Talk:Spam

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Spam is more positive than negative, but it must be portrayed in a negative light to open up additional revenue streams. Such as anti spam software, tax money from spammers, fines etc..

So spam definately helps the economy. Thats a crap deifnitio

-- Just as a comment, I slightly went against MoS:DAB by adding periods to the end of summaries. This is because one summary was two sentences, and having the first sentence end with a period but the second one not looks awful. Once periods are established as line terminators, you then need internal page consistency. This has been discussed and tacitly approved on the MoS:DAB talk page.

In other news, a few of the links were going to the same place as the main link, and one of the entries seemed to be completely bogus, at least according to Google. SnowFire 21:26, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] S.P.A.M?

Aren't spam just short for Stupid, Pointless, Annoying Message? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.109.192.85 (talk • contribs) .

See Spam_(electronic)#History -SCEhardT 23:24, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

no i think because spam is terrible ;)Spex control 09:43, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article Design

Snowfire, you are absolutely correct about what Wikipedia:Manual of Style says about the layout of disambig pages, and your revert was correct, per the book.

Nontheless, I am going to revert. For the first time in my two years on Wikipedia, I am making reference to WP:IAR, because this, I believe, is clearly an instance where it is called for. Let me explain.

MoS says that we need to place the most common usage or meaning first. But the situation with spam is fairly unique. For one thing, if you think about it, the use of Spam to refer to the canned meat is almost certainly not the most common usage today. There are likely many, many people who use the term spam without even having heard of the meat. So MoS would seem to dictate that Spam (canned meat) should NOT be the first thing listed. The only thing is, there are so many other spam meanings here, which one should come first? It's almost impossible to pick one. And then there is the fact that you cannot avoid the fact that these usages are all related (though the Weird Al usage is the most distantly related, as the only meaning with no connection at all to the Monty Python sketch.)

Generally speaking, a disambiguation page is only supposed to point one in the correct direction, that is, to the article that the reader is looking for. But in this case, this page is the "last and best hope" (hyperbole intentional) for the reader to discover and truly understand the relationship between these terms. For that reason, I think we need to ignore the usual rules regarding disambiguation pages and revert to the unusual format it had before. Unschool 04:29, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Requested edit

Link R.E.M. should link to R.E.M. (band) --Passargea 02:40, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Done. Unschool 03:03, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wrong redirect

Since SPAM is the registered trademark of Hormel Foods Inc., surely the SPAM page should redirect to Spam (food), not this one. Hormel doesn't mind "spam" (sentence case) being used for UCE and such, as long as their trademark is always spelled in upper case. -- 217.171.129.74 (talk) 04:57, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia has not been in the habit of having corporations determine their policies on naming articles, redirects, or anything else. There are perfectly valid reasons—overwhelming, IMO—for having the redirect come here. Unschool (talk) 05:54, 14 April 2008 (UTC)