I've brought this up at the talk page at [[Wikipedia:External links]]
and ended up with more contempt than actual answers, so maybe some
people in the know will be nice enough to actually clear some things up
for us.
1) If we're going to blindly attach "nofollow" to all the external
links, why are we allowing Wikia links to be propped up artificially?
Are we in the business of conflict of interest now?
2) Myspace blogs were recently added to the spam blacklist by Raul per
request of Jimbo, although no one else seems to know why, how, or per
what rationale. I won't pretend to know what Jimbo's been up to past
not having edited Wikipedia since the is-it-or-is-it-not-a decree, but
perhaps some more explanation on this would be worthwhile? Seems like
we're blocking a shitload of otherwise worthwhile primary source
material for many of our articles for the sake of...well...nothing.
Meanwhile, a blog ''not'' hosted on MySpace is still a-okay, which is
patently absurd on its face. I'm wondering what the thought process was
on this, since no one else seems to want to chime in.
3) Did you folks know we have a bot that reverts links that are
arbitrarily considered spam? I didn't until today.
[[User:Shadowbot1]]. I convinced him to post the blacklist where we
could see it, and while some (most?) are useful, others are pretty
screwy, and I'm not sure this is helpful in the long run.
I'm starting to think that our focus on spam is becoming a problem
rather than a benefit to the project. How much collateral damage are we
willing to accept in the project to take care of this "problem" that
people think is massive? One out of every 10? 5% poor hits? Do we
have some sort of measurement we're using here?
-Jeff
--
Name: Jeff Raymond
E-mail: jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com
WWW:
http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
IM: badlydrawnjeff
Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the
Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else."
- Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.