Vanity page: Difference between revisions

A '''vanity page''' is a page that a person posts for promotion of himself, his company, his ideas, etc. Essentially he uses the wiki as a free {{w|vanity press}}. A page whose content is [[off-topic]] is particularly susceptible to being viewed as a vanity page. Mainspace content is also often more closely regulated than [[userspace]].

Such pages are sometimes deleted as [[spam]], but norms differ from one wiki to another. [[Wikipedia]] clearly {{w|Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_blog.2C_Web_hosting_service.2C_social_networkin|states}} that it is not a free web host and that vanity content will therefore be deleted. For one thing, vanity pages are deemed to manifest a [[conflict of interest]]. Other sites are willing to be more Facebooky and to welcome vanity pages as potentially useful [[user-generated content]], so long as there is an actual human being who has taken enough interest in that particular wiki to post his content, rather than a bot advertising generic erectile dysfunction remedies. The idea may be that the user has an incentive to cross-promote the wiki as a way of drawing further attention to his content.