Talk:Economic data

External link

Regarding the removal of this link:

• The Brussels Free Institute for Economic Research

It was commented as "rm workforall.net linkspam by User talk:81.242.58.154" but I do not see any discussion about the quality of the link on the user's discussion pages. It looks like the user spams all possible WP articles with the link but I do not see how it proves its low quality. Can you please enlight me? (I do not defend its quality because I do not know the site; but I would like to see a reason/proof.) :-) --Ioannes Pragensis 16:46, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Hello Ioannes. The workforall.net external link is part of a mass spamming with 112 linkspams so far. This spammer also copied and pasted large quantities of duplicate text into multiple articles which damages Wikipedia's content integrity. I've tried to clean it up as best I could but I could use your help. Please see User_talk:Requestion#workforall.net_linkspam for details. This link is going to be blacklisted by the official meta black list or by a bot so I wouldn't bother adding the link back. (Requestion 17:55, 30 April 2007 (UTC))

OK, thank you, let us seek another link. --Ioannes Pragensis 18:50, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Here is the diff [1] for this article. Note that this exact text has been pasted into 12 other articles. It was fairly recent so this propagation isn't bad but some other workforall.net paste spams have been in many Wikipedia articles since Summer 2006. (Requestion 19:44, 30 April 2007 (UTC))

Yes, I have it seen in Regression analysis first and removed it immediately, because it is not appropriate there. But I think that something like this is useful here in the article about Economic data - I sometimes look for data about inflation rates, unemployment etc., and such external links can be very helpful if well selected.--Ioannes Pragensis 20:00, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Do you have any idea why the workforall.net spammer is doing this? They seem like a legitimate organization. It's just crazy. (Requestion 21:03, 30 April 2007 (UTC))

I have no idea. Perhaps they do not know how Wikipedia works and think that it is a free advertising service... --Ioannes Pragensis 21:22, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Workforall is a leading think-tank in Brussels. Their contributions provide information on a great number of socio-economic subjects, some of which have indeed political sensitive implications conflicting with mainstream economic thought. The information they provide is high quality, well researched and well documented, and their posts were a positive contribution to Wikipedia's quality and pluralism.

One or two of their posts would indeed better suite under a different subject. However the indiscriminate mass destruction for this sole reason of all the valuable information they provided has destroyed lots of highly valuable subjects.

Such hasty random destruction without thorough investigation is causing much collateral damage and looks more like vandalism than it helps to fight spam. Such hit-or-miss random destruction in a couple of minutes has the ultimate effect of lowering the overall quality of Wikipedia.

The last thing the Wikipedia community needs is censureship. Wikipedia does not need censors from big media to validate the quality of information. The visitors of Wikipedia are competent enough to evaluate the quality of information provided. Once big media censors take over it will be the end of the unique Wikipedia concept.