External links policy

This concerns the placement of external links on Foundations projects sometimes referred to as spam. While many are desirable some are creating advertisements masquerading as articles and pushing of external links. This page mostly deals with the latter.

Cross wiki link placing

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.

Cross wiki spam means that a certain link has been added to multiple projects. In this case the URL might be blocked (blacklisted) on a global level, meaning that it can't be added to any Wikimedia project.

As Wikimedia projects use nofollow-tags addding a link to one of them doesn't alter the search engine ranking.

Blacklisting

Global blacklist

There is a global blacklist on meta: Spam blacklist. This is a list of domains that have been placed excessively, or which are deemed completely unhelpful to any project, and are therefore blocked on all Wikimedia projects, i.e. you can't link to one of the listed entries from any Wikimedia project. For a domain to be globally blacklisted it generally has to be excessively linked on multiple projects. If it's only added to a single project generally the link should be blacklisted locally (some exceptions exist.

Addition and removal of links can be discussed on Talk:Spam blacklist.

Exceptions

Some links are generally blacklisted on meta, even if the abuse has only been to one project, or when the link has not been used abusively yet:

1. URL-shorteners/redirect sites (like e.g. tinyurl) as these can be used to circumvent blacklisting of other domains, and it is totally unnecessery to use these (as one can link to the original document directly).
2. Sites which drop viruses, Trojan horses, etc. etc. on the users computer, in other words, links which, when clicked on, are a threat to the computer the user is on. Blacklisting of these sites is generally temporarily, until the problem has been resolved.

Local lists

Each Wikimedia project also has a local blacklist and a local whitelist, for example en:MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist and en:MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist. The former can be used to disallow linking to certain domains on a certain project only. The latter is a means to be able to link to domains on the global blacklist, or to exclude certain documents on a server, while all other documents on that server can not be linked to.

Addition and removal of links can most often be discussed on the local talk page. Local blacklists should be used whenever possible to manage blocking of external links; the global blacklist should be used for widespread cross-wiki link placement, which would be inefficient or impossible to stop using the local blacklists (and for the real crap?).

Helping out

If you're interested in helping out by fighting and removing unwanted external links, please see Spam blacklist/help.

See also

General

• Wiki spam
• Wikipedia:Spam on en.wikipedia.org
• Small Wiki Monitoring Team

IRC

• IRC bots
• Small Wiki Monitoring Team/IRC