Wikipedia talk:Spam event horizon

Idea

ROFL great idea! Dominick ^(TALK) 14:10, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Yup, I agree. There are no words for things like that. -- ReyBrujo 22:04, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

:-O Outrageous. That is a lot of spam. Iolakana•T 19:41, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

And let's not forget this. :( --Dreaded Walrus 09:42, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

At Talk:David Hicks this essay is being used to explain the removal of a link without reference to the linked site's content or reliability. Shoe Event Horizon? SmithBlue Wednesday, 15:19, 22 November 2006 UTC

Subsections

"When the external links section is broken down into subsections, you know something is seriously wrong."

I can't fully agree with this assessment. In my opinion, in some cases subsections actually make sense, without being an indicator of spam. Consider the articles on major classical composers. Many of them have links to at least three major providers of free sheet music (IMSLP (currently down), CPDL, Mutopia Project - all free content community projects with no advertising). I believe that these links are justified, as they provide access to the original works of the composer who is the subject of the article. Since usually none of the sites has all the scores, it makes sense to link to all three of them (and possibly some additional sources with scores not available elsewhere). In those cases, I would consider a "sheet music" subsection an improvement over an unordered link list. This has no bearing on the necessity to watch out for spamming from commercial sheet music providers. --Keelburg 13:41, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is so vast and so diverse that one can probably find an exception to every rule, except the rule that there are always exceptions. --Teratornis (talk) 23:37, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Unclear paragraph

I have some questions about this paragraph, from Wikipedia:Spam event horizon#Remedies:

Another good option, (and one requiring less effort) is to remove all the obviously commercial or promotional links to the article's talkpage: any link to a page offering to sell something or attempting to persuade you toward a point of view. These may be useful and could assist editors in improving the article.

My questions:

• I suspect the last sentence needs to begin with the word "However". In its current form, the second sentence seems to contradict the first sentence. How is it a "good option" to remove links which "may be useful and could assist editors in improving the article"? Note that I assume the referent of "these" in the second sentence is "all the obviously commercial or promotional links", since I don't see anything else for "these" to refer to.
• What sort of link would not be "to a page ... attempting to persuade you toward a point of view"? Every page on the Web which makes a claim of any type is, unavoidably, trying to persuade any reader who disagrees with that claim to agree with it instead. Even a page which attempts to recount all sides of an argument implicitly tries to persuade the reader that all sides should be heard, and that the page fairly represents each one.
  • This essay, for example, is an attempt at persuasion, with plenty of bold and italics to hammer home the author's point of view. This is unavoidably the nature of all expository writing - why else would people write, other than to spread their perceptions of truth?
  • I agree about links to pages which only exist to sell products, although even such links can sometimes be useful as footnote references.

--Teratornis (talk) 23:37, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

The fundamental problem is laziness

It seems to me that the fundamental problem with external link creep is laziness. It's much easier to add a link to the External link section, or delete a bunch of links, than to turn the links into footnote citations. Probably only a small percentage of users have slogged through the instructions in WP:FOOT, WP:CITE, and WP:CITET, and to make matters worse, Wikipedia has several incompatible reference formats. It would be nice to have a tool that could automatically generate citation template wikitext from a list of raw links. That would help with the most tedious step. --Teratornis (talk) 23:37, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

You mean like reflinks? Yeah, it really should be more accessible, but it already exists. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:45, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

I want something better, which will fill out citation templates (e.g., {{Cite web}}) automatically. Yes, there are already tools that can do this some of the time, such as {{Google scholar cite}}, but I have yet to find one that works consistently and does what I want it to do, with less work than it takes to just manually edit a template. Slogging through all the tools and trying to make them work is much harder than slapping in a bare URL in the External links section. Until we find a way to make adding footnotes as easy as spamcrufting the external links, only a tiny minority of users will bother with footnotes. I'm sure our citation tools will continue to improve, and maybe the growing importance of Wikipedia will motivate the content publishers of the world to add standard code to their Web pages that make them easier to cite. Academic journals already do this with digital object identifiers. We need to extend that to all media, so all the user has to do is click on any Web page, and automatically get a filled-out Wikipedia citation. --Teratornis (talk) 15:15, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Reflinks already has support for {{cite web}}, and all it takes to use it is to click a bookmarklet. The problem with most external links sections is that they just point at project home pages rather than at data which is actually being cited in an article. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:33, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Amusing, but NOT a good idea

I don't think it's unreasonable to link a (large) number of father's rights organizations from the Wikipedia article, used here as the "bad example". So long as external links have some information to offer the reader that is not in the article already, they belong.

I'm sorry, but the potential complaint that you think there might be some "spam" links in the section which you are too busy to read over and challenge individually, is not as important as preserving the useful content of the section.

Organizing the external links into sections may indicate a problem, but it is also the first stage of the moderate solution. Once the section is categorized it is easier to decide which links belong. Wnt (talk) 18:21, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

I see this is apropos of the discussion over Microsoft SQL Server Compare Tools, an article which looks to be a complete mess. Individual organizations are not to be linked to from articles about general subjects, this is per WP:ELNO point 13. With the father's rights example the individual links have no impact on an encyclopedic understanding of the general concept of "father's rights", and are likely to lead to a WP:LINKFARM. It is our policy that Wikipedia is not a mere collection of external links, and as such our articles are not dumping grounds for lists of links.

That all being said, this is a very important essay, one which I feel has a wide consensus among editors who work with spam and external links. I reference it often myself ThemFromSpace 20:54, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there are individual articles for the products listed at the Microsoft SQL Server Compare Tools article. Thus point 13 does not apply - they are directly related to the subject of that article, and not to more specific articles (there are none). The argument might be made that if there were articles for each product listed in the table, that the table could just link to those specific articles, but here it can't be done.

I don't see how having a table with links for each product listed constitutes a "complete mess". They are in fact references, and might be converted to inline format, but with some loss of usability.

I am not sure why it is so important for some to ensure that Wikipedia readers must rely on copyrighted resources for useful links to relevant and notable organizations. Wnt (talk) 04:53, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

If we don't have articles on the individual products then they probably shouldn't be linked to at all. There are many links on the internet, and most are not suitable for placement on Wikipedia. See WP:NOT#DIR: Wikipedia is not a complete exposition of all details available on a given topic, it aims to be a summary about the topics that we have articles on. If you disagree with me here you're welcome to bring this topic up at the external links noticeboard for further input. ThemFromSpace 09:54, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

This topic is already up on a noticeboard,[1] and I'll not add another. And I don't need broad discussion to reject an essay. And notability is required to create an article, not to cite a reference. In that article, the "external links" are the references. And there's nothing wrong with finishing a table. Wnt (talk) 17:53, 17 June 2010 (UTC)