Wikipedia more or less has "de facto" senior editors, anyway - Wikipedians who spend a lot of time editing all sorts of article for grammar, content, etc. I read a statistic once (can't remember the numbers) saying that a huge percentage of their edits (upwards of 80) are done by a rather small number of people.
A personal experience I have with this is a friend who was upset about the political situation in his home country and began editing the offending political candidate's bio by purposely mispelling the politician's first name, inserting ridiculous statements, etc. One of the editors consistently corrected it every time, and then he must have reported it because the admin-y people froze the entry for a couple days. There's no reason they can't police links in the same way, I think.
Still, that does mean they're spending a considerable amount of human effort on a Sisyphean chore.
Also, spam is more likely to be automated, and distributed. A person with a political bone to pick isn't as likely to be using software to automatically post edits to assorted chosen pages at random time intervals, from a number of different network addresses, etc.
My point was just that they already have volunteers policing everything...do you really think it would be that much more work to get rid of cruddy links?
I don't have real data, but my guess would be that Wikipedians spend a lot more editing time on spam than they do on other kinds of page maintenance. A single spammer running a script could make thousands of edits in a big batch.
It probably varies with the section of the wiki, and with current events.
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A personal experience I have with this is a friend who was upset about the political situation in his home country and began editing the offending political candidate's bio by purposely mispelling the politician's first name, inserting ridiculous statements, etc. One of the editors consistently corrected it every time, and then he must have reported it because the admin-y people froze the entry for a couple days. There's no reason they can't police links in the same way, I think.
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Also, spam is more likely to be automated, and distributed. A person with a political bone to pick isn't as likely to be using software to automatically post edits to assorted chosen pages at random time intervals, from a number of different network addresses, etc.
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It probably varies with the section of the wiki, and with current events.
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