Semi-Protected Affiliate Marketing Article
The Article to affiliate marketing at Wikipedia was today “semi-protected”.
You might noticed the template that indicates the protection on other articles at Wikipedia already. If you did not, let me explain what it means and why it was done.
All you have to provide is a username of your liking (it does not have to be your real name or related to it), an email address (free mailer like hotmail, yahoo or gmail are fine) and a password. That’s it. If you use a fictitious username and an email from a free mail service, you will be pretty much as anonymous as without an account.
So if you would like to make a change to the article, don’t be scared to create an account. It does not cost anything or gets penalized for inactivity.
The semi-protection was actually requested by me. The reason for that is the increase in spam the article was exposed to, specifically “link spam”. Almost everyday was a “contribution” made by an anonymous visitor which only consisted of a link with Keyword rich anchor text in the External Links section.
Contributions such as the last one prior the protection which was a link to earnmoneyonline.phpnet.us does not really add much, if any value to the article.
The link lasted only 9 minutes before it was removed by a RC Patroller of the Wikipedia SPAM project. RC stands for “Recent Changes” and is a “special page” of any MediaWiki that shows the most recent modifications to pages of the Wiki. You can find the link to that page in the navigation on the left side. Wikipedia has a lot of volunteers that monitor this log for “suspicious edits” and take action quickly after spam was detected.
To aid them in their efforts did a user called “Lupin” create a little tool that is geared to and optimized for the task of the RC Patroller to make the monitoring, verification and action as easy and fast as possible.
Spammers are often “tagged” with a “Spam Template” at their users talk page. A users talk page is even available if you are active at Wikipedia anonymously. The “User name” would be your current “IP Address”.
Repeated offenders get a second, third and fourth warning. After that will the IP or User account being banned entirely and not be able to do any edits at Wikipedia anymore.
If the SPAM is performed by a “ring” of offenders or automated means, chances are that not the User or IP is getting banned, but the entire site that is being promoted by the spammers.
If added to the “Spam Black List“, nobody will be able to create a link to that site at any page at Wikipedia anymore, including Talk and User Pages.
This happened earlier this week by accident for the whole Squidoo.com domain. The admin did ban the whole site instead of just the “sub directory” or “Lens” that was the target of the spammers.
Okay that is enough of Wikipedia SPAM procedures 101.
The protection of the Affiliate marketing article will not be permanent. It will be removed sometimes next year again and then we will see what happens.
