“imho in that case that’s not vandalism-by-bot but correct bucket-of-spam links removal. When doing edits on different sections as an unregistered user it’s common courtesy to only change a single section, not to change various ones in a single edit doing major revisions and dump a bucketload of URL links at the end of the article. This behavior is extremely common for url link spammers and that caused the revert action. Adding the URLs usually belongs in a separate edit action… check the Talk page of that ip address, the reason for the revert is stated clearly there: url link dump.”

Bots don’t argue “reasons” — they spit out canned responses (and enforce non-negotiable blanket rules) when triggered. In this case based on the inclusion of a single word, “myspace”.

This was the offending line that nuked everything:

“MySpace (http://www.myspace.com)- a “self-promotion” site where people often provide substantial details about themselves“

So because of a single line containing the URL of the home page of a highly-popular site on the ‘ban’ list, the entire body of work by that author was thrown out. Although well-intentioned, the bot ‘crashed-and-burned’ here because the bot’s programmer failed to distinguish between links to personal pages on MySpace (of which there are millions) and the front page of MySpace. The bot was obviously programmed to assume that any links to MySpace (homepage or not) were put there by a spammer trying to googlebomb his personal vanity page to increase its search-engine ranking. As judge, jury and executioner, the bot pronounced that Wikipedia editor guilty of link-spamming, and as punishment, deleted not just the offending word, but all edits ever made by that person (even those that broke no “rules”) going all the way back to his first appearance on Wikipedia.

That’s severe overkill, based on an invalid assumption, triggered by the bot’s slopily-programmed ruleset. And as a result, the Wikipedia bot vandalized –in this case permanently– an entire two-thirds of an article about an informative subject.

But just think about it for a moment … the Wikipedia article “Skiptrace” is about research methods used to locate people. Doesn’t it seem counterproductive that Wikipedia’s search-and-destroy bots would (mis)identify the URLs of these related search engines and online research tools used by investigators for data mining — including the website of the US Post Office — and consider them all to be “link spam” – even when they are precisely on-topic and relevant to the subject?

I find it amusing that “Anonymous Coward” would find the Wikipedia bot’s draconian enforcement action to be justified because a new user was not aware of the various customs peculiar to Wikipedia. I think this is one of the main problems with Wikipedia — the site has become very unfriendly and unforgiving to new visitors, who are somehow expected to know a long list of esoteric rules before they ever start. Rules that are often counter-intuitive and illogical to an outsider not steeped in the “culture” of Wikipedia.