There are three main types of spam on Wikipedia:
- Advertisements masquerading as articles: Sometimes editors add content that seems more like an advertisement than an encyclopedia article. Even when the promotional material is added in a good-faith effort to improve Wikipedia, it is not appropriate for an encyclopedia article.
- External link spamming: Sometimes editors add inappropriate links to external websites. Adding the same website to multiple articles usually causes other editors to suspect that a spammer is trying to promote the website.
- Reference spamming: Sometimes editors add citations to sources in contexts or volumes that make other editors suspect that the main goal is promoting the author or the work being cited, rather than impartially providing a relevant citation.
Advertisements masquerading as articles
Articles considered advertisements include those that are solicitations for a business, product or service, or are public relations pieces designed to promote a company, organisation, or individual. Wikispam articles are usually noted for sales-oriented language and external links to a commercial website. However, a differentiation should be made between spam articles and legitimate articles about commercial entities or other organisations.
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Blatant examples of advertising masquerading as encyclopedia articles can be tagged for speedy deletion with the template {{db-spam}}. The same applies to pages in userspace, the draft namespace, or any other namespace. Other advertisements posted on Wikipedia can be dealt with by either proposed deletion or listing them on Wikipedia:Articles 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. Before trying to get an advertisement masquerading as an article deleted, please check the article's history to see if an acceptable revision exists there. If so, please revert to the latest acceptable version of the article.
When an article on an otherwise encyclopedic topic has the tone of an advertisement, the article can often be salvaged by rewriting it in a neutral point of view. Elements of articles about products or services with brand names can also be combined under a common topic or category to facilitate unbiased and collaborative information by including information about the competition and about different alternatives.
Spam may also occur by hijacking articles. In this case, information is changed to the subject being promoted, and the article is "hijacked", or changed, to promote an entirely different subject.
Tagging articles with spam or prone to spam
Some articles, especially those pertaining to Internet topics, are prone to aggressive spamming from multiple websites.
If articles have spam, and you haven't got the time or ability to remove it, you can tag them with {{Advert}}
. This template expands to the following:
Another possible tag to use is {{External links}}
, which expands to the following:
The third useful template is a substituted template {{subst:No more links}}, visible only while the page is being edited. After spam links have been removed from a Wikipedia article, this template can be substituted into the top of the external links section of the frequently spammed article as a pre-emptive measure.
<!-- {{No more links}}Please be cautious adding more external links.Wikipedia is not a collection of links and should not be used for advertising.Excessive or inappropriate links will be removed.See [[Wikipedia:External links]] and [[Wikipedia:Spam]] for details.If there are already suitable links, propose additions or replacements onthe article's talk page.-->
A fourth template, used for citation spam, is {{refimprove-spam}}, which looks like this:
Finally to advise the Wikipedia community to watch an article for abuse you can add to the talk page (under the project banners and other page headers, but before any discussions) {{Prone to spam}} which looks like this:
External link spamming
Adding external links to an article or user page for the purpose of promoting a website or a product is not allowed, and is considered to be spam. Although the specific links may be allowed under some circumstances, repeatedly adding links will in most cases result in all of them being removed.
Citation spam
Citation spamming is the illegitimate or improper use of citations, footnotes, or references. Citation spamming is a form of search engine optimization or promotion that typically involves the repeated insertion of a particular citation or reference in multiple articles by a single contributor. Often these are added not to verify article content, but rather to populate numerous articles with a particular citation. Variations of citation spamming include academics and scientists using their editing privileges primarily to add citations to their own work, and people replacing live or dead URLs with links to commercial sites or their own blogs. Citation spamming is a subtle form of spam and should not be confused with legitimate good-faith additions intended to verify article content and help build the encyclopedia.
Source soliciting
Source solicitations are messages on article talk pages that explicitly solicit editors to use a specific external source to expand an article. Editors with a conflict of interest should follow Wikipedia policies and best practices scrupulously when soliciting editors to use a specific external source to expand an article. Every article on Wikipedia can be expanded as a matter of course, but the question is in the details on a per-article basis. It is not possible to simply say "all articles of X type can be expanded using Y source".
There is no hard rule on when this crosses over from being a legitimate attempt to improve the article into being internal spam, but some guidelines and questions to consider:
- Is the source commercial?
- Does the source meet the requirements of Wikipedia:Reliable sources?
- Is the suggestion being made anonymously through the use of a template or category?
- Was the suggestion duplicated across a number of articles at the same time, particularly articles relating to different topics?
- Has there been any discussion (of a specific and substantive nature) on why the source should be used in each article?
External link spamming with bots
A few parties now appear to have a spambot capable of spamming wikis from several 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 the search engine rankings of the external sites, not to directly advertise their product. (This does not work on Wikimedia wikis because of the use of the nofollow directive.)
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, please contact a sysop on the Meta-Wiki; they can put in a Wikimedia-wide text filter. Any Meta sysop can edit the Wikimedia-wide spam blacklist to add or remove the patterns that are recognized by the filter, with the changes taking effect immediately. New links can also be added to the list if a new spammer should start making the rounds.
Sysops are authorised to block unauthorised bots on sight. Spambots should be treated as vandal bots. 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.
The link spam problem extends far beyond Wikimedia projects, and is generally worse on smaller wikis where the community struggles to keep it clean. m:Wiki Spam page (now obsolete) has some more general information and advice for users of wikis elsewhere on the Internet, while the MediaWiki Anti-Spam Features page describes features available in MediaWiki (for administrators running this software).