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Revision as of 22:52, 8 October 2004
There are two types of wikispam: advertisements masquerading as articles, and wide-scale external link spamming. Articles considered advertisements include those that are solicitations for a business, product or service, or are public relations pieces designed to promote a company or individual. Wikispam articles are usually noted for sales-oriented language and external links to a commercial website. A differentiation should be made between spam articles and legitimate articles about commercial entities, however.
Advertisements masquerading as articles
Advertisements posted on Misplaced Pages should be dealt with by listing them on Misplaced Pages:Votes for deletion. On some occasions, the content can be removed temporarily on the basis of a suspected copyright violation, since the text is often copied from another website and posted anonymously.
It is also possible, and appropriate in some cases, to rewrite the article from a neutral point of view.
External link spamming
A few parties now appear to have a spambot capable of spamming wikis from several different wiki engines, analogous to the submitter scripts for guestbooks and blogs. They have a database of a few hundred wikis. Typically they insert external links. Like blog spam, their aim is to improve their search engine rankings, not to directly advertise their product.
If you see a bot inserting external links, please consider checking the other language wikis to see if the attack is widespread. If it is, contact a developer: they can put in a site-wide text filter.
Sysops are authorised to block unauthorised bots on sight. Spam bots should be treated equivalently to vandalbots. Edits by spambots constitute unauthorised defacement of websites, which is against the law in many countries, and may result in complaints to ISPs and (ultimately) prosecution.