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Gregory Maxwell | 1 May 2006 01:45
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Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

On 4/30/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@...> wrote:
[snip]
> I probably managed to remove a few good link as well, but it was clear
> that there had been almost *zero* edit oral oversight of these links.
>  When we allow articles to have large lists of links without solid
> editorial oversight, we are no more useful than google... and worse:
> we are more subject to manipulation than the authors of the links.
>
> It is my belief that almost every page with more than 10-20 externals
> is in the same position of low to no oversight on the externals, and
> many with more than 5 externals.

A list of pages which I suspect of having low edit-oral-ness (whatever
that is) of their external links is now available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/externalmania

The page doubles as a browser stress test. Enjoy.
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Robin Shannon | 1 May 2006 05:00
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Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

On 01/05/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@...> wrote:
> A list of pages which I suspect of having low edit-oral-ness (whatever
> that is) of their external links is now available.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/externalmania

Looking at that page i notice that lots of them are lists (in fact the
majority). Many of these lists are complete and will not need editing
ever again (for historical things) or very rarely into the future.
Perhaps a lost of these should be semi-locked or is that unwiki?

paz y amor,
-rjs.

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Gregory Maxwell | 1 May 2006 06:41
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Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

On 4/30/06, Robin Shannon <robin.shannon@...> wrote:
> On 01/05/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@...> wrote:
> > A list of pages which I suspect of having low edit-oral-ness (whatever
> > that is) of their external links is now available.
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/externalmania
>
> Looking at that page i notice that lots of them are lists (in fact the
> majority). Many of these lists are complete and will not need editing
> ever again (for historical things) or very rarely into the future.
> Perhaps a lost of these should be semi-locked or is that unwiki?

I didn't see any lists that were complete, but I haven't looked closely.
I know that a good number of pages have already been fixed based on
this list.. even the ones that have lots of link that look good, many
of them still have a bad link or two lurking, you have to check them
all.. and no one is, which was my point. :)
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GerardM | 1 May 2006 07:33
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Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

Hoi,
Just saying that we should liberaly ban "spam" is too easy because the
devil is in the details. A few days ago there was an article on
slashdot suggesting that an American chain manipulates its Wikipedia
article. Some people will agree some won't. When somebody calls and
says that he has "bought" his wikipedia article, it is easy; you
cannot buy a particular type of content on Wikipedia. It does however
not necessarily mean that such an organisation does not have its
relevancy. A kneejerk reaction is not necessarily always the right
thing.

On the other hand you have people who have a beef with an organisation
and insist on being negative about an organisation and do not allow
for a NPOV article about such an organisation. In my opinion this is
another side of the same coin.

There are also the people who do nothing but adding links to their
info site and, as always there are people who think this a good idea
and people who opine that it detracts from the Wikipedia article ....

I would in conclusion say, in case of obvious spam at least remove the
external links and when the article is plain advertisement, make it
NPOV or delete.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 5/1/06, Ben McIlwain <cydeweys@...> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
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Ray Saintonge | 1 May 2006 08:06

Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

daniwo59@... wrote:

> 
>Over the past few weeks, OTRS has seen quite a few messages concerning  
>companies that are putting information about themselves onto Wikipedia for  
>advertising purposes, insisting that it is their right to do this. An article in  an 
>online SEO (search engine optimization) magazine described how to mine  
>wikipedia to get web traffic. We have had emails from such diverse groups as  talent 
>agencies (we will take the copyright off our own website, as long as it  is 
>included in Wikipedia), a Dominatrix, a vaporizer (I have no choice but to  
>keep inserting my links on your site so as to fend off the competitors), and  
>many others. In fact, this appears to be a growing trend in Wikipedia, as is  
>evidenced by similar phone calls to the office (I did not write the article  
>about my, my PR firm wrote it, and I paid them good money so you can't take it  
>off). Shoppingtelly.uk has written that as long as we allow links to the BBC,  
>they will insist on their "rights" to put links to their site on Wikipedia. 
> 
>This is a worrying trend on the English Wikipedia which raises issues of  
>POV, notability, and verifiability. Ironically, we do not allow paid  
>advertising, but we are buckling when people use our site in order to get free  
>advertising. 
> 
>I do not know the solution to this problem--several have been raised, but  in 
>my mind none is completely satisfactory. I am simply posting this here in the 
> hope that it will elicit discussion and, perhaps, a real policy decision to  
>counter this worrying trend. 
>
Thank you for sharing this problem with us.

"Vaporizer" sounds too much like a Dalek; "You will be exterminated" :-)
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Andre Engels | 1 May 2006 09:08
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Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

2006/5/1, daniwo59@... <daniwo59@...>:

> I do not know the solution to this problem--several have been raised, but  in
> my mind none is completely satisfactory. I am simply posting this here in the
>  hope that it will elicit discussion and, perhaps, a real policy decision to
> counter this worrying trend.

I think that the solution should be to remove many more links than are
done now. When I read that Gregory Maxwell removed 45 links from a
page and kept another 45, in my opinion he has been rather reserved -
rare is in my opinion the page that needs more than 3 links. Wikipedia
is not a link collector.

I'll be going through pages on my watchlist and see whether there are
any inappropriate links and remove them, then check whether they exist
elsewhere on Wikipedia if they appear to be not on the most likely
page (which would make it seem they have been spammed).

--
Andre Engels, andreengels@...
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
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Brion Vibber | 1 May 2006 09:26
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Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

Andre Engels wrote:
> I think that the solution should be to remove many more links than are
> done now. When I read that Gregory Maxwell removed 45 links from a
> page and kept another 45, in my opinion he has been rather reserved -
> rare is in my opinion the page that needs more than 3 links. Wikipedia
> is not a link collector.
> 
> I'll be going through pages on my watchlist and see whether there are
> any inappropriate links and remove them, then check whether they exist
> elsewhere on Wikipedia if they appear to be not on the most likely
> page (which would make it seem they have been spammed).

Perhaps this is a good time to push reenabling rel="nofollow" on en.wikipedia.org.

Domas and I visited the Google campus last week after the MySQL users
conference, and chatted a bit with some folks from the search quality team. They
assure us that, yes, rel="nofollow" *does* help prevent linkspam from having its
intended effect and that, yes, at least some of the SEO folks end up giving up
on sites because of it (though of course not all, and not immediately).

While this automated protection doesn't prevent eyeballs from seeing or
following links, it does keep them from autospamming the search engines that we
all rely on in our daily surfing.

The argument for turning it off centered on the idea that "good internet
citizens" help "good sites" by linking to them, and that on en.wikipedia.org
there's enough eyeballs to immediately remove linkspam.

Apparently that's just not so. Good internet citizens need to recognize this and
keep our communal resources clean. Wikipedia is not a link farm!
(Continue reading)

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Essjay | 1 May 2006 11:55
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Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 4/30/06, Ben McIlwain <cydeweys@...> wrote:
>   
>> The problem is that the blacklist is on Metawiki, not enwiki, so
>> administrators such as myself can't do anything about it on our own and
>> have to go running to a Meta admin.  Maybe we could add some sort of
>> spam blacklist queue on Enwiki that is regularly viewed by meta admins?
>>  Or more liberally giving out meta adminship might help too.
>>     
>
> There are many meta admins in the admin channel on IRC, I promise that
> you are never far from one. :)
>   
Agree totally; I'm a meta admin, and I'm happy to put stuff on the list, 
as long as it is really spam. I wouldn't have a problem with having a 
"Requests for blacklisting" page, or with checking it regularly (though 
I'm sure it'd be overwhelmed in short order; perhaps one time [just one] 
that we could make a request page sysop-only [via protection]?).

Also, I support Brion's suggestion; I trust that after all the work he's 
done, he has both the best interests of the site and the best 
understanding of what's going on (technically). Go get 'em, Brion <ties 
scarf around Brion's sword as he rushes into battle with the spammers> :-D

Essjay

--

-- 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/
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Erik Moeller | 1 May 2006 13:33
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Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

On 5/1/06, Brion Vibber <brion@...> wrote:

> Perhaps this is a good time to push reenabling rel="nofollow" on en.wikipedia.org.

I don't much like the idea of effectively punishing thousands of
perfectly fine sites because of a few people who pee in the proverbial
public pool. How feasible would it be, in your opinion, to
 - add a timestamp to the externallinks table
 - only add nofollow to links which have been added recently (<7 days)?

That might be a reasonable middle ground. Yes, some spammers will get
through, but that's to be expected. If we can keep the quality of
links above the average on the web, then surely we should be treated
like any other site on search engines.

As for the present situation, I think that more closely cooperating
with existing link directories like DMOZ might help. If we can say, in
the style of sister project links, "DMOZ has more hyperlinks about
Foo", then we don't have to host these link lists on Wikipedia. I
often find even large link lists very useful, but I would prefer more
structured and carefully maintained ones than Wikipedia has, and that
is exactly what projects like DMOZ are for.

This is more relevant to en.wikipedia.org than some others; de:, for
example, has a guideline stating that five links should normally be
enough, and that all links should be of the highest possible quality:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Weblinks

As a more gentle alternative, a substitution policy of link lists vs.
links to link directories might make sense.
(Continue reading)

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Anthony DiPierro | 1 May 2006 13:56

Re: Free advertising on Wikipedia

On 4/30/06, daniwo59@... <daniwo59@...> wrote:
>
> Over the past few weeks, OTRS has seen quite a few messages concerning
> companies that are putting information about themselves onto Wikipedia for
> advertising purposes, insisting that it is their right to do this. An article in  an
> online SEO (search engine optimization) magazine described how to mine
> wikipedia to get web traffic. We have had emails from such diverse groups as  talent
> agencies (we will take the copyright off our own website, as long as it  is
> included in Wikipedia), a Dominatrix, a vaporizer (I have no choice but to
> keep inserting my links on your site so as to fend off the competitors), and
> many others. In fact, this appears to be a growing trend in Wikipedia, as is
> evidenced by similar phone calls to the office (I did not write the article
> about my, my PR firm wrote it, and I paid them good money so you can't take it
> off). Shoppingtelly.uk has written that as long as we allow links to the BBC,
> they will insist on their "rights" to put links to their site on Wikipedia.
>
> This is a worrying trend on the English Wikipedia which raises issues of
> POV, notability, and verifiability. Ironically, we do not allow paid
> advertising, but we are buckling when people use our site in order to get free
> advertising.
>
> I do not know the solution to this problem--several have been raised, but  in
> my mind none is completely satisfactory. I am simply posting this here in the
>  hope that it will elicit discussion and, perhaps, a real policy decision to
> counter this worrying trend.
>
> Danny

Are the current solutions failing?  Do you have some examples of
violations of Wikipedia policies which have remained in the
(Continue reading)

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Gmane