External links policy
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- Note:You may be looking for the Spam blacklist instead.
Due to the increasing popularity of the Wikimedia Projects, spamming by external parties has become and continues to be a major problem. This page documents general protocol and policy relating to the inclusion and exclusion of external links in Wikimedia projects.
While many forms of external links are desirable, some less desirable applications involving linkage to external sites include the creating of advertisements masquerading as articles and the pushing of promotional external links. This page mostly deals with the latter.
Cross wiki link placing
Adding external links to an article or user page for promotional purposes is disruptive, 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. It is the behaviour in placing the links rather than the content of the site that may cause concerns.
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 adding a link to one of them doesn't alter the search engine ranking.
Blacklisting
--2601:8C1:8280:4840:38C3:E945:4936:5343 05:22, 18 April 2023 (UTC)pkgb
Local lists
- For local policies see local policies and pages
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. Before blacklisting all other measured should be explored such as blocking the user or IP or protecting the page. However where this is not sufficient local blacklists should be used whenever possible to manage blocking of external links; the global blacklist should only be used for widespread cross-wiki link placement, where other local options are not effective. The list may also be used for sites that simply are not suitable for whatever reason if there is consensus.
Helping out
If you're interested in helping out by fighting and removing unwanted external links, please see Spam blacklist/help. To get started, you may wish to contact one of the following users:
See also
General
- Wiki spam
- Wikipedia:Spam on en.wikipedia.org
- Small Wiki Monitoring Team
- mw:Manual:Combating spam has technical details on how to install anti-spam tools on a mediawiki server.
IRC
Templates
{{Xwiki-spam-warn|link}}