User:Donald Trung/I am not a spammer

“So why is this box here? Is this an ad?” Because it shows just how little I know about the website, and no, in fact it's the opposite of an ad, it's an anti-ad, this page purely exists to debunk the claim that I am an advertiser, and I will tell you this to whom it may concern… claim that I did any, and I mean any edit in mainspace is not out of my love of educating the readers I will hunt you down (a joke, I am a non-threatening person… well, I look threatening in real life but I’m really not interested in violence). I wrote because of a libelous claim that I added random spamlinks to Wikipedia, I sockpuppeteered to insult another user and the first thing all the admins did was assume bad faith of EVERY edit I ever made, regardless of what it was, and if I learned something from this ordeal is that the admins and the ArbCom at the end of the day really don't care about the content of Wikipedia but only “vandalfighting”, so what do you do to make someone look even worse than they are? Claim that they are only here to spam, remember it's

What this page is and isn't.

 * This is not an attack page against either Beetstra or the Beremean Hunter (or whatever they are called), in fact this is the opposite as I am defending myself here against their attacks.


 * This page in no way serves as advocacy for Primal Trek itself, I am not affiliated with either Primal Trek, Gary Ashkenazy,, Charm.ru, Zeno.ru, Vladimir Belyaev, or literally any source I have ever cited on Wikipedia, if you are here to claim this then here is the door. 🚪


 * This is not promotional for any individual source or sources I use, I simply explain why I use them, and where I’ve used them


 * This is not a call for WikiProject Spam to be abolished, only for there to be a committee/commission to oversee their actions, we are all here to build an encyclopedia but to deliberately prevent people from using certain sources out of arbitrary reasons defeats that purpose, WikiProject Spam should be here to defend the verifiability of Wikipedia and not attack it.


 * This page does not serve as a biography for Gary Ashkenazy, I only name random facts about him that are public to give a (somewhat jokingly constructed) example.


 * This page is not intended to be temporary, it's supposed to showcase the zeitgeist of Wikipedia from when it was written, this could mean that my opinion on these matters could change but I wouldn't adjust this page for it, nor if the problems I address here get solved.

Background.
I saw lots of stubs, I knew of a website that had tons of information 🛈 on those subjects, and I added that website as inline references to various articles including 7 I had created (published) by myself... Then I got blocked and the first thing that was concluded is that I was a spammer. 😒

Libel and slander.
And the worst part is that I am being incorrectly accused of being a spammer. 😖

I have never in my life received any money or compensation for any edit I’ve ever made I simply do not get paid to edit Wikipedia, on the contrary I pay to edit Wikipedia (no not through donations, no offense but I prefer to donate my time to research articles and expand them). I have bought several books including David Hartill’s Cast Chinese Coinage to expand or create articles on Chinese numismatics, I did use Primal Trek (the website I'm being accused of having a COI with) a lot but if you divide it among a dozen Chinese coin articles and 7 new Chinese coinage articles I had created it barely adds up to 2 links a page, in fact the “most excessive” examples being Southern Song dynasty coinage, and Cash (Chinese coin) where it was I think around 5 links, but in all cases those links were related to content and to source them, I don’t just go around randomly adding Primal Trek links in articles (what I’m being accused of), I simply wanted to expand all content and obviously I use sources and since Primal Trek simply is “a more trusted name” and a very big website I milked that website dry to make sure that the Chinese and Korean monetary history articles would be as well expanded as possible. Years ago I did the same with ZDNet, PCWorld, MSPowerUser, WMPowerUser, WinBeta, On MSFT, Etc. to Microsoft-related articles and there are articles with 10 links to Engadget in a single section, but only because Primal Trek was more rarely used the COIBot had a false positive. All my actions concerning mainspace editing were purely for the benefit of the readers and to make Wikipedia articles as complete as possible, in fact on my user page I even claim that if it weren’t for the images I had made “Primal Trek obsolete in favour of Wikipedia”.

Speaking of images the only contact I had with Gary Ashkenazy was me e-mailing him to donate his images to Wikimedia Commons, and do you know what I did concerning that? Well, I have spent hundreds of euro’s on various coins that Wikimedia Commons doesn't have pictures of just to make pictures.

Now let’s check the facts…

What I did in Beetstra’s twisted bad faith fantasy:

I went around using sockpuppets to randomly add spamlinks for a website I work for across 4 projects.

What I actually did:

I sourced material (you know what you SHOULD do when adding content to Wikipedia) using a highly trusted and reliable online name in Chinese numismatics, I saw that literally every article except for “Ancient Chinese coinage” was either unsourced or a stub, largely only David Hartill’s book inserted by the author himself (yes, there is an account named DavidHartill operated by the writer, this is an actual COI but let’s only focus on me because I used sockpuppets for something completely unrelated) so I used a well-known source in this field, also note that it was only on articles related to Chinese and Korean coins as Primal Trek doesn't cover Japanese coins unless it's a hoard and barely mentions Vietnamese coins at all, so using a trusted source on Chinese and Korean coins in articles about Chinese and Korean coins is not “spamming”.

And outside of English Wikipedia, well I didn't add it to Serbian Wikipedia that was added years before I registered as Donald Trung (my real name), nor did I add it to German Wikipedia that has also been there for years. I did however include 2 links at Dutch Wikipedia sourcing an article and judging by how very few articles on Dutch Wikipedia cite any references or sources at all deliberately removing sources seems to only be putting salt on that very old long-infected wound, in fact I have even told him that I only planned on using Primal Trek a total of 3 times with ⅔ being in “Chinese kèpèngs” and ⅓ in “Koreaanse mun” of course his only reply was “you’re a COI spammer”.

His libelous claim that I just randomly added spamlinks is nothing short of a personal insult.

How Beetstra phrased the question and what it implies.
“So you added spamlinks out of what, altruism?” (could be paraphrased, hij had het in het Nederlands moeten schrijven zodat ik het makkelijker kan onthouden.)

This question basically implies a few things, 1) I simply went around randomly adding a link to a website in various articles for no reason, it’s not like I expanded the content of those articles while doing so. 2) It implies bad faith, at no time did he actually look at where or how I added the links he just called it “spamlinks”, admittedly Beetstra says himself that he doesn't care what gets linked and where it gets linked to, he just looks who links something how much his definition of “spam” can include anything from a random blog about images of ceiling fans by a guy named Micheal to a well-researched and well-respected scientific journal. 3) He probably didn't even look at the content supported by the links in the first place, remember that at all times he keeps insisting on me being a spammer and at all times he doesn't care about the actual content of any article, just what's linked there. 4) Maybe he shouldn't be at the global spam project in the first place, this is not an attack on Beetstra it's an assessment and my conclusions from it, if you remove references simply to spite someone you call “a spammer” even if they weren’t placed there by that person then maybe you should be re-thinking your life and what you’re doing with it, I’m serious because the whole deal with WP:SOURCE is that content at Wikipedia should be verified at all times and if your crusade against what you consider to be “spam” allows for you to indiscriminately remove links then Wikipedia isn't the right place for you. Why should one person be the arbiter of what we can and can't link 🔗 to? Even if so, then multiple people should be able to judge that person’s actions and uninvolved editors should be able to criticise them.

DISCLAIMER: The above statement is in no way an attack on Beetstra, I am simply criticism his way of operation, I do not want anyone to leave Wikipedia who can make themselves useful here (unlike what he believes), and I am simply saying that his current way of looking at things might be more harmful than it is helpful.

And to give a not-so-stupid reply to this very stupid question, “Yes, I did it out of altruism” (remember that Wikipedia exists to educate others, if you learn new things by researching articles it's fun 🎉 and all, but the articles themselves get published for the readers).

What I know about Gary Ashkenazy.
Gary Ashkenazy (Hebrew: גארי אשכנזי) is an American citizen who lived for 13 years in various Asian countries such as South Korea, the Republic of China, Thailand, and Mainland China, his hobbies include amateur radio, Morse code, wire antennas, computer technologies such as the OpenBSD operating system, riding motorcycles 🏍, and collecting Chinese charms, amulets, and coins, he frequents coin fora (forums?) under the handle of “Manymore”. As a child his grandmother used to refer to him as “Skinny Rooster” 🐔, and he started collecting Chinese good luck charms and coins while he lived in Beijing. “Wow, you really know a lot about the owner of the website, you clearly are connected with the owner of the website and spammed his site out of your personal relationship with him” Well, no I can simply name these things because he (Gary Ashkenazy) noted them on another website unrelated to Primal Trek, in fact the only thing I have in common with him (Gary Ashkenazy) is the fact that we both volunteer for the Red Cross.

Unlike Gary Ashkenazy I really don’t have an interest in Chinese charms, in fact I loathe the idea of “good luck 🍀 objects”, and by extension I loathe Chinese charms because they’re nothing but imitations of real money, they’re not government-made items designed for circulation they’re non-sensical items designed for superstition, if you may notice a pattern in my editing I only ever use Primal Trek on Chinese coinage-related articles (with only one exception), and to that end I used a several other websites in similar amounts too, these include Charm.ru and Zeno.ru and unlike Gary Ashkenazy I did in fact have a conversation with Vladimir Belyaev (the owner of the aforementioned websites) and the conversations with that person can be found at the archive of the OTRS team in Wikimedia Commons where I had pasted them, and the only attempt at contact is the e-mail in the section below here.

Other things I have in common with him is that we both prefer to use Chinese characters to write Korean, and when we use Latin script we both prefer the North-Korean version (McCune-Reischauer), these things actually helped me in expanding the article, Korean mun but I had to add Chosŏn'gul in order to avoid a 2nd copyright © strike and to make the WikiTables sufficiently different from the ones at Primal Trek.

My personal suspicion is that Gary Ashkenazy either died or retired in 2016 because as of August 20th, 2017 the last entry on his multi-weekly updated monograph site still states November 16th, 2016. (I am not going to update this either, this purely serves to debunk any libelous claims of conflict of interest against my person.)

Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.

The only e-mail I have sent to Gary Ashkenazy.
This is the only e-mail I have sent him since; on June 6th, 2017 to which I have received no reply (as of August 20th, 2017).


 * “Dear Mr. Ashkenazy,


 * I am here to request something of you if you’re interested, I want to write more about Chinese coins, and charms on Wikipedia and have already started referencing your work, unfortunately there aren’t that many images available so I would kindly like to ask if you are willing to upload pictures of all of your Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Ryukyuan coins and charms to Wikimedia Commons so the Wikipedian community could share your work and knowledge with the world.


 * Thank you for your time.


 * Yours faithfully,
 * Mr. Trung


 * Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.”

To this end I would like to state that not only have I no conflict of interest with the subject at hand, I have absolutely no communication or relation with Primal Trek. The possibilities are simply this, 1) I am in fact Gary Ashkenazy or a hired goon who got paid to edit Wikipedia by Gary Ashkenazy, or 2) I am a person with a love of Chinese numismatics and monetary history and saw that there is a website with a lot of information on the subject and added as much information 🛈 from that site into Wikipedia as possible because I want others interested in the subject to find it here on Wikipedia.

Obviously paid editors go around insulting people with sockpuppets because it's not like their livelihood or anything is at stake, and obviously I must be a COI spammer because everyone knows that the worst form of spam anyone can add is writing information to educate others on a subject and daring to verify that information with a source, I mean those vandals. 😒

The numbers.
Now let’s look at the numbers, the link was added slightly more than 40 times across all wikis, I had used it once for reference on my Userpage on Wikimedia Commons to show the images I wish to upload after buying those coins myself, and once in my own user page on English Wikipedia to show where I had attempted to contact Mr. Gary Ashkenazy, it was used twice on Serbian Wikipedia once as a source on Ancient Chinese coins and once in a draft by a user named Neboyshka87 (not me), and once in German Wikipedia as a source on Korean coins. Twice on Dutch Wikipedia in an article I had created containing almost 20 sources (if I had a COI I wouldn't bother with other sources at all? I don’t know I don’t get paid to do this and never look how paid editors edit), on English Wikipedia I did use it several times in talk pages often asking legitimate questions if such material on hoards and modern finds could and should be added, the article “Zhou Dynasty coinage” named no sources, I used Primal Trek as one of 4 different sources, “Knife money” and “Spade money” both were either unsourced or dependent on one source (you’ve guessed it, David Hartill), “Ming dynasty coinage” only contained either David Hartill or 12 links to a random auction site often linking to closed auctions (clearly an education website here is “spam” and an auction website is a reliable source), I have created 6 articles named “[X] dynasty coinage” that all included Primal Trek of which the most excessive one has 4 links to Primal Trek and “Qing Dynasty coinage” an article with over 100 references only contains 3 links to Primal Trek. “Cash (Chinese coin)” is probably the only article where the link is used disproportionately compared to other sources but every time that I added Primal Trek I was sure to add at least 1 or 2 other sources to back the claim up.

Per article.
The article Ban Liang was previously unsourced, I added a total of 13 sources of which one was David Hartill's book 📚, and 12 were external links 🔗, of those external links 3 were Primal Trek, and yes by far the majority of the content (simply the words and not the links) came from Primal Trek, removing Primal Trek here because it’s “spam” would basically reduce the article back to the stub it was when I first found it, but obviously let’s not care about the encyclopedic content of Wikipedia and just insult users and punish them (and most importantly let’s punish the readers) for an unrelated insult to an uninvoled user concerning an issue on a completely different page, surely the admins of Wikipedia care more for the encyclopedia than they do for punishing people, yeah blocks are totally meant to be penal, everyone knows that the readers of the articles the punished person contributed the most to also deserve to have less content, it’s not like Wikipedia is just a hobby and people write about what they’re interested in, and the onl reason people are here is to build an encyclopedia, nah let’s just assume that people are only here for self-promotion and money. 😒

The first article I created on the subject of Chinese monetary history was actual about a Mongolian realm, it was the Yuan dynasty coinage article that only contains a single link to Primal Trek, at no time did I ever intent to write more articles in fact at User talk:DavidHartill I even requested him to make a Qing Dynasty coinage, I then looked at the Articles for Creation page only to find out that simply requesting a title doesn't make an article happen, you have to fully draft one first and since no article I have ever created in the 10 years I am here on Wikipedia (this includes West Frisian Wikipedia, and Dutch Wikipedia) has ever been deleted, and only once nominated by a user who harassed me for some years (the reason I started over with a new account before) which was then argued to be worthy to be on Wikipedia, I simply avoid going through extra non-sense as making an article for Wikipedia is as simple as clicking a red link.

I made 4 (four) articles very specifically to bridge the Ancient Chinese coinage and Yuan dynasty coinage articles filling a 300 year gap, I only made those articles because I don’t want Wikipedia to “be incomplete” and Primal Trek barely contained any information 🛈 on the Khitans, Tanguts, Jurchens, and Mongols so never did I use Primal Trek more than once in ¾ of them, but since Primal Trek does have a lot on Chinese coinage from that period I did use it more there, but then again I found an essay by a history professor that had even more information 🛈 so the majority of the content again can be ascribed to other sources.

At Qing dynasty coinage it is (as far as I can remembered) only linked 3 times in an article with over 100 references that I (as of August 20th, 2017) wholly wrote the content (excluding the mark-up) of myself, the fact that I didn't use Primal Trek that often here is very simple, Qing Dynasty coinage extends beyond cash coins and though I did in fact use Primal Trek as “the skeleton” of the article in its early concept the majority of the content is (as usual) from David Hartill's book 📚.

The only article where one could say that I might’ve “spammed” Primal Trek was also the last English language article where I used to some excess, but if there is an authoritive source that (used to have/) has more infor

Note: Used to because as I had stated on my Wikimedia Commons user-page, “I made Primal Trek obsolete”, if anyone is interested in information 🛈 on Chinese coins or Korean coins then Wikipedia has officially superseded Primal Trek by early July 2017 (and this is not an insult to either Gary Ashkenazy or Primal Trek), if you want images and illustrations then you could go to Primal Trek but as you can see in the above e-mail 📧 I want him to “donate” those to Wikimedia Commons, also I tend to buy Chinese and Korean coins simply to upload them to Wikimedia Commons so maybe a couple of years from now I can say that Primal Trek is “100% obsolete”. 😈

“Cross-wiki spam”
As I already said above I only added 2 links to the Dutch Wikipedia site to Primal Trek and the article contained a dozen links, at no time did I add Primal Trek anywhere else and the ironic part is that even before I got blocked for Sockpuppetry I had stopped using Primal Trek on the English Wikipedia for a very simple reason, there was literally nothing left to link to, I had already used any “useful” link I could, and the rest of Primal Trek covers Chinese charms which I personally have no interest in writing about in general (let alone on Wikipedia), however I did add it to Dutch Wikipedia and as Beetstra can't understand Dutch (I think) he just saw the link and assumed that it was spam, heck I might be lucky that he isn't an administrator (Dutch: moderator) at Dutch Wikipedia because he might’ve deleted Chinese kèpèngs as “a spam article”.

📚📚📚📚📚 “Bookspam”. 📚📚📚📚📚
On another note 📝 of excessively adding a source I did however add David Hartill’s Cast Chinese coins, in fact while David Hartill has an actual COI with the book he added it to numerous articles, do you know who added it to even more articles? You’ve guessed it, me. It’s not like David Hartill pays me £ 100,- for every page I cite, the opposite is true I had to pay him money in order to use it (and rephrase it) on Wikipedia, but I did use the book on literally every article with a subject described in it (remember, there are many Chinese numismatic articles about pre-1912 coins), and to no extend did I ever expect to see my money 💴 return to me, I only bought his book to share the knowledge with the world, isn't that what Jimbo Wales dreamed of when he made this website?

Of course there is no “Bookspam” project because a double standard exists that you can blacklist websites, but you can’t blacklist books 📚, and boy/girl am I happy that David Hartill hasn't been blacklisted. 😅

Conclusions.
Under any other circumstances a rational human-being would've looked at the situation and see that in fact all I was doing was sourcing and verifying content but the Bermean Hunter and Beetstra assumed bad faith on a Sockpuppetry case clearly unrelated to any articles I have written or expanded and globally blacklisted a reliable source, in this instance Wikipedia itself has become collateral damage, the community has no say of what Beetstra does and doesn't consider spam and going around multiple wikis removing inline citations would be nothing short of vandalism if it were done by anyone else, imagine if any new user would come here and just randomly started removing references from articles we would immediately revert them simply on the fact that it hurts the encyclopedia and we all know it. The main reason I was even protesting my lock is simply because this slanderous accusation of COI upon my person has hurt the month of hard work and the work of other editors, I never did anything to harm the article content of Wikipedia, Beetstra did when he started removing references from articles I have never edited on Serbian Wikipedia.

My conclusions on WikiProject Spam.
Well let me first explain my motivations behind my persistent socking before I will address the WikiProject Spam, this serves only for a (possible) comparison of motivation, when Commons admin Daphne Lantier/INeverCry found my sockpuppets at all times did they delete the user- and talk-pages (even if those didn't contain any disruptive texts), and then deleted any image uploaded by them as “Copyright violations”, also later deleting some categories I had created after removing those categories from images and then claiming “empty category”, in fact the whole reason INeverCry was discovered to be a sockpuppeteer was because they went looking for old unused accounts, and then delete any personal pictures 📷 of them citing “abandoned account” regardless of the reasons that user had left Wikipedia, nor is there a rule or guideline on Wikimedia Commons that states that personal pictures 📷 of people must be deleted after they have become inactive, imagine if a person had died, they only had digital pictures of themselves, their survivors “cleaned” all their disks, and no other picture 📷 of that person exists other than the one in Commons, well “though luck” according to INeverCry. In fact one of the main reasons I appealed my global lock 🔒 is because this (ab)user just deleted my Commons user page citing “locked account” (again, there are no rules or policies regarding this) and after they were de-sysopped they bragged about almost getting half a million admin actions, which makes me suspect that all the above mentioned actions were purely motivated to get an arbitrary number of admin actions rather than an actual interest for Wikimedia Commons, who would benefit from educational images being deleted? Who would benefit from useful categories being deleted? Who would benefit from deleting user pages and pictures of inactive/blocked users? Well, 1) not the users of these services, 2) not the readers, and 3) not the website itself, all it does it increase a number without value by removing things that do have value.

Now the reason I cite the above example is very simple, this admin has been doing it for years, how many useful images have been incorrectly deleted as “copyright violations” because some admin either wanted to stack up their admin stats or assumed that anything uploaded by a blocked must be deleted (from an e-mail 📧 exchange with a Commons admin the man claimed that images by blocked users at all times need to be deleted even if they are free, donated, and used on Wikipedia because “the Foundation should not host images by users who ignore the rules”), the community never decided on any of these actions, and other admins never review them because there are millions of users and only hundreds or thousands of admins, on paper admins are accountable for their actions but in reality this is rarely true.

Update: Credit where credit is due the admin I complained about looked at the situation and undeleted the category deleted by Daphne Socktier, despite his aggressive e-mails towards me he did take an objective look at the situation and did the right thing for Wikimedia Commons.

Which brings me to WikiProject Spam, how many good and useful sources have been deleted because the COIBot had a false positive? Let's be honest if something is blacklisted most users will probably assume that it is so because the source was deemed unreliable, or maybe because the website itself was questionable, if I found out something was blacklisted I didn't go to request its removal because “it must be blacklisted for a reason, right?” who actually checks what and where things get deleted, on Wikipedia the general rule is that if content is unsourced that it should not be on Wikipedia, if a previously commonly used source suddenly becomes “spam” then how much information should be deleted? Well, simply put the members of this project don't care, they never actually look at the content or where it gets linked to, they only look at how much it gets linked, and by whom it gets linked, is it just a good faith contributor who happens to read this website more than others? Well, that’s a question they never ask, is it an obscure but otherwise quite resourceful website for a niche subject? Again, they simply don't care, their definition of “spam” has nothing to do with how or if it would benefit Wikipedia, they simply don’t care about the content.

Now ask yourself this question, imagine if you like me are just someone who likes a subject, you know that there’s lots of information on this subject on the internet but all the Wikipedia articles are just unsourced stubs… You know this one website that has lots of information on the subject and it doesn't matter what website that is, but only 4 or 5 other people used it very sparsely, how often can you use a source to expand Wikipedia’s content with it, 10 times? 20 times? 30 times? 40 times? The answer is that It’s simply not your choice to decide, others in bad faith will decide this for you, they don’t want those articles to expand, they don't want you here, it doesn't matter if you use lots of other references, you just used that one website “too much” and they don't care that it to expand or source content, in their minds you are now “a spammer”, all the work you did out of the goodness of your heart is seen as “spamlinking” and all the content you added may get deleted not because it's wrong, not because it doesn't benefit either Wikipedia or its readers, but because someone else decided for you that your content is “spam”. An example below is exactly how Wikipedia looks like if we do not criticise their actions:

What I like Wikipedia to look like, Vs. how Beetstra wants Wikipedia to look like.

The problem really lies with how inefficient the COIBot is designed.
The COIBot only shows who added the link where, it doesn't show Diff’s, I think that the human checking where the links were added should see the full edit to know if it were just a link being added, a link replacing another link (a common form of spamming), or a link being added with content, the COIBot simply doesn't discriminate and if you add a whole paragraph of educational content and properly source it someone reviewing the bot might delete the reference you used, this is the antithesis of verifiability.

If you still believe that I’m a spammer...
The COIBot simply had a false positive because I'm passionate about expanding Chinese numismatic articles, nothing more and if anyone is daring to make a claim that I am here to spam then please leave a message at at my talk page so I can cuss at you. 😡

Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.

Addendum (added on September 2nd, 2017). How to describe the tactics used against me.
Unsubstantiated accusations of canvassing or conflict of interest, labeling an editor as a point-of-view pusher, or accusing them of being a sock puppet or meat puppet of a banned user are common false narratives.

1) Well, the claim that I have a WP:COI certainly falls under this, no evidence just accusations, never was an objective look at any of my edits been exercised, they were simply retroactively seen as “adding spamlinks”.

2) Beetstra concluded that Javierfv1212, Dwarwinci, and Neboysha87 were all my sockpuppets, not based on any evidence but since they used the same reference I used they must sockpuppets because no-one else in the world 🗺 would ever use this “spam-site”.

POV railroading also occurs on a one-to-one basis and may involve a condescending, patronizing, sarcastic and insulting tone.

3) Obviously the above question by Beetstra can be seen as this, the fact that at no point he was even considering the fact that his false WP:BADFAITH narrative was wrong and only replied in sarcastic insults proves that he is not here to build an encyclopedia.

XLinkBot
XLinkBot has got to be one of the worst designed bots on Wikipedia, it operates completely on bad faith and even if it were designed to fight “spam” it does a pretty lousy job at it. First of all the way it reverts is completely unrelated to the context of the edits it reverts, it simply targets a user and then undoes all of their revisions on a page where they have inserted a blacklisted link, this can be quite evident in my first encounter with Beetstra where the XLinkBot indiscriminately removed numerous sources, content additions, and illustrative images (as can be seen here) not because any of my edits were bad but simply because I had inserted what Beetstra defines as “a spamlink”, for context all the “sources” cited in the article before I added more appropriate references are links to a random auction site, how accurate is the information from those auction sites? Well, I don’t know because 75% of the coins in those auctions were sold when I began with my edits in July 2017 there at Ming dynasty coinage and those bare-link “references” were added years ago. The trustworthiness of a source or it's value to Wikipedia isn't something Beetstra or the XLinkBot ever look at, the context as to how and why links were added are also completely ignored.

As a scenario, imagine a new inexperienced editor finds a stub about his/her favourite subject, this new editor knows a dozen websites about this subject and starts expanding the stub into a great educational resource that any reader would appreciate... Oops, the new editor added a source that was blacklisted and all of their edits have no been reverted, imagine the impression this would give to that user, also a(n automated) message has been left on their talk page “You are a spammer, if you continue to do edits like that you will be blocked from editing”, this would also give them the impression that all of their edits were bad while in reality the link they added could've been blacklisted for literally any reason.

“But, hey…” you might be saying, “that’s just a minor risk in combating the prevalent issue of spammers, right?” well, no that brings us to another issue with the bot… it simply doesn't work, as of Semptember 2nd, 2017 Beetstra proudly proclaimed that he “removed any reference of Primal Trek from Wikipedia” and he personally removed many links claiming “XWiki spam” from other wiki's… of all the links he added… only one (1) was actually added by me (and you've guessed it, a reference), so I can only assume that he programmed the XLinkBot to revert my edits and remove a total of… zero (0) links, I’m not even joking, all the links in English Wikipedia placed by “I, the master-spammer, the spam-master, Spammy McSpammington, Spam McSpamz, the Spamming Spamster” are sill there (as of writing this), this is good news for Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, but bad news for BadFaithBot… I mean XLinkBot, the moment any other editor makes literally any edit the XLinkBot simply doesn't function, so how can mass-spammers circumvent the XLinkBot? Very simple, just add the spam-links as an IP/named-user, then sign-in/-out and make a few minor edits, and there’s absolutely nothing the XLinkBot can do against this, it has to be one of the easiest bots to game, and it is not uncommon for Wikipedia itself to become collateral damage of its antics, so basically we have a bot that removed educational content but no spam…

I am not calling for this bot to be out right abolished, I think that the “External Links” sections of articles should be patrolled to some extend but in the end a human (who actually objectively looks at the link-additions) should judge whether or not an edit or a series of edits harm or help Wikipedia, “a war against links” is a war against verifiability which is more harmful than helpful, which brings me to a bot designed with the same level of neglect and bad faith…

COIBot
COIBot has got to be thought out by someone who clearly doesn't understand how Wikipedia works, its tasks seem to be based on bad faith and COI-paranoia, and not on any practical means to build an encyclopedia, so what is my issue with COIBot? Well, very simply it doesn't actually look at edits, no I'm serious it just lists links, it doesn't care where the links link to, how the links were added, or why the links were added, it just looks at who adds what link (not a source, reference, or external link, just the link to a website) and how much that person adds that link. The assumption before a single person has even looked at the edits is of bad faith, the COIBot doesn't ever show Diff’s which are great for context it only shows links additions.

Here is how the WikiProject Spam thinks “These links were added by/used by a spammer, hence they need to be removed”, this also includes links that people completely unrelated to “the spammer” added (just think of the people other than myself that added Primal Trek), and also notes that Beetstra and others consciously delete references, if a spammer would let's say replace an existing source with their website reverting that would be the better choice, if a spammer excessively adds links to the “External Links” section of every article even vaguely related to that it could be obviously a conflict of interest (case in point would be Sema from Art-Hanoi who did this, but as I added the link 🔗 probably more than he did the COIBot might see me as “the spammer” rather than the owner even though I mostly used it as a reference). The COIBot should be updated to include diff’s for context, even if someone has a conflict of interest if their edits still help build an encyclopedia then why remove it? Remove them from the “External Links” sections sure, but why as references if the website actually properly references the added content? Well, this is another way how “the war on spam” basically became “the war on Wikipedia” but by people who sincerely believe that they’re protecting the thing they’re destroying. (See, unlike them I hold the moral high ground and assume good faith)

What’s even worse is that for us mobile-users there simply are no warnings, when I tried to launch the article Yuan dynasty coinage I couldn't, on my mobile browser I got an error message that only read “Error, couldn't save page” with no explanation given, when I was forced to switch to my “Desktop view” I got a message that China Guide or something was blacklisted, now imagine if Beetstra’s idea of indefinitely blocking anyone who tries to add a blacklisted link in any way with no talk page access, imagine the huge collateral damage this would have on not just new- and mobile-users but on Wikipedia itself, the Wikipedia definition of “spamlinks” isn't based on the source itself (the “target” website) but on an earlier bad faith assumption regarding the links, I have absolutely no idea that that China Travel or China Guide or whatever website was blacklisted or even why it was blacklisted, if I pressed save twice with this idea I could've been blocked on the bogus assumption that I'm a spammer, and at the time I was unaware where or how one could remove links from the blacklist, I can only assume that many others may have also run into this problem and very few people actually know where the SpamBlacklist is so blocking anyone before they could save an edit because of “a bad link” (what a handful of people deemed “bad”) basically shows that the current “anti-spam culture” is very harmful, I do not comment on the actual spammers but indiscriminately combatting “links” while not evaluating the edits is a bane on the idea of building an encyclopedia.

Drafted from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) (Sockpuppets 🎭) (Articles 📚) 20:28, 6 February 2018 (UTC)