Ever since the ancient Sumerian’s started writing things down in cuneiform on stone tablets thousands of years ago, people have been modifying historical records to suit their own purposes and goals. One of my particular favorites is the story of the heretic king Akhenaten of ancient Egypt, who tried to replace thousands of years of polytheism with worship of a single deity, Aten the sun god. Now before you condemn Akhenaten’s actions the response the priests took to eradicate all traces of Akhenaten’s existence after his death are equally as self serving. Modern day netizens looking for ways to modify historical records to suit their own goals need to look no further than Wikipedia. For those of you out there who think Wikipedia is some bastion of truth not to be sullied up with personal goals, I point to the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales who was recently caught rewriting his own biography to put a different spin on things( Wired:Wikipedia Founder Edits his own bio).
So here are some helpful tips for getting your links into Wikipedia:
- Don’t Be Popular: Unless your content is truly stellar don’t try adding it to hot, popular, or page that gets edited with any frequency. The longer it’s been since the last edit the better.
- Look for Stubs: If you can find a stub you’ve hit pay dirt. Go ahead be bold add some real content of value.
- Redundancy: Don’t be happy with only one link, strive to make yourself immune from everything but a full on frontal assault
- Act Natural: You will look much more natural adding 1 link per month over 12 months instead of 12 links in 1 month
- Obfuscate your Intent: Don’t make it easy to spot that you are just interested adding your link. Add content, other links, even some of your competitors.
- Be Neutral: One of the long standing rules of Wikipedia is it’s neutrality, so insert your highly opinionated comments with neutral point of view qualifiers like [some argue]
- Say no to Keywords: Keywords in the anchor text are a dead give away, resist the temptation, or use it to get your enemies links eliminated
- Learn to Sacrifice: In chess sacrificing is an art, in Wikipedia learn how to sacrifice your last edit to accomplish your true goals
- Know the Rules: Got yourself in a editing war, make sure you know how use the rules to your own advantage.
- Become A User: Lots of people are users with their own pages of hand edited links
- Wikipedia is not Spam:Most people don’t think of Wikipedia as spam so dropping links to Wikipedia pages you’ve edited usually won’t arouse too much suspicion.
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I’m a big fan of the Amarna period, too.
However, literature has always had a close relationship with propaganda – the study of written history (certainly from the ancient to mediaeval period) is essentially about trying to form objective opinions from political manifestos.
BTW, the Wired article returns a 404.
Wired seems to be having a problem now. I did a search for the article title and it’s there, click thru and it’s gone, go figure.
What about spinning off a subentry, letting it sit for a while, and then adding a link to the spin off? I figured that would be less obvious, and it was also WP-friendly due to the nature of the entry/subentry. However, the subentry doesn’t appear to have any pagerank and I’ve received almost no traffic from it. My other WP links generate a fair amount of traffic, but those topics are much more popular than either the entry/subentry in question.
Also, I placed a link and it was deleted, followed by it being put back after I defended it. Now, I want to replace that link with another one since I spun that info off to another site. Advised?
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