WikiSpam

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WikiSpam usually means any content posted to a wiki without intent to establish a PersonalRelationship with the community and without belief that the community will benefit from the content. This falls into two parts. LinkSpam has the sole motive of increasing an external site's PageRank. Commercial SemanticSpam is posted content that is trivially not appropriate under the site's MissionStatement.

[WikiVandalism] is different; vandalism involves posts meant specifically to annoy others from a person without an intent to establish a PersonalRelationship with the community.

All spam and vandalism removal on Meatball should be tagged with WikiSpam in the digest (see EditCategories), both to hide such trivialities from the casual user and to leave an AuditTrail for fellow editors. When simply reverting to a previous version of the page, it is conventional to restore the old revision by following the "View other revisions" link, appending a summary like the following to the digest:

[WikiSpam: revert to r24]

See CategorySpam for a lot more information on WikiSpam and related issues.

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Discussion:

Suggestion for better summary: -- FridemarPache

If there are postings, not on topic or with poor content, or at the worst case, replacing substantial parts of a wiki page by a backlink to an external site, this suggests, that the sole motive of the poster consists in increasing their external site's PageRank. -- [fridemar] (taking responsibility for this opinion, replacing the earlier anonymous formulation, that could intimidate other opinions as having the taste of a GodKing statement.)

The PageRank definition is powerful because the actual practice we are combating 99.99% of the time is LinkSpam, which involves specific approaches. What do you think of my combined reformation? -- SunirShah

Thank you for mediating. I am not quite happy with this formulation yet, because it appears to be not operational enough and gives rise to arbitraryness. "Any content" could be wiped out as spam, only due to the assumption the poster had done it for the "sole motive" of increasing his/her "external site's PageRank". Increasing PageRank itself is not at all a bad thing. When building a Common Wealth Of Prospering Social Online Communities, this is even a key factor. Special subsets of "any content" can clearly be identified as LinkSpam. Often the linkspammers only leave their links, with a "buy that comment". Therefore I suggest to find an operational definition, based on criteria, that can be verified by the community. Imagine valuable contributions like code, artwork, music, ideas, concepts, etc. from a newcomer, who has just started his/her homepage, but thinks, it is better placed into an established community with rich link context, leaving StrongLinks to their site, such increasing their PageRank. The objected definition is food for "dogs in the manger", who might cut off such a newcomer as spammer. -- Fridemar

Good points. I've adapted it to include the concept of a PersonalRelationship. -- SunirShah

Thank you Sunir, for taking the time and for your patience to tackle this very subtle, sensitive and highly emotionally loaded stuff. Yes, PersonalRelationship was the missing link. Now the biggest part of my cognitive dissonance has diminished into thin air. But, please forgive me, if I'm not quite satisfied yet. I would like to suggest to formulate instead of "without intent" to say something like "without recognizable intent". The reason for this additional adjective comes on the one hand from my drive to make concepts as operational as possible, but on the other hand from a new insight, gained from your PersonalRelationship article and [your video presentation].

 Whoever wants to build up a good PersonalRelationship must make it easy to their peers to AssumeGoodFaith. 

(( Nevertheless future spambots, who pass the Turing test, may even crack such bastions of humanity :-) )) -- Fridemar

I'm 200% behind your intention here to make the definition accurate. I can see how a vauge definition will be a problem. The one thing I dislike about my PersonalRelationship formulation is that it discounts IncidentalCollaboration, such as normal for Wikipedia. i.e. If I edit an article to add a relevant link, but I have no intention of interacting with the InnerCircle?, that isn't WikiSpam. On the other hand, if you notice, companies are racing to add their dubious 'relevant links' to Wikipedia articles to promote their products, and that is WikiSpam, even if it isn't ShotgunSpam. -- SunirShah

Sunir, I think IncidentalCollaboration is greatly enhanced by combining wiki with blogging, especially with Blogger, which is the Blogging platform, bought and improved by Google. As an example, within one day the Meta Meme: Become Aware of the StayPoor Meme [1] reached rank 2 out of 799,000 entries. You can see that a single author's blog, rooted in Meatball, has such an impact in terms of rank. I doubt, that parasitic links from spambots can catch up with this. Normally the MeatballWiki live page is ranked higher. I was really surprised about the result. Now fortunately this blog gives awareness back to Meatball, because the living page is always more interesting to the active readers and potential wiki contributors than a snapshot. In the same way I watched, that the simultaneous social bookmarks and social annotations to the most prevalent social collaboration communities, bundled by Diigo, supported the fast flow of new ideas in Meatball very efficiently. A third component is the alternative social annotation system and community of TrailFire. As the annotations are Url-based, they appear on the Google radar very early. TrailFire has the advantage to create WebRings on the fly but even WebWebs, because of their addressability. You remember our conversation in this wiki some years ago. As soon as the CreatingAndSharingWealth idea is in the heads of a critical mass of StayPoor handicapped artists, musiceans, programmers, thinkers and other creative peers, this will create a new rush into appropriate communities. A SocialCommonWealth is on the horizon. I see chances, how this can be combined with the CreativeCommons idea and with the micropayment system of GooglePay?. Imagine, if more and more peers get attracted by this idea, how fast this goal can be reached. I am not ambitious to play the leader of this movement; on the contrary, the more peers are engaged, the more time I have to make and enjoy math songs, together with resonant peers :-) -- Fridemar

I've added "and without belief that the community will benefit from the content" to the definition, in an attempt to resolve the concerns about IncidentalCollaboration.

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All spam removal on Meatball should be tagged with WikiSpam in the digest (see EditCategories), both to hide such trivialities from the casual user and to leave an AuditTrail for fellow editors. When simply reverting to a previous version of the page, it is conventional to restore the old revision by following the "View other revisions" link, appending a summary like the following to the digest:

[WikiSpam: revert to r24]

See CategorySpam for a lot more information on WikiSpam and related issues.

To encourage / enforce BidirectionalLinks (automatic) or at least ReciprocalLinks (manual workaround) can be a very efficient tool to fight against WikiSpam. A la longue the author sees the following pattern: if there is no (friendly) BackLink on a foreign webpage, that is inserted here as ForwardLink, the ForwardLink becomes the target of some LinkGarbageCollector?, thus demotivating LinkSpam. -- FridemarPache

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Some Notes

Le WikiSpam signifie généralement tout contenu posté sur un wiki avec l'unique motif d'accroître un PageRank d'un site externe, mais le terme peut aussi s'appliquer à tout contenu posté qui est trivialement non approprié pour le site.

Toute la suppression de spam sur Meatball devrait être taguée avec WikiSpam dans le champ résumé (voir CatégoriesModification), à la fois pour dissimuler de telles trivialités pour l'utilisateur occasionnel et pour laisser une PisteAudit pour les éditeurs collègues. Au moment de simplement réinitialiser une page vers une précédente version, il est conventionnel de restaurer la vieille révision en suivant le lien "View other revisions", de fournir un résumé comme suivant dans le "digest" :

[WikiSpam: revert to r24]

Voir le DossierSpam? pour bien plus d'informations sur le WikiSpam et les problèmes en rapport.

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