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I was reviewing suggested edits recently and came across these two tag edits, made by the same person:

  1. flask tag wiki suggested edit
  2. django tag wiki suggested edit

Both edits were rejected by me, but were ultimately approved by the community.

What stood out to me was the edit comment for each. One of the edit comments reads:

link to flask usage examples on Sourcegraph (disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of Sourcegraph.)

The other edit comment is similar. As I was reviewing, I thought the edits were borderline spam, so I investigated further. From the Sourcegraph About page:

Sourcegraph makes it easier to find the information you need: documentation, examples, usage statistics, answers, and more.

From what I understand, Sourcegraph is a tool to do code analysis; the tag wiki edits referenced above seem to just link to the Sourcegraph analysis of the Django and Flask source code.

My questions

Was I correct to reject the above edits as spam? If I was wrong, why are the edits not considered spam?

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  • 4
    I'd hardly recommend that mess as "usage examples"...
    – madth3
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 1:30
  • 4
    I think Wikipedia's rule of: if a thing is important enough, other people will write about it is apropos. Of course there will be exceptions, but a link should point to content that is canonical and/or phenomenal, and it certainly doesn't seem to be the case in this situation.
    – Tim M.
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 3:19
  • For the record, the edits in question have been removed: Flask tag wiki rollback, and Django tag wiki rollback.
    – chue x
    Commented Sep 13, 2013 at 22:17

2 Answers 2

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I say it's spam. I would be reluctant to accept third party links in general. Otherwise tag wikis will end up as big link directories.

The site in question seems non-commercial for now, but that doesn't mean it's not spam. It looks like a github crawler without much useful content. The disclaimer seems to indicate the users good intent - but that could also have been the intention of including it. The link seems kind of promotional.

Both tag wikis already link to their official documentations with many examples. I see no reason to link to other external sites, unless 'Sourcegraph' is something well known and accepted in the those frameworks' communities (which I guess it's not). Should sourcegraph link from every tag wiki to their site just because they indexed some random code snippets from github? Of course not.

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  • The community seems to agree that the edits are spam.
    – chue x
    Commented Sep 14, 2013 at 15:41
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Spam primarily refers to blatant advertising/publicity for products and services. If it's a link to a legitimate resource and nothing is stated about "visit my site!", then it isn't spam.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/144802/217361

In this case, that website appears to be promotional and not directly relevant. I would just accept a link if it leads to an SE question or another site with adequate information (including Wikipedia).

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    a link just existing says "visit me", and that is a commercial website, and the content of dubious value.
    – Andrew Barber Mod
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 1:34
  • @AndrewBarber: Ah, okay. I thought it had to look obvious at first glance.
    – Jamal
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 1:37
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    No problem. Your answer is not bad here as a general answer, but in this case I think those edits were spammy.
    – Andrew Barber Mod
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 1:38
  • @AndrewBarber: Okay. That's good for me to keep in mind when doing my own peer reviews off-site.
    – Jamal
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 1:39
  • @AndrewBarber Shouldn't you ..like.. rollback those edits since they were indeed spam? :)
    – asheeshr
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 1:45
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    @asheeshr Why do you people keep encouraging me to feed my addiction for deleting content? ;-)
    – Andrew Barber Mod
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 1:47
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    @AndrewBarber: I feel the same about my flagging. :-)
    – Jamal
    Commented Sep 12, 2013 at 1:48

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