This is particularly prevalent in geographical articles. I recently spent a few hours clearing spammy links out of articles on Greek islands (and towns, and bea

This is particularly prevalent in geographical articles. I recently spent a few hours clearing spammy links out of articles on Greek islands (and towns, and beaches, ...). One strategy spammers are using to try to make their links in Wikipedia "stickier" is to insert them as citations instead External Links. Wikipedians will (rightly) think more carefully before removing references than external links, since refs are supposed to be providing justification for part of the article, not just a nice-to-have extra. But in most cases they are not really legitimate citations, in the sense of any kind of reliable source for information (either the information isn't even there, or it's copied from a better source like an official website, in which case the original source should be cited instead).