Oh dianadiana!

Looking at recent changes this morning, I've realized that 5 and a half pages were dominated by edits by dianadiana. I can't figure out the motivation. It looks like spam to me, however almost all of the products are missing the tell-tale sign: the SEO backlink.

Here are the facts:

• all the products are lingerie
• all of the descriptions are short, but copied and pasted
• very few of them have SEO links

What should we do? What are your thoughts?

The policies thus far have been no adult products. But that was more in reference to sex toys and that kind of thing. Lingerie is a tough one since it borders on adult/family acceptable. Going by TV standards they do have commercials for Lingerie, though watching them with your parents can be a little uncomfortable!

I think some of the reports with more risque pictures that have nudity should be removed. The other ones... I'm still undecided, but I can see keeping them. In the back of my mind one side is yelling out "won't someone think of the children!" while the other side is saying "it's not THAT bad. Commercials have them!"

I'm more motivated by the annoyance factor. These reports are garbage. They don't serve any purpose. Personally, I would prefer to have no report than reports of this quality.

I'm not really against them, but at the same time they're not very well done and need to be fixed (the categories are pretty crazy, I don't think a thong fits in under women's pants). But I could see moving everything into a new Lingerie category.

What are SEO backlinks? This seems like spam to me, but if someone wants to change it and add it, that'd be okay.

SEO, Search Engine Optimization: the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords.

--

The most common techniques for "winning" searches in Google would be to spam the Internet by dropping links with the keyword you want to win as the link. For example, let's say ProductWiki wants to win the search for "product reviews" on Google, we could hire an SEO firm to go aroundthe Internet and place links like this:

....for the best product reviews, go to ProductWiki...

Google infers that the linked web page must have something to do with "product reviews", and subsequently ranks higher in the search results

So how do sites like ProductWiki fit in to this picture? Well, we're often targetted by SEO firms, manufacturers, retailers, and spammers alike as a place to drop these links since we're a wiki and anyone can edit the content. However, what they may not realize is that we are dedicated to obliterating their efforts.

I vote to remove all of the reports. The pictures aren't that bad, but the quality of the report is. No one will really find much to help them make a purchasing desicion based on these product reports. Unless their quality is improved I find the whole lot nearly useless.

My gut feeling is to DELETE. The value-add is so low on this content, relative to the annoyance factor. (I've messaged dianadiana, to give her (or him) a chance to pipe in).

The more important issue, is the precedent that this sets. Ultimately, the goal of ProductWiki (I think) is to make a useful, valuable, high-quality, spam-free, trustworthy, and open site for people to use to help make smart consumer choices. If the content being added to the wiki is not inline with those ideals/goals, then it must be deleted.

When in doubt, throw it out?

There are two slippery slopes that we can fall on as a community. Being too lax let's the spammers and jerks ruin the day. But be too strict and we end up becoming TOO hard which is making Wikipedia an unfriendly place. I know that in the early days Wikipedia was a lot more loose in their policies, and as they grew became stricter and stricter in their editorial guidelines.

The reason why I dislike these reports is because they're not really products. They seem to be coming from yandy.com (not safe for work link keep in mind), but is Yandy a reseller, or the manufacturer AND seller? If they're the manufacturer and seller then at least they're real products that can be reviewed, people can comment on them, etc.

Actually, thinking about it more, there's really 2 forces at work here.

1) the pace of adding products

2) the quality of the reports

If the reports were of the same quality, but were only being added once a day, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. I think the fact that they're low quality means that they EACH have to be checked to ensure that each one is acceptable for the site (content wise, and spam-link wise). So doing 50-100 a day is obviously quite a bit of effort, its not a TON of effort maybe 30 minutes to check them all, but what happens if there are 5 dianadianas? 10? All of a sudden the site can get overwhelmed pretty quickly with these garbage reports that nobody will check.

Now if dianadiana did a better job on these (I want to keep in mind they're not HORRIBLE reports or anything like that) such that a mod didn't have to check every single report, then the amount of effort into moderating them is less, and the site could handle a higher load.

So from a policy perspective, I don't want to ban/delete all of these reports. As it is right now, they're not worth the effort to go back and delete them, the system is setup so that they fall into the system pretty quickly and don't clutter the site up. But going forward policy wise I think we should put a limit on the rate that people can post poor quality copy and pasted reports. We keep that in check so that we don't get overrun in the future, but at the same time don't become TOO strict and limit potential good contributions.

What about productscout? Adding a whole bunch of medications, copied and pasted.