Link Spamming Wikipedia for Profit

Link Spamming Wikipedia for Profit - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2011, written by Andrew G. West, Jian Chang, Krishna K. Venkatasubramanian, Oleg Sokolsky and Insup Lee.

Overview

Collaborative functionality is an increasingly prevalent web technology. To encourage participation, these systems usually have low barriers-to-entry and permissive privileges. Unsurprisingly, ill-intentioned users try to leverage these characteristics for nefarious purposes. In this work, a particular abuse is examined -- link spamming -- the addition of promotional or otherwise inappropriate hyperlinks. Authors analysis focuses on the wiki model and the collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in particular. A principal goal of spammers is to maximize exposure , the quantity of people who view a link. Creating and analyzing the first Wikipedia link spam corpus, authors find that existing spam strategies perform quite poorly in this regard. The status quo spamming model relies on link persistence to accumulate exposures, a strategy that fails given the diligence of the Wikipedia community. Instead, authors propose a model that exploits the latency inherent in human anti-spam enforcement. Statistical estimation suggests novel model would produce significantly more link exposures than status quo techniques. More critically, the strategy could prove economically viable for perpetrators, incentivizing its exploitation. To this end, authors address mitigation strategies.