Wikipedia:Spam Event Horizon
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This is an essay. It is not a policy or guideline. Please update the page as needed, or discuss it on the talk page. |
The Spam Event Horizon is a stage in the development of the external links section of an article. The development goes something like this:
- Sources, which are reliable sources of information used in the creation of the article
- Authorities on the subject, such as major organisations with an interest
- Points of view starting to creep in, minority dissent from the authorities and other monographs
- Spam for commercial providers in related industries
- vanispamcruft links to www.myspace.com/randomuser/randomthoughts.htm added by their authors because "I think that too"
- the Spam Event Horizon where the number of links is so long that no realistic attempt is made to assess individual links on a continuing basis for relevance or indeed existence.
Once an article has passed the Spam Event Horizon, the number of links to commercial providers (sometimes several links to different pages on the same site), geocities/myspace/whatever sites, blogs, POV rants, 404 Myspace pages and other cruft begins to spiral out of control. When the external links section is broken down into subsections, you know something is seriously wrong. Many of these links are attempts at search engine optimization, others are simply added because, after all, if everybody else has linked their site, why shouldn't I?
As an example, here is the external links section from Fathers' rights as at 31 December 2005. You won't persuade me that this is anything other than mad linkspamming.
[edit] Remedies
Once an external links section moves past the Spam Event Horizon, any further additions to it are overwhelmingly likely to be spam. An effective but severe remedy is to delete the whole thing and start anew.
Milder, but requiring more effort, is to remove all commercial or promotional links: any link to a page offering to sell something or attempting to persuade you toward a point of view.
If there are some useful external links, an even better approach is to convert into references those which actually back up the factual content of the article, and to delete the rest.
