What is going on with this dead wiki?

I wanted to see what this minecraft mod added to the game and ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole. Go to this site: https://wiki.industrial-craft.net and click the random page button. Clearly someone is botting this dead wiki with computer generated articles, but I'm more confused as to why? I initially thought it would be some form of advertising, but the links I've found seem totally random and unconnected. The wiki is still having bot pages added right now judging by the recent changes page. Anyone know why this might be happening? It doesn't really impact the functionality of the wiki, it's just weird.

All I can tell you is that it's common on dead/dying Mediawiki sites. Bots go in, create like 50 accounts with a similar pattern to the names, and just spam it to kingdom come. For what purpose, I don't know. Couldn't be money since the links aren't (always) to a site that could potentially make someone money. I doubt anyone would be assmad enough at a Minecraft mod to flood its wiki, either. Maybe someone's just bored.

There seem to be a few bots actually. This kind of botting is usually aimed at a non-human reader, search engines and spiders are most often the target audience. Florfenicol (from your picture) is an antibiotic and the links are by majority to a Chinese website selling pharmaceuticals. So there's at least one bot trying to increase the profile of that site. I ran into some Polish. The google translation looks like gibberish, but that might just be because it's a google translation. There's reference to things like "rock blocks". If it is random garbage it's Minecraft themed random garbage and it didn't look typical to a simple markov chain generation. It included parenthetical asides and some strange punctuation choices!!!!!!!!!!! This might be something more like an electronic equivalent to tagging a wall. If it does make sense in Polish maybe it was even human generated. The most abnormal sample I've run into so far seems to be a mangled scientific paper with random broken links strewn throughout. It's very jargon heavy and there are places where parts of the text appear to be missing or maybe the result of a machine translation because it doesn't make sense structurally. It's hard to tell what the purpose of this one is. Number station? Pastebin with extra steps? Some form of SEO? No idea here. All sample URLs attached.

Well, I think I've solved a majority of the less straightforward botting. I thought that the medical paper spam and the Chinese pharmaceutical spam were unrelated until I found a paper which included live links. It looks like these are set up in chains across multiple unmoderated/abandoned wikis, forums and comment sections. The content itself is lifted straight from pubmed. The papers are cut up and the links are to removed parts of the paper in whatever it is. These secondary sites all have links along to one of "medchemexpress" or "selleckchem", these sites are the same. If I were to speculate I would say that this is an evasion technique. Search engine web spiders will still likely follow the chain of links down to their ends but on the wiki you're linking an abandoned forum rather than the target of your SEO bot. Since MediaWiki has tools to purge mass vandalism by domain the result of re-routing through abandoned and homemade forums is that it's harder to nuke all the spam with a single addition to a blacklist. Digging around a little I have found both sites referred to in MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist pages starting in late 2019-ish, most of the spam on the industrial-craft wiki seems to have been made in early to mid 2020, so this is a long-running bot.

>In the end: Just some random bots spamming dead wikis and is not an elaborate ARG So much wasted potential... but the content is amusing because of the context of the wiki