Wikipedia:Spam-blacklisting

This MediaWiki interface documentation is for administration of the Wikipedia project and intended to supplement the MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist.

The MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist exists primarily to control widespread spamming and disruption of Wikimedia Foundation projects. It is intended as a last resort for persistent spamming on the project, by multiple individuals or IP addresses. Mediawiki:Spam-blacklist is meant to be used by the spam blacklist extension. Unlike the Meta spam blacklist, this blacklist affects pages on the English Wikipedia only. The MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist is a page in the MediaWiki namespace, which only administrators may edit.

Before blacklisting, please consider the following:

1. Does the site have any validity to the project?
2. Have links been placed after warnings/blocks?
3. Would referring this to our anti-spam bot, XLinkBot be a more appropriate step?
4. Is there a WikiProject Spam report?
5. Have all other avenues for dealing with the problem been explored or tried?
   1. Can the problem be controlled by page protection?
   2. Can the problem be controlled by blocking a single user? Accounts which exist solely to spam can and will be blocked uncontroversially.
   3. Fixed IPs with solely external link contributions can probably be blocked uncontroversially.
   4. Open proxies should be blocked outright.
6. Ensure all links have been removed from articles and discussion pages before blacklisting.