Spam Schadenfreude in the Seychelles
- By Tagishsimon and Dynaflow, May 28, 2007
Somewhere in the Seychelles, a spammer is likely being sacked after discovering that "the encyclopaedia anyone can edit" is not as safe a place for spam as one might sometimes think.
The spam in question, which began its strange Wiki-world life as a glossy, enthusiastic pean to the prestigious-sounding Canterbury University of the Seychelles, was quickly discovered by RHaworth and taken to AfD because of concerns about the institution's notability and because the article read "a bit spammy".
From the article, AfD reviewers learned that the university was "a fully authorised tertiary level academic institution under British law", "compliant with ... British Legislation" and even "the norms outlined by the International Organization for Standardization in EN ISO Model Standard 9001 of July 1994". Allegedly a certain "Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) confirmed that confidence can be placed in the University’s management and awards made through the external system". It was inferred that Canterbury University worked in co-operation with much better known establishments, such as Royal Holloway, University of London, and Imperial College London. 10,000 students are said to be in the process of earning credentials.
Wikipedia's position as the penultimate arbiter of tending-towards-unbiased information on the web, combined with the high Google ratings of its articles, makes it an attractive target for spammers, and cleaning out spam is a mainstream activity here, with its own dedicated project - Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam. However, this piece of spam was in for a much more horrific fate than simple reversion, at the hands of Wikipedia editors willing to teach the spammer an object lesson based on the ancient Wikipedian proverb, "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed by others, do not submit it".
As the AfD discussion progressed, convincing evidence that Canterbury University of the Seychelles was actually less of a prestigious institution of higher education, and more of a diploma mill, surfaced from editors arguing for the article's administrative deletion. It was at this point that Tagishsimon took it upon himself to rewrite the article in such a way that it would actually satisfy Wikipedia's verifiability and notability standards. With Dynaflow's help in shifting the tone of the article into one reflecting as much of a neutral point of view as was possible, given the circumstances, the team of AfD reviewers together helped cause what Dynaflow called "one of the worst spamming backfires I've seen here yet".
Despite some lingering misgivings about the notability of CUotS, the article survived its deletion nomination. AFD comments suggest the twin motivations of preserving an object lesson in the pitfalls of spamming Wikipedia and the promulgation of an unbiased view of the once proud hall of academe were at play in the unanimous final decision to keep the article. The article has found its way onto a number of watchlists and onto the list of unaccredited institutions of higher learning; furtive reversion to the halcyon version is no longer a possibility. Deletion is not an option either. It looks as through CUotS is stuck with its reputation, on Wikipedia as well as IRL. This mention in the Signpost merely gilds the lily.