Talk:The Spamhaus Project/Archives/2014

Couple of corrections

I don't want make corrections myself to the Spamhaus Wikipedia entry because I've been following Spamhaus for years and ergo have enough real knowledge on the subject and history of Spamhaus to disqualify me as an editor of their entry under Wikipedia rules. But sad to find the Spamhaus entry filling up with nonsense, I mean this is supposed to be an encyclopaedia no? So a couple of notes for anyone interested :

"The Spamhaus Project is an international non-profit company" - It's actually an organization and is staffed by Volunteers. The fact most organizations are non-profit companies on paper does not mean one calls an organization a "company", nor do people usually volunteer for "companies". For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization

Sorry, should have been http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_organization - Like all NPOs (Nonprofit Organizations) The Spamhaus Project is not a "company" (although all organizations are "companies" the naming convention for a nonprofit organization is "nonprofit organization" (same as Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. which is also a company but is usually properly termed a "non-profit organization"). The use of the TLD .ORG is also a good clue, as in spamhaus.ORG and not spamhaus.CO.UK, and as has been noted by various people the official registration of "The Spamhaus Project" has no "Inc., Ltd., Corp." or any company suffix after it. Why? Because it is registered in the UK as an NPO, a Nonprofit Organization and not a normal company. But in case things are different over in USA, I tried looking up "non-profit company" on Wikipedia and guess what? Wikipedia redirects the words "non-profit company" to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_organization because "non-profit company" is not correct terminology for a Nonprofit Organization. :-) FirenzeNove (talk) 11:27, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

"The Spamhaus services protect 650 million email users" - I guess some point ten years ago that would have been real but nowadays is > 1.9 billion users (<http://www.spamhaus.org/organization/> "Spamhaus Userbase" at 03 March 2014 = 1,971,848,000 users).

I don't think it's a problem to add corrections here in Talk, but sorry anyway if it gets someone upset :-) FirenzeNove (talk) 12:05, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

I've added that 650 million was the figure in 2006. It adequately makes the point that the lists are used by a lot of people. We don't need the exact up-to-date figure from the spamhaus website. Secondary sources are preferred. TwoTwoHello (talk) 22:48, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

There are plenty of recent secondary sources all over the web, no need to get one from 8 years ago. For example: http://newgadgetntechnology.blogspot.fr/2013/04/spamhaus.html ("1.77 billion email users") or CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/27/tech/massive-internet-attack/ ("1.7 billion e-mail accounts") FirenzeNove (talk) 05:48, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

The Blogspot link is not usable, per WP:SPS, and the CNN link is only reporting Spamhause's own claims. That might be usable, as long as it's made clear that it's a self-report. Normally I would just change it, but the primary source template make me feel it might be worth waiting until reliable, WP:SECONDARY sources come along. This isn't to say that the numbers aren't accurate, just that they aren't independently verified. The Guardian story from 2006 was reporting on a court case, so it has something more tangible to base it's numbers on, at least in theory. Grayfell (talk) 06:16, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Fair enough :-) FirenzeNove (talk) 11:32, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

On the company/organization issue, reliable sources usually refer to Spamhaus as an organization rather than a company, so I am going to revert the recent change. TwoTwoHello (talk) 10:30, 8 March 2014 (UTC)