Wikipedia:Spam-only account
 | This is an explanatory essay about the Wikipedia:Single-purpose account and Wikipedia:Spam. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Users who use Wikipedia for the sole purpose of promotion will be indefinitely blocked. |
On Wikipedia, A spam-only account is a type of single-purpose registered account which is only used to promote a person, item, company or any other entity.
Background
[edit]Throughout Wikipedia's history, there have been numerous attempts by users to add promotional content, and many users will attempt to not just add such content but create entirely new pages that are completely promotional. Anonymous users, including IP editors (formerly) and temporary accounts cannot create articles, so many users create registered accounts for the purpose of promotion to get around those restrictions. These users often engage in behavior contrary to the purpose of Wikipedia, which are listed below.
Common behaviors
[edit]The usernames of spam-only accounts are often promotional, and their edits often only serve to promote a particular entity. These are a few, but not all, of the examples of activities that spam-only accounts may engage in; however, keep in mind that not all spam-only accounts engage in every single one of the behaviors listed here.
- Adding promotional content to articles
- Changing the content of articles to include promotional phrasing
- Removing percieved negative encyclopedic content which do not violate the neutral point of view policy or biographies of living people violations policy to make the article subject look better
- Linking to spammy external sites
- Hijacking articles to a promotional version
- Creating spammy userspace pages
- Engaging in undisclosed paid editing in violation of the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use for the purposes of promoting a subject
What to do when you encounter one
[edit]Tag any promotional pages created by the spam-only account under Criterion G11 of the Speedy deletion guidelines, as well as revert any edits which contain spammy external links, promotional content or are otherwise unhelpful to the encyclopedia. After doing that, report the account to the Administrator intervention against vandalism page if the spam is recent. Accounts that are only used for promotional purposes are usually indefinitely blocked.
What is not a spam-only account
[edit]- New users who do not understand that Wikipedia is not a web host. While such user pages may seem promotional at times, some users create userpages looking like resumes because they genuinely do not know our user page policies and think that user pages on Wikipedia work similar to profiles elsewhere.
- Anyone who makes edits about companies that are neutral and non-promotional in nature. To be a spam-only account, the edits made by that account must be biased in order to promote a particular entity, or be subtle and seem innocuous alone but otherwise done in a manner to generate traffic for spam sites.
- Anyone who simply has a conflict of interest with any article on Wikipedia. Conflict of interest is a description of a situation, and is not an explicit indication of bias.
- Accounts with usernames that imply shared use that never edit the encyclopedia. To be classified as a spam-only account, it must make an edit to the encyclopedia, as we cannot always determine good or bad faith from usernames alone.
- IP addresses, as they are often shared or reassigned.