to internal spamming. For example, suppose you've written a cool new article, and you want lots of people to read it. Simply add links to it from other encyclopedia articles, where it is relevant, and also add it to appropriate categories. This increases the exposure of your article, while simultaneously benefiting the encyclopedia, without annoying your fellow contributors.

All I've changed there is the middle bit, from that bulleted list to a paragraph about why internal spamming is bad. What do people think? -GTBacchus(talk) 03:38, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

  • I think it would be a very bad change. First of all, the very definition of "spam" is that it is non-selective. If people are deliberately choosing people based upon their perceived interest in the subject, that certainly is NOT spam. Johntex\talk 03:46, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    The question isn't really whether it meets some previous definition of "spam". The definition of spam is whatever this guideline says it is. We're free to discourage whatever we decide is harmful, under whatever name seems convenient. Do you have an objection other than the semantic one? -GTBacchus(talk) 03:50, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    Yes, absolutely, but the terminology is important. It is not mere semantics. Please see political framing. Most people think they know what spam is. Most people think spam is bad. Calling something spam erroneously is not fair to the discussion. Johntex\talk 04:27, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    You're right, that is a fair point. Framing is important, but I don't think of it as erroneous so much as responsive to the community's usage. I see people talking about "spamming", at WP:AN/I for example, and they're talking about cross-posting identical or similar messages to many talk pages for the purpose of influencing decision-making discussions at Wikipedia. Maybe that's an extension of the usual meaning of "spam", but we're free to develop our own vocabulary as we see fit. We just need to be explicit on pages like this about what we mean when we use the word "spam" here.
    One might read the fact that people are calling this behavior "spamming" as evidence that there's some degree of community backing for the idea that it's bad. GTBacchus(talk) 4:54, May 3, 2006
    Some of the same people that are calling the action "spamming" also seem to be saying they particularly dislike it the more selective it is. In other words, certain people seem to think that posting to a largely disinterested group (E.g. village pump) is OK, posting to all people on all sides of a discussion is less OK, and posting to specific people is even less OK still. That seems to not only stretch the definition, it seems to stand it on its head. Johntex\talk 05:05, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    Ok, what do you think we should call it? It's kind of a targeted marketing. I think the position you describe (Village pump - ok, everyone who's shown interest - borderline, those on your "side" - unacceptable) is eminently reasonable. Can we agree to call the behavior in question something, so we can talk about it, and not just about why we're calling it the wrong name? -GTBacchus(talk) 05:12, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    I think if it is targeted, it should be called "campaigning". For the record, I think campaigning is not only fine, but beneficial. Johntex\talk 05:31, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    Absolutely not. We are not going to endorse turning Wikipedia decisions and discussion into who can get out the vote more effectively. JoshuaZ 06:36, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    (outdenting, and edit conflicting w/ brevity.) "Campaigning" it is then. I say it's a terrible idea, indicates an utter misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works, and serves to derail and misdirect our processes.
    You talk about framing, Johntex - I think you're framing Wikipedia as a political and legalistic thing. If you want to campaign, that implies that you see a vote occuring. The established culture - the one I learned anyway - is to think of these deletion discussions and the like, not as votes, but as discussions. They aren't bound to any strict majority rules or supermajority rules system precisely because they aren't votes. Articles are kept or deleted based on the arguments made for their keeping or deletion. It is normal and healthy, for example, if a majority of participants in the discussion are arguing in contradiction of policy, for their input to be disregarded. (In a legalistic framing, that looks pretty bad! ...But it isn't.)
    Now, if you frame this deliberation process as a vote, you're going to approach it differently. It won't be so important to you to understand and respond thoughtfully to objections; you'll be more interested in trying to attract more "voters" - and to what end? "Busing voters" doesn't tend to raise the level of dialogue, quite the contrary. The effects that it has are detrimental, namely: it floods discussions and makes dialogue difficult over the noise, it generates frivilous controversy by skewing "numbers" (which were never the point) away from the best arguments, and it reinforces a legalistic, unencyclopedic conception or framing of the Wikipedia project, as something controlled by "votes" and "laws".
    We don't want to turn our discussions into votes. We're not trying to measure the popularity of different ideas, and as soon as someone starts collecting numbers, that becomes the game, and everyone loses. Please don't do that; it hurts the encyclopedia. -GTBacchus(talk) 06:50, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I don't think there is any reason to see it as "bussing voters". You can look at as "bussing people to contribute to the discussion". Remember to WP:AGF. Johntex\talk 16:16, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
That's why Aquillion and I commented below. Alerting users who are generally interested or may have unique views on a topic is one thing. However, specifically alerting people who have one view on the matter isn't helping discussions, its simply vote stacking (heck even you call it "campaigning"). Furthermore, WP:AGF is not a suicide pact and does not force us to allow behavior which is detrimental to the encyclopedia. JoshuaZ 16:22, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm not questioning anyone's good faith, but I'd question the good judgement of anyone who thinks they're going to enrich a discussion by flooding it with declared partisans. I'd question that person's understanding of how a healthy Wiki functions. -GTBacchus(talk) 17:31, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I appreciate your assumption of good faith. Likewise, I'm sure you trying to make what you think is an improvement. I just happen to have the completely opposite view. I question the good judgement of anyone that thinks a small group of people speaking about something is somehow better than a bigger group. To me, that is what shows a lack of understanding of a healthy wiki. Johntex\talk 19:58, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
It's not about a small group versus a big group, as I see it. I'm happy for lots of people to contribute to a discussion. It's about trying to "get the vote out" and influence decisions with sheer numbers. It's also about participating in a discussion as a partisan, versus participating as someone who's trying to impartially weigh arguments. You still haven't addressed what I see as our fundamental disagreement - you're framing Wikipedia as a political process. If you assume that's what it is, then everything you say makes sense. If you assume otherwise, then none of it does. Should an encyclopedia be written by people with a lobbyist frame of mind? I say no. -GTBacchus(talk) 22:19, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
Even without any notification, partisans will appear. Posting an AfD notice to an article will stir up partisans who want it kept or deleted. Posting to a project (E.g. WP:Schools) will stir up people who think that nothing related to that project should ever be deleted, etc. People will have opinions. They will be convinced their position is right. They will know of other Wikipdeians (note that I am not talking about their off-site friends) who they think should know about the AfD. They will want to convince them they are right about it. Therefore, I see nothing wrong with them saying "I wrote this article on my high school and now this guy wants to delete and I think that's wrong so why don't you go and help me." This is a normal thing to do.
I haven't responded to your argument that I'm "framing Wikipedia as a political process" because I don't understand what you mean by that. Part of me wants to say Wikipedia is a political process, part of me wants to say that it is not. All decision processes are political processes at some level, that is human nature. Getting a new policy accepted here, for example, is basically about modifying it and compromising until it appeals to enough people to have a super-majority. You, right now, are involved in a political process in trying to modify this policy, and in discussing it with me in a good faith attempt to understand each other's positions and to find common ground.
However, if you mean political as in POV, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about recruiting people to come help put a POV across in an article. Let me be clear about this, no matter how many editors are recruited, they can't violate policy. POV edits would still be POV, even if they are made by a large set of users. Does that answer your question? Johntex\talk 22:56, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
  • This is complicated. There are cases where sending messages to multiple users is to be strongly discouraged, and cases where it might make sense. For instance, clearly posting a message to everyone with a userbox that makes you think they might be sympathetic to your cause (as one user was reprimanded by the ArbCom for doing) is unacceptable; on the other hand, if someone comes before ArbCom, anyone who has had extended dealings with them in the past could legitimately be alerted, even if that is a rather long list, since their comments can only help the ArbCom reach its final decision... that logic might extend to Adminship requests as well. In short, alerting people because you think they might be sympathetic to the side you support for some extraneous reason ought to be discouraged; but alerting them because they have relevent expertise or experience (including experience with a user on RfA or before the ArbCom) could be acceptable. --Aquillion 04:01, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
    • To build on that. As long as one isn't alerting people exclusively on one side of an issue, it should be generally fine. JoshuaZ 06:36, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
If you want to attract people on all sides of the issue equally, why not say that notifications can only be made to the village pump, and not to anywhere else? Johntex\talk 20:00, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
Oooh, I like that. Snoutwood (talk) 20:09, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, this is a point. There can be cases where notifications are good, so it could be helpful to distinugish those cases from the type of "busing" we're trying to discourage. Is there a better way to phrase "Internal spamming for the purpose of influencing discussions is strongly discouraged at Wikipedia," that would make that clearer? -GTBacchus(talk) 17:24, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

One thing that concerns me with this discussion is that there are times where limited notifications to people are a good thing; just this week, I had a new user show up on a new page I'd created related to a particular nuclear weapon design and start making extremely POV edits. They got very defensive when I reverted, even though I explained what and why, and asked "what could be done" about me stifling their attempts to "fix" the article. In this case, I sent notifications to three other editors who had contributed to similar articles in the last month or so, asking that they take a look and assist in generating a larger consensus.

The new editor has, now that it's a bunch of people involved, calmed down and cooperated nicely; the article has moved significantly in the direction of including the point of view they wanted, while remaining neutral and presenting all sides. But I can't predict that any of those other editors (or anyone else) would have come over if I hadn't "spammed" them.

So, was that wrong for me to spam? Would this current proposed policy ban having done that? If it wasn't wrong, but this policy would ban it, what can we do to make the proposed policy more flexible? If it was wrong, how are we supposed to deal with situations like what happened with me this week?

Thanks. Georgewilliamherbert 22:18, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

  • No. There is nothing wrong with what you did. Notifying a selected group of individuals does not fit any common definition of spam, and there is nothing wrong with it at all. Johntex\talk 01:46, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Spam blacklist

there is a page where you can put web addresses that constantly get spamlinks on wikipedia. these web addresses are then checked when a user presses "save" - if one is included the user cannot save until that address is removed. does anyone know where that page is, and shouldnt it be mentioned on this page somewhere? Zzzzz 08:43, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

meta:Spam blacklist —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 18:27, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Proposal: Enable rel="nofollow" outside the main namespace

Following a current discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list, and occasional earlier discussions elsewhere, where the it has met no opposition at all, I am hereby proposing that rel="nofollow" be enabled for external links on the English Wikipedia outside the main (i.e. article) namespace.

While the use of rel="nofollow" in Wikipedia articles has been and continues to be controversial, there is little reason not to use it on talk and other non-article pages. The reason this has not been done so far is technical: there has been no way to enable rel="nofollow" in some namespaces but not others.

However, a patch now exists to enable this functionality in MediaWiki. I am now seeking confirmation that consensus in fact exists to enable it on the English Wikipedia — if so, the technical aspects should be trivial. Please note that this proposal is not about using rel="nofollow" in articles; this is not the time and place to discuss that. Once the (presumably) uncontroversial part — using nofollow on non-article pages — has been dealt with, the remaining issues can then be discussed at leisure.

Please indicate your opinion on the matter below. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:02, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

  • Support Pretty obvious. Stevage 15:12, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. A step in the right direction. It would be better to return to the previous status quo where all external links were nofollow. · rodii · 15:27, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. This will help with one annoying source of junk search hits. EncMstr 16:05, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Definitely a good idea, I also think enabling it in the article namespace is a good idea as well. Martin 16:31, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. That's really an obvious thing to do. --Mormegil 16:37, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. Will help. Chick Bowen 16:38, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support per nom. should eventually also be on main article space. Zzzzz 17:53, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support Platonides 20:04, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Weak support. It seems to be unfair to sites that are likely to be commonly linked to for some good reason outside the article space (say, that meatball wiki people sometimes link to). Google and other search engines rely on links to establish how many people like a certain site, and how many link it to any given concept. It seems only fair to give such sites their due if we legitimately cite them outside the article space. But, of course, Google is encouraging the use of nofollow for user-submitted links, so I can't really object too strongly on those grounds. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:52, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Conditional Support for all namespaces Except Help: and Wikipedia: (and of course main:). — xaosflux Talk 03:31, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Weak support, I'm with Bluemoose there. However, the Help: namespace documentation isn't updated much, so it should also be enabled there, as Xaosflux said. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 17:22, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support (and for the main namespace too). Simetrical's point about fairness is well-taken, but I think the situation as it is is too lopsided: we've much more potential to harm the whole 'net by letting link spammers abuse our stupefyingly high aggregate pagerank as applied to their spam links, than we do to harm a few sites by denying them legitimately-ranked links (which, if they're high-quality, they'll probably get from enough other sites anyway). Also, as I understand it, google themselves have specifically requested we do this, and presumably they understand the tradeoffs. —Steve Summit (talk) 21:50, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
Do you have a source for the Google request? Snoutwood (talk) 23:56, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
Never mind, here's something on it from Wikitech-l. Snoutwood (talk) 00:03, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support - I'd love to be able to link to my personal site and not be accused of exploiting Wikipedia's page rank. — ceejayoz talk 23:18, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support, per Ilmari Karonen and Ummit. Snoutwood (talk) 23:56, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support -Quiddity 05:55, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support - Mrjeff 14:08, 22 May 2006 (UTC) I do link my home page from my talk page, and like the fact it probably boosts my google pagerank. However, I accept I probably shouldn't :)
  • Support - per User:Simetrical and User:Ummit. Angus McLellan (Talk) 16:35, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support Naconkantari 21:04, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support per above abakharev 01:26, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

I've applied the patch to MediaWiki trunk, and enabled nofollow here for all but main namespace for the moment. It is however my intention to enable nofollow everywhere in the long run (though this might end up being in more limited form, for instance allowing some whitelisting or other verification process). --Brion 21:26, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

  • Support nofollow everywhere Phr (talk) 18:57, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Strongly appose blanket use of nofollow, by enabling nofollow we are essentially telling automatons that the links we provide are crap! is that really what we wan't to do? I don't know if archive.org looks at nofollow but if it does then that would make enabling nofollow even worse (we do find it highly usefull to be able to look up references there after the original sites die right?). Smart use of nofollow is a good thing though. If we use it on pages outside the main namespace (already done), links that were added to an article in the last day and on very new articles (btw maybe we should introduce a new article review process that looks at each new article when its a day or so old and decides if its spam or not) then we should have eliminated most search engine spam possibilities without telling all automatons that our links are worthless. Plugwash 14:07, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

Fear of spamming accidentally

I've just read this project page and am left feeling intimidated. I try to work on poorly covered areas, and sometimes have to defend articles against deletion – or at least improve the level of discussion at the AfD. To do this, I often seek out the three (or whatever) other people on the whole of Wikipedia who might know something about the topic to add their comments either way. Will I be shot for spamming? The project page has a lot about what isn't allowed: very little explicitly on what is... Could you possibly expand? Nice people read this page as well as horrid spammers! Ta, JackyR | Talk 17:32, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

PS Since m:Polls are evil, how does "vote-stacking" mean anything? Isn't it the content, not number, of comments that matters? JackyR | Talk 17:33, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

PPS I've now found, buried in the above, comments on exactly the same anxiety. Still, could some of this make it's way to the Project page? V many thanks, JackyR | Talk 17:39, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Internal Spamming Take 3

Discussion over at Wikipedia:T1 and T2 debates revealed that the wording on the guidelinecommentary on Internal Spamming is from 2004 and may be significantly more permissive than the consensus of the community. This makes me think the text here should be improved. However, that discussion is not primarily about this guideline, so I am raising it here. If this position is true, lets improve this wording. GRBerry 15:21, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

At this point, the most out of date part is where it says "it's too early to have any definite rules". I had suggested a rewrite above (#Suggested rewrite), but that discussion spun off into the abstract. I just now did this. What do we think? -GTBacchus(talk) 21:37, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
First let me say, whatever the outcome of this debate on internal spamming is, having sentences like Internal spamming for the purpose of influencing discussions is strongly discouraged at Wikipedia is harmful. Let's have a policy that says you can't ask people on their talk pages to come and vote on anything ever or face blocking, or let's say it's fine as long as you don't become disruptive with it. "Discouraging" behavior does not provide a clear guideline. As to the specific issue, I see no problem at all with asking people to come and weigh in on a topic, regardless of their previous affiliation, and I think the reasons proffered against it contradict each other. People essentially seem to be saying, "Hey, WP isn't a democracy," but are simultaneously afraid that the vote-stackers will "outvote" the people who came to the article randomly. If The Powers That Be don't have to be swayed by extra voters, then why not let the extra voters have their say, however they got there? IronDuke 23:44, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. Morton devonshire 00:25, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
Iron Duke, you ask a good question, and deserve an answer. I've seen it put very well here. To restate it anyway, the fact that Wikipedia isn't a democracy and our deletion discussions aren't votes is true, but it's kind of a delicate process. A crowd of people flooding a discussion, which they would never do unless under the impression that it's a vote, are still disruptive, and ruin the discussion for its proper purpose. If enough people show up and "vote" against policy, they also make it harder for an admin to close it against the numbers, even when it's appropriate. It's a stonewalling tactic, and it works as disruption. Furthermore, it spreads and reinforces the idea that our discussions are votes, and in a community like this perception matters. A bunch of people who think they're voting will raise a stink when they think their rightful votes are being discounted.
Regarding your other point, that it should either be strictly and specifically disallowed by policy, or else allowed, you're wrong. "Discouraged" is just right. Wikipedia is not the kind of organization that is based around fixed "rules". This is not a "rules game". We have more of a culture, and the best way to be happy here is to learn that culture. -GTBacchus(talk) 00:49, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your quick and thoughtful reply, Bacchus. To take your last point first: it will perhaps not surprise you to learn that I do not consider myself wrong on this point. Yes, my suggestion is counter to the dominant WP culture, but I'm raising my voice here to ask that the culture be changed. I think fixed rules are preferable, and admins can still go on a case by case basis. But using a word like "discouraged" here is worse than useless -- it's meaningless. If I campaign for votes, will someone put a frowny faced emoticon on my talk page? Or will I get blocked for a week? I have no way to know. There’s no harm in having the policy be "Don't do it unless you have a very good reason, and then you should ask on [Page X] if it's okay." The other reason I hate "discouraged" is that it encourages selective enforcement. Some admins are quick on the trigger, some aren't. Some admins are really hostile to editors of certain persuasions, some aren't. It's all too nebulous. For example, I looked at the discussion you linked to and saw it was almost entirely about userboxes (which is vote-stacking, properly, and not "campaigning," I believe). If I were to continue this discussion there (and if you have a sec, could you point me to the most relevant part of the page? It's huge and mostly about stuff that's irrelevant to what I'm discussing) and decided to invite my new friend Morton devonshire to join me, am I "spamming?" Or does it take more than one message? How many? You see why this is irksome. One is just supposed to absorb the "culture" by osmosis. So it's like the Matrix: it can't be explained, you just have to experience it, right? As to your first point, what you seem to be saying is that 1) Admins can be easily confused by too many participants and 2) People who are invited to a discussion will be more disruptive than editors who haven't and 3) People who think they're voting will complain when their votes aren't counted (but mightn't the people who weren't invited do the same?) and we can't have people complaining here. I guess all I can say is 1) Admins are pretty hardy souls. I'm sure they can separate the wheat from the chaff in a discussion. 2) I think people who care about an issue often have the most useful things to say about it and 3) Every AfD I've seen has functioned exactly like a vote, where consensus (people talk about 60-40) is king. I'm sure there must be exceptions to this (although I know of none) but I don't think people's misconception (?) that they're voting has anything to do with campaigning. IronDuke 01:23, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
IronDuke, you seem to be a very reasonable person, and I agree with some of your statements, while I would take issue with others. The real gem, though, is your characterization of the mysterious Wikipedia culture, which editors are expected to somehow just "get", and which includes a number of bizarre and paradoxical claims about the nature of reality, or so it seems. I've been thinking about this state of affairs recently, and I think you're right to observe that it's odd. It's a very real and deep issue, in my opinion (maybe I spend too much time online!). That said, I support that very same Wikipedia culture, and I'm now going to argue all of those counterintuitive points, about how things that look like votes aren't votes, and how rules made of mist are a good thing. If history is a predictor, there's a small probability that you'll buy it, and if you do, you'll be an admin in a month.
So, simple things first; I've certainly seen AfDs closed against the numbers. The most common example is when we discount blatant sockpuppets, or accounts that just registered to cast that one "vote", which sometimes happens when someone goes to another website posting a link to the deletion discussion and asking all their friends to go "vote" to "save the article about Joe", where Joe is some guy from the office they're giving a hard time to, or something. I've seen that happen a dozen times, and I'm not even an AfD regular. You're right that people who care about an issue might have good things to say, but groups of people, rallied for a purpose, tend to engage in groupthink which is not what we're after. (We get it often enough without any rallying going on, and we don't need more.) Experience shows, that when someone "gets out the vote", the quality of discussion goes down, not up. I've seen AfDs that had to be closed because they'd been so flooded with sock- and meat-puppets that there was no real hope of sorting out a discussion of how to apply the salient policy points, which is all an AfD is for. I think I've addressed your numbered points, to wit: (1) It's not about confused admins, but ruined discussions, (2) Groupthink happens, (3) It happens all the time.
Now, your more meaty point is the one about rules made of mist. I want to think about that longer. I apologize for my tone, saying "you're wrong" like that. Obviously, you don't find yourself wrong. I appreciate the thoughtful discussion, and continue to learn more about the Wiki every day from such conversations. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:54, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
Sir, I'll have you know that all of my points are equally meaty. (Sorry about that. It's getting late.) Seriously, thanks for the nice words -- all too rare, sadly. I hope you don't mind my saying so, but I believe that you have shifted the debate slightly when you bring in sock and meatpuppets. Yes, indeed, people who are not part of WP culture have no "votes" here, and that trend must be discouraged; that doesn't mean that regular Wikipedians ought not to be selectively invited to give their opinions. But let me present a concrete, though fanciful, example for you, to show you where I'm coming from: say I'm an admin, and I'm contemplating an AfD on the article Klingons are Nazis. If I myself know nothing about Klingons, I'm going to need to learn as much about them as I can. It will help to get input from people who speak Klingon, people who know something about Nazis, as well as general comments from people about "argument" articles like this one. I'll be really grateful to have partisan users, on both sides, flood the AfD and give well-reasoned opinions with citations to back them up. Yes, there will be trolls (I can ignore those) sock and meatpuppets (these can be unmasked) and people who are just making shrill and irrelevant points. I feel, as a theoretical admin, I can wade through all that and use the info from people who know more about the subject than I to make a decision. (My decision? Klingons are not Nazis, but militaristic, irredentist totalitarians.) IronDuke 04:26, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
I don't think your example quite works. A deletion discussion consists of asking, "is this an encyclopedic topic?", "is it verifiable?" It's not about whether some claim is true or not. That deletion discussion would not involve arguments about whether Kingons are or are not Nazis, and if those became the focus of the discussion, because a bunch of people who felt strongly about it showed up and changed the subject to that, the discussion would be effectively derailed, and probably end up a forced no consensus, regardless of merits, or else a controversial close, which many admins will avoid. (We don't all have scales and sharp teeth, it turns out.) The deletion discussion for Kingons are Nazis should invovle deciding whether there exist reliable sources documenting the "Klingons are Nazis" theory, and maybe opposition to it. No expertise of Klingon or Naziism (sp?) is needed to determine that (unless the reliable sources are written in the Klingon language, heaven forbid). Irredentism is a new word for me, thanks. -GTBacchus(talk) 04:37, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
You're right, my example was flawed. Let me tweak it slightly: it's an RfC because there's been an edit war around a single sentnce. There are three camps. Camp A wants "Klingons have been accused of Nazi-like war crimes, but no evidence has been provided to supprt ese claims." Camp B wants "Klingons have long behaved in a manner reminiscent of Nazis" and Camp C wants "Klingon culture lacks elements of corporatism and therefore can't be considered Nazi-like." This would be an opportunity for people who really know the scholarship to come to the debate and weigh in. Will it also be an opportunity for screaming trolls to flame each other? Yes, but that's what happens with controversial topics on WP, regardless of campaigning. If "Wikipedia is not censored" then why am I not allowed to ask editors who might be interested in a topic to come and work on it? Or may I do that a long as I can demonstrate that no one I am inviting has any identifiable ideology? Does it apply to WP policy discussions as well? It's confusing, and gets us back to that "misty" quality of WP culture. IronDuke 15:17, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
It is confusing, and fuzzy around the edges. Asking an expert to come give their informed opinion about some matter of fact is one thing; acting as if rounding up more numbers is the way to "win" (as if anybody wins if the wrong decision gets made), is quite another. Bringing a lot of people to a deletion discussion, even informed ones, is a bad idea for the very same reason there are no giant ants: scaling and power laws. As the size of a discussion increases, the density of one-on-one dialogue goes down with the square of the number of participants. Discussions, like exoskeletons, don't scale well. The worst thing someone can do is act like it's about numbers. If you can inform 20 people, without giving the impression that numbers matter to you, then I'll bet you'd be left alone. If you only inform one or two, you're almost certain to be left alone about it.
As to your example, that content dispute would probably benefit from the presence of those familiar with the scholarship out there on Klingon culture (I'm sure there's tons of it.) Still, verifiability is the ultimate test. If a reliable source says Klingons have been accused of Nazi like tendencies, then we can say: "XXXX says that Klingons have been accused...," and provide a citation. Camp B wats to put in a POV statement, which won't fly, and camp C only gets to make their counterargument about missing elements of corporatism IF there's a reliable source wherein someone makes that argument. That's all there is to argue about. It's the beautiful thing about NPOV: it's not our job to decide who's right, we just report however much of the controversy has been documented by good secondary sources. -GTBacchus(talk) 21:04, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Campaigning for what a person thinks is right is not spamming, and it should be encouraged, not discouraged. Johntex\talk 01:46, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
    Johntex, I believe your situation leads to having encyclopedia content dictated by the faction that can most effectively "get out the vote", which is anathema to NPOV. We should be encouraging a culture of neutrality, not one of partisanship. If Wikipedia is partisan, it sucks like the rest of the internet; insofar as we rise above partisanship - at an individual and a group level - everybody wins. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:54, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
I disagree. Saying that people have no right to campaign is like sayign no one's opinions are wanted unless they already happen to be in the discussion. Opinions are meant to be delivered, and minds are meant to be changed. We can't get a normalization of opinion unless people are first allowed to spread their opinion around and to recruit other people to come share their opinions as well. Johntex\talk 22:01, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
Not what I said - putting in terms of "rights" at all betrays a deep misunderstanding of what I'm saying. I'm not saying they have no right to do it, nor that they do have a right to do it. I'm not dealing in that currency at all. Try a paradigm shift, if you have any idea what I mean. Spreading opinions around: fine. Citing sourced facts, and sourced notable opinions: better. Recruiting people to rally to "take a side" in anything here: not good. Why do you think that taking sides is an appropriate way to be thinking while trying to write an encyclopedia? Learn to rise above "sides", and you'll be a better encyclopedist. -GTBacchus(talk) 23:52, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
I completely disagree. Campaigning for what a person thinks is right is not spamming, and it should be encouraged, not discouraged. That is what makes a good contributor to any project, including writing an encyclopedia. Johntex\talk 19:24, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
Umm... that's a verbatim repetition of what you said on June 8, but you're not really responding to any points I raised in response. Let's try a different approach. Can you cite one example, actual or hypothetical, where you think campaigning would be the way to best make some decision about an encyclopedia article. Please be as specific as you like. It's not clear to me what you're thinking of when you say "campaigning for what a person thinks is right". I'm not sure how you're seeing right and wrong tying into writing a neutral encyclopedia. -GTBacchus(talk) 20:30, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
If you are looking for examples of how it can work okay, you won't find those in Arbcom findings, but there are plenty of examples of how notification can be done in a non-abusive manner. Here's one: Aeon1006 notified me of the Afd on What Really Happened -- it was an article that I don't generally edit, because it's populated by POV-pushers from the What Really Happened website. However, Aeon knew I was interested in the subject, and thought the article should be deleted, so he notified me, and I went to the Afd and provided my reasoned argument for the deletion of the article, based upon Wikipedia policy reasons (which was subsequently removed by a very angry vandal) -- nothing bad there, and it acted as a nice counter-weight to the Meatpuppets who showed up from the What Really Happened website. The article got deleted. What's wrong with that? Morton devonshire 22:09, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
You're confusing two rather different questions, Morton. I didn't ask for examples of where someone brought others to a discussion and it didn't do any obvious harm. That's obviously easy to find. We've talked before about a lack of examples where rallying participation in discussions was "encouraged", and you never provided any example like that, at least not in our conversations. I'd still be happy to see such evidence for the wording you were trying to insert into what is supposed to be a descriptive guideline. Johntex is talking about something different here - he's saying that it's actively good to campaign for what you think is right. I'm trying to figure out what he's talking about, and I don't think your example is really an example of that. It doesn't sound like Aeon notifying you about that AfD was really an instance of campaigning for some cause or something; I don't know what Johntex is thinking of, which is why I'm asking. I don't think anybody is even suggesting that notifying one person who's interested in a discussion is a bad thing. It's when someone starts notifying lists of people, and trying to alter the demographic balance of the discussion towards one perspective. That's always harmful, even when no obvious bad result happens, because it reinforces the idea that doing that sort of thing is cool, and that an appropriate way to write an encyclopedia is by lobbying for it to say what you politically think it should say. The spirit of the rule is "Hey - approaching encyclopedia writing as an advocate is entirely inappropriate, so don't do it, and don't act as if you're doing it, because people will get the wrong idea." Johntex seems to be coming out against that spirit, and I'm still curious what he's thinking. -GTBacchus(talk) 22:31, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
(reset) I think I realize now why you find my comments puzzling. I am not at all suggesting that we try to form up "sides" to push POV in an article.
However, with regards to policy issues, or more generic issues, I think it is fine to campaign. I will list several examples where I think it should be OK to selectively notify people to come and support your point of view.
First, I'll define "selectively notify" - I am not talking about writing a bot to indiscrimitely reach hundreds of users. I am talking about placing notices, by hand, in one or more places that you have selected in part or in whole because you think the person(s) receiving the messages will be friendly to your argument. Those messages can be worded neutrally, or with an appeal to act in a certain way.
  1. Hello, I know you have edited articles related to Arkansas. There is an article on ___, Arkansas that has POV problems because someone keeps inserting a disproportionate amount of negative demographic info. I need you to come join the discussion.
  2. Hello, there is someone trying to make a new proposal that says notability can't be included in decisions on allowing an article. I know you think that idea is rubbish, but I'm afraid you haven't seem the page. Please come speak out against this idea.
  3. Hello, I know you have done great work expanding our articles on video games. You may not be aware that there is an article on ___game up for deletion. A lot of people are saying that it can never be a good article. I need your help to convince them that it can and to save this article from AfD.
  4. Hi there! you voted to reject ___ proposal the last 3 times it came up. You may not be aware it is up for another straw poll. Please help keep it rejected!
  5. Greetings. You don't know me, but I am personally offended by ___userbox you have on your User Page. I think these boxes get in the way of forming a community spirit and I am requesting, user-to-user, that you take the box off your page.
  6. Announcement to the Schools WikiProject: There is someone trying to create a policy that says that school articles are deletable if they don't cite notability. Please come lend your voice as to why this is a bad idea.
  7. Announcement to the LGBT WikiProject: I want to create an LGBT Portal, but some people at Portals don't think its a good idea. Please come help me get this portal started.
  8. Announcement to the Sexuality Portal Talk page: Someone is trying to create an LGBT Portal, but I think that is a bad idea until we all work together to get this Portal featured. Please "Oppose" the LGBT Portal.
I think all the above are perfectly legitimate. If you believe "thing A" is best for the project, then it is your *duty* to help "thing A" become a reality. That includes campaigning for people to assist you in your goal. Johntex\talk 22:59, 10 July 2006 (UTC)


Arbitrary subsection header

Groupthink -- we already get it at Afds. If you prowl around Afds much, you'll begin to see that it's the same tired group of people voting who like to vote on Afds -- not much analysis going on there, mind you. Like IronDuke, I believe Afds should be about people who know and care about the subject, and therefore have a REASONED opinion about whether a subject is notable or not, verifiable or not, original research or not, etc. As it stands now, random Afd-watchers, mostly who have no context in which to make their decision, dominate the process. Morton devonshire 21:15, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

If the current system has problems, that doesn't mean we should elevate those problems to a feature of the system. If you think that the process of "getting out the vote" raises the level of the discussion, I just have to say that experience proves you badly mistaken. Show me where it's worked. I can show you where it's really messed things up. The very act of rallying people creates a situation where you get block thinking. Historically, it's unhelpful. We didn't make up the no vote-stacking rule for no reason you know - we were addressing an actual problem. -GTBacchus(talk) 23:52, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
GTB, I'm not taking the piss here, but could you point to votes that were ruined by campaigning (without sock or meatpuppets)? I'm genuinely curious. IronDuke 00:26, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
I don't imagine you are (taking the piss, I mean). Just give me a few minutes to dig around. -GTBacchus(talk) 00:28, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
While you're looking, a thought occurs to me. As has been pointed out before, everyone who votes in an AfD or any other vote is self-selecting, and therefore has some sort of bias. The only way to overcome this would be to essentially force all Wikipedians to vote on randomly assigned topics. We'd all have to do it, like jury duty, before we could move on and edit other article. Somehow, though, I think this idea would receive little support. But absent that, there's no such thing as a "pure" vote by disinterested Wikipedians. IronDuke 00:45, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Ok, rather than dig through my own AfD contributions to find the examples I've seen, I decided to go to the experts: the AfD regulars. So I posted here, and we ought to be able to sit back and get handed the best examples from collective recent (or distant) memory. Or, maybe we'll just be told I'm wrong.
Meanwhile, back to our conversation, I don't think the point is to get a disinterested participants, or even a representative sample, because a good AfD discussion isn't about the issues involved in the article; it's about sources, and whether or not they exist. That's it, plus application of some pages like WP:BIO and WP:MUSIC that have sprouted around certain classes of articles. What we've got is that a body of AfD regulars, who are steeped in AfD culture, which like all of Wikipedia culture is inscrutable until it's suddenly second nature, supplemented by people like me just passing through and making a few comments, and of course the interested parties, who tend to only comment on the article that they're excited about. The body of AfD regulars doesn't have a particular bias that I've ever noticed, except against people who clearly don't "get" AfD culture, and want to talk about how they feel about the content of the article, rather than about reliable sources. I think that situation is as it should be. It's like we have a special breed of creature that inhabits a certain cavern, and they pretty much decide which articles stay and go, which is great, because they're fairly consistent about it. Every now and then, a bunch of really passionate people storm down there and try to tell the denizens how to do their job, and that's generally bad... or so the evidence may soon show. Oh, here's a good read: DefendAgainstPassion from MeatballWiki. -GTBacchus(talk) 01:24, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Okay, I have to point this out: you do realize that, in a sense, you are doing the very thing that you object to? That is, you are rallying a group of users who have a specific POV on AfD's (an expertise, even) and asking them to come here and weigh in. I have no problem with that, indeed, I am very interested to see what they have to say, if anything. It is, in fact, exactly what I am advocating. And as for a subterranean race of Wikipedians who decide which articles stay and which go, well, if that's so, I'm leaning even more forcefully now in the direction of widening "voting" on AfD's and other topics. IronDuke 02:00, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
To be fair, I didn't give them a link and ask them to come mob our tea party. I still thought about what you point out as I was doing it, and about how I was doing it differently from the "vote-stacking" I'm talking about, in an important way. In your Klingons/Nazis example, if you were to post notes at Talk:Klingon and Talk:Nazism saying that contributors there might be interested in an AfD discussion about Klingons are Nais, I don't think that would bother people. That's different from going door to door saying, "come and vote to save the Klingons are Nazis article!" on fifteen talk pages. In this case, I started out asking for examples of how vote-stacking derails AfDs, but by the end, I had shifted as far as asking for counterexamles if those are around as well.
I think a closer analogy would be if you went to the Klingon Guild page where people who are interested in justice for Klingons have assembled and asked for input on Klingons are Nazis. What you'd probably get is a lot of hostility to that phrase. Which is fine, in my view. IronDuke 03:39, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Can you explain your last sentence further? I don't actually know the proportion of regulars to others on AfD; I was stating my impressions, perhaps too blithely. Why not spend some time there yourself, and let me know if your impressions are different? -GTBacchus(talk) 02:37, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, I have particpated in a few AfD's, buthave no knowledge of the "culture" as such. I was taking your characterization as gospel (if I understood it correctly) that there were regulars there, and that they had a more or less homogenous point of view (which doesn't mean it's wrong). I will try to get there more... IronDuke 03:39, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
I didn't mean to suggest that the AfD regulars have a homogenous point of view. I meant to suggest that they know what AfD is about, and it's not about anyone's point of view. It's about our verifiability policy. People who are passionate about an issue tend not to care very much about reliable sources, only that their gospel gets told in a Wikipedia article. Do you think AfD discussions should be about something other than applying Wikipedia:Verifiability and related policies? (It is kind of fun to participate there, sometimes. Just the process of learning all the little references they make, like WP:NFT is entertaining.) -GTBacchus(talk) 03:45, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
One more thing: can you name, or find someone else to name, a vote where an admin went against consensus (and there were no sock or meatpuppets)? Sorry, don't remember if I asked you this before, but I'd love to know. IronDuke 03:39, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
I'll think about it. I don't have one on the top of my head. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:45, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
I've certainly seen it at Wikipedia:Deletion review, where you have a lot of people who "vote", but don't make any policy argument - those votes are frequently discounted. I'll still have to rummage around for actual examples, or I'll just let you know the next time I see it happen. You're asking all the right questions, for sure. I'm interested to see what the AfD people will tell us. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:48, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Evidence, of a sort

So I went ahead and analyzed all the AfDs I've participated in, which is already not a representative sample. I looked at "my contributions", main namespace, and looked at the 149 AfDs to which I've posted for any reason, whether posting a recommendation, closing, or just fixing a typo or something. There are 149 of them. At a rough approximation, they fall into 4 groups: 37% were deleted unanimously, 21% were deleted based on 70-99% saying delete, and 27% were kept with under 50% recommending deletion. Those three groups were uncontroversial; only in the range where 50-70% recommended deletion (14% of the total AfDs) was there any question of what would happen. The weakest support I saw for a deletion close was 50%, and the strongest deletion support against which I saw an admin close was 70%. That breaks down approximately to: out of every 19 AfD's, 11 are uncontroversial deletes (70% or more saying delete), five are uncontroversial keeps (under 50% saying delete), and only three are controversial (between 50% and 70% saying delete). Also of those 19, about three get closed early, two as deletes and one as a keep; all three are generally uncontrovesial.

There was one closure where an admin decided to userfy, before five days went by, in the face of 100% saying delete. That was a little bit odd, and I think it was the wrong call. Even the AfDs with sockpuppet infestations managed to get over 50% saying delete if they closed as deletions. Here's a list of the middle group, in which 50%-70% said delete:

So, nothing in my list was actually closed against more than 50%, except for that one userfied page. Some of the deletions above with support in the 50%-70% range are the closest I seem to have to closures "against consensus". There's more to say about this; but I have to turn in for the night. -GTBacchus(talk) 08:02, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Wow. Thanks so much for doing that, I look forward to your conclusions when you get the time. Quick question: what is "userfy?" And were there any keeps "against consensus?" IronDuke 01:00, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
Userfy means to move the page into someone's userspace and then delete the resulting cross-namespace redirect. It's what we sometimes do when someone posts what should be their user page as an article. As for keeps against consensus... there were plenty of articles kept when 50-70% were saying delete. Does that count? -GTBacchus(talk) 01:14, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. I'd say 60% is roughly consensus so, yeah, anything that was at 70% delete and kept anyway (assuming no socks) would indeed tend to undermine the notion that Wikipedia is a democracy... but then, I wonder why people come and vote saying stuff like "Delete as per nom." Is there really a point to that? IronDuke 01:39, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I know what you mean. It certainly helps reinforce the idea that there's a vote going on when people register little more than another name on the list. When it's working, it's kind of like the old Protestant idea of predestination - if we get >65% agreeing delete, that's not why we delete it, but that's a good sign that the proper reasons to delete it are in place. That usually works, because most cases are clear deletes or clear keeps. In borderline cases, people try to influence the sign we're reading (the numbers) instead of addressing the policy that it's supposed to be a sign of. Borderline cases are really kind of up to the whim judgment of the closing admin, and deletion review is the appeals board where you have to convince over 50% to undelete, which would have made it not an actual borderline case at AfD. (I haven't alalyzed CfD or TfD, or RfD, or IfD, or SfD, or participated in any of them enough to know the differences.)
There is one point to just saying "delete per nom". In obvious delete cases, a half dozen of those makes the difference between an obvious delete and something that nobody bothered to comment on, which should then be relisted. Sometimes, there's nothing to say beyond what the nominator said. There's also the effect of numbers that, until you get a handful of people on one side of the debate, people on the other side might not bother to spell out their good arguments, on the grounds that there's no opposition anyway. It's actually a pretty complicated process, with all the various forces at play. -GTBacchus(talk) 02:40, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

More on canvassing

The existing guideline says, "Don't attempt to sway consensus by encouraging participation in a discussion by people that you already know have a certain point of view, but do encourage people who might have an interest in the discussion, and whom you reasonably believe will objectively apply applicable Wikipedia policy, to participate in forming a consensus." I am going to add have added, "You may inform multiple editors on both sides of an issue about a pertinent debate, but not those on just one side." This will allow me to build consensus by posting an announcement on Wikiproject AntiUserBoxes and Wikiproject ProUserBoxes (the actual wikiproject names have been changed because they don't really matter; the point is that they are likely to have opposite viewpoints) without violating this guideline. Supplicant 01:07, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Um... rewording a guideline doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't do before, you know. Do those Wikiprojects really exist? How bizarre. -GTBacchus(talk) 05:20, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

External link finder

I made a page that takes an external link URL or domain name as input, and returns a list of all articles containing that link: [5]. It's an automated version of a method I've been using to find linkspam.

The results are usually a couple of days old, so it's not good for reverting recent spam. Still, I think it could be useful for the links that are continually re-added to articles.

If you're interested, try it out and tell me what you think. Is it a good idea? Is there an easier way of accomplishing the same thing? Wmahan. 06:16, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Very useful! I'm dealing with someone who is spamming one site across a large variety of pages, with a plausible enough link that it may not get caught, under a variety of accounts, so it's really hard to know that I've found it all. Just yesterday I found myself wishing for such a tool, and this caught seven pages I didn't know about. Thanks! · rodii · 13:52, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm glad you found it useful. That's just the sort of situation where I was hoping the tool would come in handy. Wmahan. 16:43, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for your tool. I find it very helpful. Neil916 15:50, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Try Special:Linksearch. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 23:51, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Spam templates

Are there any spam templates for talk pages that deal with actual advertising content added to the body of the article rather than just adding links, like Lisk Content Management System? Anand 13:33, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I think Template:Advert would be appropriate for such a situation. Maybe it should be mentioned on the project page. Wmahan. 16:38, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Spam warning message to ad-spammers

I've come across a sophisticated spammer who has done the full range of spamming - images, blatantly advertisement articles for (minor) companies, link-spamming and even promotional categories! They are obviously quite aware of all kinds of wikitricks, including making a null edit to their user page so they show up as a blue link (grrr) and getting rid of speedy deletion notices. Unfortunately I was the first one to apply the "spam" warning template to their talk page so it may be quite some time before they end up being banned. I found that the spam warning template doesn't apply so well to this kind of high-end spammer, they are obviously far more than just linkfarming, so it feels like they are being censured only for a minor part of their annoying activities. Should there not be a more general warning for spammers who engage in this full gamut of spamming? TheGrappler 05:35, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Morton Devonshire, come on down

Hi. Putting the sentence "You are encouraged to inform multiple editors on both sides of an issue about a pertinent debate." into the guideline doesn't make it true. Where on Earth has it been the case that such activity is "encouraged". Are we just lying the guidelines now, and using "you are encouraged to" to mean "I really want to"? GTBacchus(talk) 18:51, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand what you are asking. If you are asking for examples, I can provide plenty where people have been notified about issues in a responsible way, and the person notified has responded in a reasonable and objective fashion. What I don't know is the mechanics of showing those threads -- how do you do that? Also, I don't appreciate you making me the subject of a debate -- feels like WP:PA -- please remove my name from the subheading. Morton devonshire 03:05, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
I don't consider you the subject of a "debate", Morton, and you're free to edit the subject heading to whatever you think it should be - this is a Wiki. The statement I quoted above "you are encouraged to inform multiple editors..." says that editors are encouraged to notify a broad spectrum of other editors of a "pertinent debate". I don't think that's true, which is to say, I don't think that activity is actually encouraged. Who encourages it? I'd like to see a case where someone has notified a lot of people on "both sides of an issue", and that's been "encouraged". Like maybe it came up, that someone thought it might not be cool, and posted on AN/I, where the general consensus was "no, that's perfectly cool behavior, in fact, we encourage it." Every time I remember a case of vote-notifying coming to the attention of the community at large, at AN/I or the Village Pump, there's been a pretty strong chorus of discouragement. Would links help, to where that's happened? Should the guidelines say that something is encouraged, when it is in fact regularly discouraged? I could be wrong about this - if so, please show me. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:27, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Paris Review

This discussion was copied from User talk:Nlu. --Nlu (talk) 16:48, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Why are you reverting the insertion of these links? While we should be combatting link spam, we shouldn't be deleting links to legitimate resources such as a PR interview. Gamaliel 14:44, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I feel that those are spam. Look at the user's editing pattern. I have little doubt that these were intended to be linkspam, and I think that this kind of editing pattern needs to be discouraged in the strongest terms. --Nlu (talk) 14:45, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
Even if the links are legitimate and useful resources? Gamaliel 14:46, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
I think so -- and that's assuming that they are legitimate and useful. I don't find that they are. --Nlu (talk) 14:47, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
A link to an interview with an author from one of the world's most prestigious literary magazines is not a legitimate and useful link? Gamaliel 14:48, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
I am not going to have this argument with you. The user's editing pattern needed to be stopped. If the links themselves should be added, they should be added by consensus. --Nlu (talk) 14:50, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, I don't see why we should prevent someone from adding useful links because of their editing pattern. Gamaliel 14:51, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm a student interested in linking these Paris Review interviews--free interviews, I might add, from a non-profit institution--how might I provide readers with these important piece of information without offending Wikipedia's guidelines?--Linebreak 15:08, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
Well, I'll say that you're already seeing a disagreement between me and Gamaliel here, but I'd say, read WP:SPAM and WP:EL for more guidance. --Nlu (talk) 15:09, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
So the more appropriate thing would be to discuss the contents of the interview in the body text and then cite the actual TPR interview below? I'm still a bit hazy how a free, non-profit resource that does nothing but inform interested readers could be viewed as something malicious and commerical. Deleting these links seems to indicate that somehow we should also delete the author's list of published works because someone could go out and buy these books, therefore making Wikipedia a contributor to a commercial activity. --Linebreak 15:16, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
As I said, I'm not debating this. It's not that they're malicious; it's that Wikipedia is not a search portal. --Nlu (talk) 15:17, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
A "search portal" in what sense?
"I'm not debating this." Well, that hardly seems fair. Isn't consensus the guiding light? I think adding maybe a salient and telling quote about an author within the body of his or her entry and then linking to the interview from which it came after that would be a sensible compromise. It's worlds away from a linkbot's actions, and it would improve the entry.--Cw cw 15:23, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
Although now I see that basically your entire talk archive is filled with this kind of fight. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but gosh if being eternally vigilant isn't incredibly confining.--Cw cw 15:39, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

As someone interested in Lawrence Durrell, I appreciate Linebreak's addition of the Paris Review reference to that article, since it contains good background. Why can't Wikipedia contain comprehensive references to other reputable web sites? Nlu cites WP:EL, but that says: "What should be linked to: . . . Sites that contain neutral and accurate material not already in the article. Ideally this content should be integrated into the Wikipedia article, then the link would remain as a reference, but in some cases this is not possible for copyright reasons or because the site has a level of detail which is inappropriate for the Wikipedia article." I think that describes the Paris Review interview well: it's 30 pages long, so it would be excessive and a copyright breach to incorporate it in the article, but people wanting to know about Durrell will find a link helpful. -- JimR 06:27, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Based on the link to the Paris Review article on Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which is not freely available and can only be accessed by an online purchase, I originally formed the view that the anonymous poster who added it was a spammer. This suspicion was reinforced when I noticed that the editing history seemed to consist of little else other than the addition of such links. On examining the other links, however, I found that the majority appear to lead to articles which can be freely downloaded in PDF format, and hence are a genuinely useful resource. I don't really think that the single-minded bias of the editor can in itself be held against him/her, if the material itself is useful. Can I suggest, then, that these links are reviewed on a case by case basis to establish whether or not they are valuable? Personally I still strongly believe that where a link leads to nothing but a pay-for-view issue of the periodical, it should not be on the page. --Stephen Burnett 10:33, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

I'll copy-and-paste this discussion over to Wikipedia talk:Spam, where I think it would be more useful. --Nlu (talk) 16:48, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

So I work for The Paris Review, and someone alerted me to this discussion. Here's the news: a few of the interviews are going to be taken down from the website within the next week. Thus those external links will now lead to a page with a teaser of the interview, but not the full text. In short, the external link would cease to be a valuable resource. Can I safely remove the link from wikipedia for each of the ones that are taken down as that happens? I'm worried 1. about having a suspect editing pattern (taking several similar links down) and 2. endangering the legitimate links that do still give access to the full interview. Tprwiki 20:54, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

If the Lawrence Durrell interview I used as a reference in the The Alexandria Quartet article is taken away, please alert me here or on my talk page and I'll deal with that one (see Wikipedia:Citing sources#What to do when a reference link "goes dead"). More generally, I think it would be a pity if the Paris Review removed some of its old interviews (the Durrell one was in 1959). Their archival value to the world is considerable, but I doubt the revenue from trying to sell them would be much. Perhaps you could argue against this with your colleagues. Of course, the Review is free to adopt a commercial approach, but this would make more sense with recent and new material. However, if interviews do end up being removed which are the subject of external links (as opposed to ones used in notes or references), you will probably be right to delete the links from Wikipedia. -- JimR 06:46, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Lawrence Durrell is safe. As for the others, we're only taking down the six interviews that are currently up that will be appearing in a new interview anthology (which will also be publishing the ones that we couldn't get web rights for--so there is some usefulness to the volume). Even nonprofits have to try to make some money, I guess. --Tprwiki 14:16, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Spamming vs advertising

I think the spam guideline is a bit too narrow in scope and leaves the door open to more subtle forms of advertisement. There is an ongoing AfD debate on ABCOffice in which the user fighting for keep (User:ABCOffice.com) complains that Office Depot or Staples get an unfair advantage because their articles describe, for instance, their policy of "low price guarantee". To a certain extent that latter information can be considered as NPOV but I think that still should be considered as using Wikipedia as a vehicle for advertising. I think the spam guideline should include a section that specifically deals with what is fair game in such cases. Pascal.Tesson 15:42, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Internal Spamming Take 4

I've removed the section on "internal spam" because it is often cited as some kind of "right to spam" (for instance see here). The abuse of Wikipedia shouldn't be condoned in guidelines. --Tony Sidaway 11:05, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

At the moment this removal has been supported by Netscott who has expanded on it with a proposal that appears to me to build on current practice, and opposed by Morton Devonshire who says (in an edit summary) that "there has been consistent consensus for the policy as written". Any more thoughts? I personally support Netscott's proposals. --Tony Sidaway 16:03, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
The proposed new wording read as follows:
Wikipedia editors are not to engage in aggressively cross-posting in order to influence votes, discussions, requests for adminship, requests for comment, etc. Although the Arbitration Committee has ruled that "[t]he occasional light use of cross-posting to talk pages is part of Wikipedia's common practice"1. In the past, aggressively worded cross-posting has contributed towards an Arbitration Committee ruling of disruptive behavior that resulted in blocking2. It is best not to game the system, and instead respect Wikipedia's principle of consensus-building, by not crossposting in such a manner, and instead allowing a given process to reflect the opinions of editors that were already actively involved in the given matter at hand.

--Tony Sidaway 16:21, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

It makes more sense to base the guidelines on what ArbCom has actually said regarding such matters, perhaps a good solution would be to incorporate this wording into the section that is currently displaying. --Netscott 16:58, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
I think that would be workable. It would set the guidelines into context. --Tony Sidaway 17:18, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
I understand your POV, but it conflicts with other Wikipedia policy, and ignores the fact that such notification can be done in a responsible way which doesn't violate Wikipedia policy -- the policy as proposed is too far-reaching, and represents a very aggressive policy which I submit is not appropriate given the nature of other Wiki policies. Morton devonshire 17:12, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
I've requested a clarification from arbcom here. For the moment, I would say of the above that "aggressively" might be better defined. I know there's some resistance to getting too specific in order to limit system-gaming, but I believe that the more nebulous the policy, the more likely it is that people are going to be tempted to game it. Small quibble: in the phrase "in aggressively cross-posting," the word "cross-posting" functions as a gerund, I think, and therefore, being noun-like, takes an adjectival, as opposed to adverbial, modifier. Thus, we might render it either "engage in aggressive cross-posting" or "editors are not to aggressively cross-post." IronDuke 17:59, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
We don't need the arbitration committee to tell us that aggressively crossposting is unacceptable. --Tony Sidaway 22:28, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't mind learning just what exactly constitutes "aggressive" cross-posting. IronDuke 08:03, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
Spamming with intent to stack a poll.
I've tried to reword the StrangerInParadise incident so that it expresses the sense of the Committee more accurately. He wasn't blocked by the Committee, he was put on probation, which eventually led to his de facto banning. The key wording of the finding was that the editor used provocatively worded edits to lead editors to vote in a certain way. This is the essence of the most abusive kind of spamming. --Tony Sidaway 06:15, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
Fair enough. But is a distinction made between me going to your talk page and writing "Tony, would you please vote for X," as opposed to going to your talk page and saying "Tony, would you please vote on X?" Also, are numbers of editors contacted a factor and is there any way to be specific about that? IronDuke 15:48, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
This is a guideline, intended to be interpreted with commonsense, not a recipe to be followed slavishly. If we give number X, then someone will inevitably write a script to spam X-1, so we don't go there. Having said that, most serious spamming incidents I've seen have involved upwards of 30 user talk pages.
One aspect of abusive spamming is selectivity. If we select fifty people who have edited Basketball and ask them to go look at a new proposal, then it's different from selecting fifty people who have put themselves into the Category of "Catholic Wikipedians", or who have otherwise distinguished themselves by the cast of their personal opinions. If I say to the latter, "go vote on the poll on Talk:Abortion" it's reasonable to infer that I'm deliberately attempting to game the poll in order to achieve a particular preconceived result.
Another factor is that we have Wikipedia:Current surveys and other means of alerting the community to ongoing decision-making discussions, and so there is no real reason to try to alert editors on their talk pages, which is why I personally regard such organised attempts with extreme suspicion. --Tony Sidaway 16:05, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Points all well taken. What do you think of the idea of having a sort of list in descending order of severity? Thus:

  1. Abusive mass-messaging: absolutely not ok
  2. Mass-messaging/vote-stacking using userboxes: really, really frowned on
  3. Selectively notifying certain editors on their talk pages in order to influence a vote: frowned upon
  4. Mass-messaging everyone who has contributed to an article regardless of previously expressed opinion: usually okay
  5. Notifying a small number of like-minded editors about an issue: usually ok

All of the above, of course, would be with the proviso that abusive behavior and rules-gaming to disrupt WP is not allowed under any circs. Thoughts? IronDuke 20:48, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I'd be happy with the above list as it is, but it's a start. I'll see what others think about this. --Tony Sidaway 20:51, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
I think it's all overkill. This is not really the problem -- meatpuppetry and sockpuppetry are far bigger problems on Afd's. Morton devonshire 04:53, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I do not advocate that people form up "sides" to push POV in an article. However, with regards to policy issues, or non-content issues such as whether an article should be deleted or not, I think it should be fine to campaign for your point of view. I will list several examples where I think it should be OK to selectively notify people to come and support your point of view.
First, I'll define "selectively notify" - I am not talking about writing a bot to indiscrimitely reach hundreds of users. I am talking about placing notices, by hand, in one or more places that you have selected in part or in whole because you think the person(s) receiving the messages will be friendly to your argument. Those messages can be worded neutrally, or with an appeal to act in a certain way. I am talking specifically about recruiting existing Wikipedia editors, as opposed to recruiting people from off the site.
My examples:
1. Hello, I know you have edited articles related to Arkansas. There is an article on ___, Arkansas that has POV problems because someone keeps inserting a disproportionate amount of negative demographic info. I need you to come join the discussion.
2. Hello, there is someone trying to make a new proposal that says notability can't be included in decisions on allowing an article. I know you think that idea is rubbish, but I'm afraid you haven't seem the page. Please come speak out against this idea.
3. Hello, I know you have done great work expanding our articles on video games. You may not be aware that there is an article on ___game up for deletion. A lot of people are saying that it can never be a good article. I need your help to convince them that it can and to save this article from AfD.
4. Hi there! you voted to reject ___ proposal the last 3 times it came up. You may not be aware it is up for another straw poll. Please help keep it rejected!
5. Greetings. You don't know me, but I am personally offended by ___userbox you have on your User Page. I think these boxes get in the way of forming a community spirit and I am requesting, user-to-user, that you take the box off your page.
6. Announcement to the Schools WikiProject: There is someone trying to create a policy that says that school articles are deletable if they don't cite notability. Please come lend your voice as to why this is a bad idea.
7. Announcement to the LGBT WikiProject: I want to create an LGBT Portal, but some people at Portals don't think its a good idea. Please come help me get this portal started.
8. Announcement to the Sexuality Portal Talk page: Someone is trying to create an LGBT Portal, but I think that is a bad idea until we all work together to get this Portal featured. Please "Oppose" the LGBT Portal.
I think all the above are perfectly legitimate. If you believe "thing A" is best for the project, then it is your *duty* to help "thing A" become a reality. That includes campaigning for people to assist you in your goal. - Johntex\talk 05:21, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

This is an interesting discussion. Just how do you quantify the level of notification that is acceptable regarding an issue. If 100 different users contribute to an article and someone who has not been an active editor puts it up for deletion, wouldn't it make sense to notify the article contributors. Just posting on the article talk page may not work, because many editors don't watch every page they edit. Of course contacting everyone with a username that starts with the letter F could be excessive.
Right now, the Guideline clearly states that posting in these instances is legit, as long as the posts are removed once the issue is done.
IronDuke has put together a great list to start. Is there anyone that can put it into a pretty box to make it look more official. Then we should invite more users to come look at it to see what they think. It is definitely not a good situation to have the Guideline say that one thing is ok, but have users punished for following what is currently written and has been there a long time.
Can't wait to see what the box will look like, and hear the extra comment on clarifying this (sorry I don't know how to make a box, otherwise I would). We certainly don't want anyone to get caught in the middle of following the Guideline, and others under the assumption that their behavior was wrong. The guideline needs to be changed to prevent that from happening. --FriendOfPeace 04:00, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
I didn't know how to make a box either, and it only took me half a day to figure out how to do something most 12-year-olds with a computer could do in their sleep. Still, it was fun... IronDuke 04:12, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
I asked folks at WP:AN to come look at your box. FriendOfPeace 04:43, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Tony Sidaway wrote, "If we give number X, then someone will inevitably write a script to spam X-1, so we don't go there." - True, so, why not set the number low enough such that X-1 is a perfectly okay number? Say, three. More than three cross-posts, it's spam, unless there is some situation-specific exception. A clear policy would save well-intentioned editors from straying into iffy territory, provide admins a basis for spam removal and blocking in the case of violations and head off the debates which seemingly arise nearly every time spamming is alleged. Making the rules clear would give editors an opportunity and a good reason to follow them, and funnel disagreements to this page, where they belong. Is there a problem with this idea I've not considered?Timothy Usher 04:23, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Yet Another Unenforceable Policy (YAUP)

JA: Like any WP:Policy or Guideline whose fair and equal enforcement would depend on knowing the real-world identity and affiliations of each editor in question, the aspects of WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, WP:VER, and WP:SPAM that deal with advancing particular purposes are simply null and void. Just f'r'instance, nobody has any way of knowing for sure whether that editor or that cabal of evatars who are so insistent about imposing the POV of their favorite secondary source on an article is in fact the author or publisher of the work in question. What will be the result of attempting to enforce a WikiProvision of this type — and I use the word "vision" blindly? The editors who are honest enough to use their real names will be at the disadvantage of the editors, their agents, and their evatars who are not. WikiPar for the course, of course. Jon Awbrey 18:04, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Substituting cleanup tag example

Would anyone have a problem with me subst:ing and then decategorising the example of {{cleanup-spam}} on this page? It's coming up in categories and it would perhaps be better if it didn't. Thanks. —Xyrael / 20:24, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

deleted/blocked

I have made the guideline reflect reality by adding in the fact that spam is often deleted on sight and spammers are often blocked. Hipocrite - «Talk» 12:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I've never seen internal spam for AFDs, etc. be removed outright, nor have I ever seen anyone be blocked for it. Could you provide some evidence of this? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:44, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
[6], from yesterday. If you believe that was out of process, I am happy to find other incidents. Hipocrite - «Talk» 20:56, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
But have the messages/spammings themselves been deleted? IronDuke 02:27, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes. Hipocrite - «Talk» 10:34, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Not trying to be a jerk, but can you show where? I am planning on making some changes to the page, time permitting (as per what I wrote above), and would like as much info and as many opinions as possible. IronDuke 13:27, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
[7] and others discussed at [[8]]. As a side note, I suggest that you not make substantial changes to this guideline unless said changes reflect already existing consensus. Hipocrite - «Talk» 13:51, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the links. As for making changes, that is in fact exactly what I am contemplating, and will soon do, although I believe my changes will be entirely consistent with current policy (and I'm sure people will quickly let me know if I'm wrong). I (and others) have left numerous requests for comments and clarifications, and I welcome your input as well. IronDuke 14:10, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Right, spamming random people can get you blocked, that's true, and such spam is often removed (rather pointlessly, since the new-messages message still appears). I was thinking of internal spamming generally, in which the recipients are often happy to be pointed to whatever you're trying to show them. That generally doesn't ever get removed or blocked, as your addition suggested it did. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 18:03, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
In the cited example, the vote-stacking targets were excited and happy they were shown where to votestack. Hipocrite - «Talk» 19:46, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, really? Interesting. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 23:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Policy and Consensus

In order to be a Wikipedia policy, something must have *WIDE* consensus, and not just be the point of view of a few advocates. Please stop re-writing the Internal Spamming section to reflect what is your aggressive and not-widely-held point of view. Morton devonshire 18:02, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Your latest removal relies heavily on an ArbCom decision and yes, I do believe it pretty much reflects consensus. There's certainly no reason to remove the fact that the ArbCom has held this against people before. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 23:14, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
One Arbcom decision, which did not turn on cross-posting, but on other disruptive behavior as the reason for discipline, does not constitute wide consensus. We are not talking about editing an article here, we are talking about changing Wikipedia policy, and that requires a much wider consensus before implementation. That wide consensus has to be demonstrated, not just alleged. Morton devonshire 00:28, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
As someone who is sympathetic to your position, Morton, I have to say I disagree with you. I think what evidence there is in terms of policy is all on the side of the deleted paragraphs. If you could come up with something countervailing, other decisions, which could be added to what was there already to modify it, I see no reason for anyone to object. My main objection isn't so much to the policy per se but to the vague way that it's presented. I think it's bound to confuse people. IronDuke 00:38, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
I stand with the consensus that the paragraphs merit inclusion, and would like to see a clarification proposal. This appears to be strong consensus. Hipocrite - «Talk» 00:54, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
I made one up here (in the festive purple box). Thoughts? IronDuke 01:05, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Remove "using userboxes," and I disagree with "usualy ok," to be replaced with "sometimes accepted." Hipocrite - «Talk» 15:55, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Obviously, there is no consensus for your changes. Morton devonshire 00:33, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Canvassing

Okay, so I've made some changes. My intent was not to change policy here, but to illuminate it. Feel free, of course, to edit this mercilessly, but I hope people won't revert it; I believe that my changes reflect a rough consensus. IronDuke 21:37, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Hipocrite's edit of your proposal. I've reverted a removal by Morton Devonshire. --Tony Sidaway 18:27, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Fine. IronDuke 00:42, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Webtoons

I have a webtoon and I want to make an article about it, with the links to the sites of the webtoon. Am I allowed to do that?

Cheddar Cheesia

Votestacking

I would like to propose an amendment to the current section on Votestacking. The text currently reads: Votestacking is sending mass talk messages out to editors who all share a common userbox and informing them of an upcoming vote.. One issue that has come up several times on CFD, which I think could be addressed with a guideline, is whether it is appropiate to notify voters on a re-submission of a AFD/CFD which previously ended in a "no concensus" result. Even more than in the userbox case, it is possible to notify everyone that is likely to vote in a certain way in a specific AFD/CFD, based on their previous vote in the same (or very similar) case. The extended problem is that if we allow this, we would either have slanted votes or everyone that participated in the previous vote should be notified, which might be considered SPAM. If we don't support this practice at all, then users that have the affected pages in their watchlists will still be notified of the AFD/CFD if they still care enough, or not if they don't. No spam is required. Can this be discussed in this forum?

Proposed amendment: Votestacking is sending mass talk messages out to editors who are on the record of a specific opinion and informing them of an upcoming vote, such as via a userbox or other user categorization. (Simply stating an opinion on a user page is insufficient to meet this criteria because it is not mass-searchable.) In the case of a re-consideration of a previous debate (such as a "no concensus" result on an AFD or CFD), it is similarly unacceptable to send mass talk messages to editors that expressed only a particular viewpoint on the previous debate, such as "Keep" or "Delete" voters.

Maybe a little wordy, but I see this as a special case of the current rule. Thoughts? JRP 13:20, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Have you read further down in the "canvassing" section? Some of your points may be addressed there. IronDuke 14:37, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
Votestacking is not about userboxes.
I'm only commenting on the text that is already there, which implies that there is a coorelation between votestacking and userboxes. I suspect that would be a separate debate/change to the guideline if you wanted to try and have that assessment removed. Also, IronDuke, I did just notice the note later on down the list... but perhaps it needs to be more explicit? 209.202.205.1 16:00, 31 July 2006 (UTC) Ack. Having log-in trouble. I'm User:JRP

Archives

What, if anything, is the policy for archived user talk page spam? Should it be blanked or deleted or left alone? I'm referring to this. I've also posted the matter on the village pump if anyone is interested. Karwynn (talk) 17:21, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the isse is specifically spam in this instance... An article's talk page is for discussing the article, not the item/topic itself. There is a lot on that archive which should just probably be deleted since it's not about the article... /wangi 11:49, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Also, the non-main namespaces use rel="nofollow" (see above), which reduces the incentive to spam talk pages as compared to articles. Wmahan. 14:59, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Where does one go to report possible spam?

Is there a WikiProject evaluating possible spam the way that there is one evaluating fair use issues. I've read this page, but don't see anywhere to go for an evaluation of a particular user's conduct or a particular set of links. The contributions by 88.112.250.113 (talk · contribs) on August 1 look to me like spamming for a particular video. My connection is not high-speed enough for me to look at the video and evaluate whether it might actually merit the link. Can someone check into this? And can someone tell me if there was a better place to report it? - Jmabel | Talk 05:26, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Not sure if it's spam, but in general you can report possible spam at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam. Wmahan. 06:47, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Just how DO I "contact a sysop"

In the article it says to "contact a sysop" when one sees so and so happening but it is not clarified in the article where exactly to go or what procedure to use. I feel it might help to clarify this. The answer by Wmahan to the question above seems to give a part answer but it might seem a little far-fetched for someone trying to support and follow a policy to have to go to question number 53 on a discussion page in order to know how to. As a benevolent "part newbie" on WP who will appreciate anything that will clarify and help follow WP policies (and hoping I'm not the only one), I hope this will get acted upon by a lot fit to produce consensus and augment this point in the article. (If "part newbies" are not intended to report anything to nowhere no matter what they might see, this might be specified there, too ;-) .) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.134.227.14 (talk • contribs) 6 August 2006.

Question about spam

If I write, on my user page, a certain university I'm attending and link it to an article available on Wikipedia, is it considered spamming (or advertising the university)?

Thanks, --JT 11:35, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

No, it's not. The purpose of your user page is to help provide some context about yourself, see WP:USER for the relevant guidelines. Thanks/wangi 11:44, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Icon ads spam making it like Wikipedia promotes commercial sites

Regularly, ads icons are inserted in front of external links, that make it look like Wikipedia treats them special, promoting or endorsing those sites. This gets worse now with the templates used for external links to IMDb, MusicBrainz, etc.

We really could use a specific, explicit point of policy against this (and a direct WP:ICONAD or WP:SPAMICON or something), that could be immediately cited in the edit summary for removing or reverting this spam without long discussions with each "new user" doing the spamming for those sites. We could also mention it in bold as a NoInclude warning in the related templates, so as to remove plausible denial to future offenders.

→ Crossposted at WP:VPP#Icon_ads_spam_making_it_like_Wikipedia_promotes_commercial_sites

-- 62.147.37.34 23:44, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Question

Hello. This question is for a Wikipedian who understands WP:SPAM.

I work part-time for a small gallery/publisher that publicises artists and (every once in a while) sells their work. I recently created an article about one of these artists, an eminent contemporary South African artist and professor named Paul Stopforth. The gallery website has images from the artist's 2004 exhibition, photographs of the works themselves, and text related to the art and its history. The text is no doubt useful to anyone studying Stopforth's work, as are the images of his work, most of which are not available elsewhere on the internet. The text is biased, of course, (the gallery is selling him, after all); however, as scholars of art and art history read both NPOV sources (encyclopedias) and a spectrum of POV sources (galleries, critics), the content on the website would be a useful component of a research project on the artist.

I'd like to add an external link to the gallery website at "Paul Stopforth" because I know that scholars of Stopforth would appreciate having the content. However, I'm conflicted, because I know that such a link would provide side benefits to the gallery and (very indirectly) myself: better Google ranking, more publicity, a semblance of authority, etc. Also, as things stand, the only links on the article are neutral or positive reviews of Stopforth's art and life. One final count against the link's inclusion is WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided #3, which suggests that I shouldn't post the link because I own/maintain the website.

In summary: can a link be added to an article when the external website is POV and has a partly commercial purpose, but also has a purposefully academic value and would uniquely improve the article?

Here is the link. Omphaloscope » talk 18:54, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Site is more or less OK to link (by the way, you have a typo on the "about the artist" page: "increased it�s reign of terror"); given that its your own, the appropriate thing to do would be to mention it on the talk page of the relevant article, then let someone else make the call on whether it is a valuable addition to the article.
By the way, given that you are obviously connected to the artist: any chance of getting a (possibly low-res) image of one of his works released unde GFDL so we can use it in the article? - Jmabel | Talk 07:44, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, Jmabel. I fixed the typo, and I'll try and get some photos released under the GFDL, too. Omphaloscope » talk 16:07, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

I've now copied this conversation to Talk:Paul Stopforth. Omphaloscope » talk 16:12, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

A friendlier face to (some) spammers

In several cases I have come accross, a new user adds advertising to an article (often self promotional links). While they seem well intentioned, they are unaware of policy and guidlines. I have in the past put up {{spam}}, and then a note explaining that I really did want to welcome them, but that we can't have spam. To streamline this process, I created a message (borrowed mostly from {{welcomepov}}) that might welcome but link to policy on advertising. I have posted it at my sandbox for the time being, User:TeaDrinker/Sandbox. Thoughts or revisions? --TeaDrinker 22:56, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

A nice sentiment, and nicely executed as well. I would only change: "seem to be advertising or promotional" to "seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes."
Okay, I would also change "Wikipedia does not use advertising in articles, since they do not conform to a neutral point of view' to "Wikipedia does not allow advertising in articles" with perhaps a link to [9]. I don't think NPOV issues are really the reason behnd the ban, but I'm not 100% sure, IronDuke 23:04, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Based on the positive response here and on my talk page, I went ahead and created it at Template:welcomespam. I did change the wording as suggested, great suggestion. --TeaDrinker 23:24, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Looks like it has been used a few times. Good job. I went ahead and added a reference to it in the guideline page under "Warning Spammers". --Satori Son 19:30, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Historical markers website...spam?

I started reverting a long list of the same links by one IP, then realized they were more widespread than I thought; as of this writing, 142 links. Thought it is a .org, it has Google ads. Personally, I think it might be appropriate for one or two articles (like Historical_marker), but the number of links shouts "spam" to me. OhNoitsJamie Talk 04:40, 6 September 2006 (UTC)`

To me, the fact that the links were mass-added gives the appearance of spam, and a few of the links I chose at random didn't have much unique content. Other IPs adding the links include 12.5.54.34 (talk · contribs) and 12.5.54.38 (talk · contribs). Wmahan. 06:58, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
The spamming continues almost as fast as I can remove it, for example by Thedocwat (talk · contribs) and the first IP I mentioned above. Another one used previously is 24.51.144.60 (talk · contribs). Wmahan. 20:02, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
There are only about 17 left now (thanks to everyone who pitched in). The ones that remain are reasonably specific to the article, so I left some of them be. OhNoitsJamie Talk 22:27, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Internal spamming/campaigning

This was originally posted as a query on Requests for arbitration. It has been moved here to facilitate permanent record-keeping.
For the arbitration committee. --Tony Sidaway 02:30, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

There's an ongoing discussion at WP:SPAM about what constitutes acceptable talk page contact between users regarding discussions, votes, polls, etc. Prior rulings that have been pointed to are this prior ruling and this one. Could you offer any more specific information about what is and is not allowed/discouraged, for example: is it the use of mass userbox messaging that is disallowed (if it is), or is internal spamming/campaigning disallowed only if disruptive? Thanks. IronDuke 17:48, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Briefly, I think a reasonable amount of communication about issues is fine. Aggressive propaganda campaigns are not. The difference lies in the disruption involved. If what is happening is getting everyone upset then it is a problem. Often the dividing line is crossed when you are contacting a number of people who do not ordinarily edit the disputed article. Fred Bauder 16:58, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Reporting link-spam

A small amount of link spamming has occurred on Electrical wiring and Electrical wiring (UK). I have placed an informal request on the talk page of the IP address, and then a final spam warning template when exactly the same behavior was repeated with no explaination. If the spamming continues, I will no longer be able to revert it due to the three revert rule. If necessary, where should I report this spamming? --Gerry Ashton 19:18, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Usually if you ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam about suspected spam, someone will take a look. In this case, it looks like the person stopped adding the links, at least for now. In case you didn't know, the standard practice for first-time spammers is to go through each of the templates {{spam}}, {{spam2}}, {{spam3}}, and {{spam4}} (or an informally-worded equivalent), waiting each time to see if the spamming continues, before resorting to blocks. Often an apparent spammer is slow to understand Wikipedia's policies against promotion, but will stop if gently corrected. Thanks and I hope you continue to help keep Wikipedia clean of spam the future. Wmahan. 20:41, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
Also you should be made aware that the three revert rule does not apply to spam or vandalism. The only thing is to be sure that it actually is such, not an editorial dispute. Pollinator 03:19, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Is this spam?

I got this message on my talk page: User_talk:DirkvdM#What_about_this.3F. I don't see how this is relevant to me, so it looks a lot like spam. actually, it looks a lot like something I'd find horribly uninteresting, but may be potentially dangerous to the 'weak of mind'. It's just that the one who put it on my page is not the same person who wrote that. So strictly speaking it is not spam, but that does not change anything from my pov. DirkvdM 13:23, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

  • A little odd, but since he or she only seemed to contact you about this[10], it doesn't really constitute spam. But should they continue and post this message on numerous random users' talk pages, that would violate the various restrictions on Canvassing. --Satori Son 13:45, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Talk page abuse

Could someone please have a look at this:

I believe that this clearly breaches Wikipedia:Spam and Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines; but I would appreciate it if some more experienced people in this area had a look. It is part of a spamming campaign by sockpuppet Orkadian (talk · contribs), when they have even put spam in article space: [12]. --Mais oui! 12:24, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Poor Administration

Three months ago I created a page for a website I belong to. It was not spam, and it was not an advertisement - unless you consider the pages for Google and Slashdot spam and advertisements. Apparently some editor thought he was high and mighty and marked the page for deletion. All I have to say is this - deleting pages written about a valid thing that exists in this world REGARDLESS OF ITS IMPORTANCE TO YOU PERSONALLY is wrong. There is a site called Volvospeed.com which has over 15,000 members and is among the prominent websites on the topic of Volvo performance. There SHOULD BE AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT. Deleting it is NOT the right thing to do, especially without first notifying an author who put hours and hours into the article to try to make it acceptable by all.

Wikipedia needs to come up with some strict set in stone standards for article deletion, because allowing this to happen is simply wrong. The number of explatives I would like to use here is unending. Just because it is not important to you doesn't mean it's not important to 15,000 other people, and anyone who has the nerve to delete an article like this is a pompous ass and needs to go find another business - WIKIPEDIA IS NOT TO BE BIASED BY WHAT AN AUTHOR BELIEVES IS IMPORTANT AND NOT IMPORTANT. Please, come up with some better way to make sure this stuff doesn't happen. I spent good time on that page and had made it with all the right intentions. I have no vested interest in that site other than as a member. It was not part of some advertising scheme.

I'm extremely offended that someone removed it, they had no right to do so. Someone should go and mark all of their articles for deletion, maybe then they would understand what it's like to be deleted and removed as if you are nothing rather than being givent he proper criticisms owed to every human being posting legitemate material on this site. -- LegendX 13:41, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Please don't be offended that someone marked the article for deletion. Simply suggesting that an article be considered for deletion is not an insult or attack, and deletion decisions are generally made by consensus, not by one person acting alone (unless the deletion is uncontroversial).
Your view that "pages written about a valid thing that exists in this world" should not be deleted is a valid point of view on Wikipedia; it's called inclusionism. However, it's not, and I don't think it's likely to become, official policy.
Often someone nominating an article for deletion will notify the creator, but it's not a strict requirement. Based on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Volvospeed, there wasn't a lot of discussion of the issue. Your work isn't necessarily lost; I suggest you check out Wikipedia:Deletion review. You could ask that the article be restored outright, which requires a vote; or you could have it restored to your userspace so you can improve it, which only requires a good-faith request on your part. Wmahan. 15:06, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
No one individual's determination of importance results in deletion, except in the case where that is uncontested. Certainly, if there was a deletion about a site of comparable notability to Google and Slashdot, that was an error.
If you think your article should not have been deleted - that is, if you believe that what you wrote about is of encyclopedic notability, leaving aside for the moment the question of how you wrote about it - and especially if it was deleted without due process (I have no idea, because you don't say what article), then I suggest that you might want to request a deletion review.
On the other hand, if you wrote an article about a site of no particular notability: well, most of the web is not important enough to be discussed in an encyclopedia, or we'd find ourselves duplicating the entire Web! - Jmabel | Talk 04:49, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
The above discussions are preserved as an archive. Please do not modify them. Further comments or new discussion should be started on the current talk page. No further edits should be made to this page.