User:A. B./Link cleanup

As a matter of policy, domains such as tinyurl.com are routinely blacklisted since they not only can be used innocently as URL shorteners but also as a means of bypassing our spam blacklist. In the majority of cases, these additions are not spam -- just innocent (if often low-quality) links. Mindless blacklisting before link cleanup will create chaos across hundreds of gridlocked articles so the links need to be cleaned up before blacklisting. Mindless link deletion in turn will delete many useful links and references since most probably were added in good faith by editors using these domains for short URLs, not blacklist bypassing. The right thing to do in most cases is to find and substitute the actual site link for the redirect URL -- that or disable the link but leave it in place where readers but not our software can see it. (If I see obviously spammy or useless links, I still delete them.)

I've been working away on "co.nr" for several weeks and have most of the other 250 Wikipedias cleaned up (except in user space). However, they're being added to the mother load, en.wikipedia, at about the same rate as I've been deleting them from the others. See:
 * meta:Talk:Spam blacklist

There are presently 729 of these links in the English Wikipedia. About 450 are on articles or article talk pages, 183 on user pages, 45 on user talk pages and 51 on "Wikipedia:" pages.

Rather than messing with links on user and user talk pages, I leave a short note explaining the situation and letting them decide what to do with the link. As I noted above, in most cases, they can go to the co.nr page then find the "real" URL with a little ingenuity.

I'll finish the foreign Wikipedias, then also work on these.

Thanks, -- A. B. (talk) 17:52, 12 June 2007 (UTC)