I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the sentiment. It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made Wikipedia great just to get rid of a few spammers. We should develop more effective spam control rather than targetting all the links as one. Mgm On 1/24/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the article in a significant way. Internal links and interwiki links are still exempt from nofollow so we already don't target all links as one. Further refinement is of course possible but whether it's worth the effort is another question. If we had version flagging I could see a distinction being made on that basis, but other than that I can't think of anything that'd be particularly easy to code.

On 24/01/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: Broke? - d.

Mgm wrote: Sure. And I agree: it is not fair to allow one's pagerank to be increased by all the links to you which various people make, without also increasing the pagerank of all the various pages you link back out to. But the spammers don't play fair, either, and we're in a war with them. I bemoan the collateral damage of the non-followed, non-spammy external links as much as the next guy, and I hope that better, more selective spam-control mechanisms can be deployed in the long run, but in the short run, we'd be crazy to let linkspammers run roughshod over our external links sections, to allow them to hijack our high pagerank in promoting their grotty little sites. But with that said, I have to agree with Bryan: Wikipedia is not great because it has high pagerank. It is great because it has great content. Personally, I think Wikipedia's pagerank is too high: Wikipedia results tend to swamp the first page of many of the Google searches I do, to the detriment of the other sites I might also want to find. If the "boycott" as any effect, it won't bother me, or hurt Wikipedia, at all.

Steve Summit wrote: Hmm! Sounds like a superpower rationalization for a net based war on terror or war on drugs. :-) Yes. This is actually a perceptive point. Maximizing our page ranking is not a part of our mission, and being big is all the excuse that some people need for throwing stones. Big players affect their environment. Restraint helps to build the impression that we are a positive form in that environment. Ec

Steve Bennett wrote: That's why I qualified my statement with "most of the time" and "significant diminishment", I knew there would be exceptions like this. But any article that qualifies as just a stub is pretty much by definition low quality to begin with, so it doesn't take much of a contribution by external links to boost its relative quality by a lot. Once an article has grown into something more than a stub I think it's safe to say that the value of the external links will pale in comparison to the content itself. And in any event, nobody's arguing that external links should be forbidden. The purpose of the nofollow attribute is just to reduce the incentive to add external links for reasons not directly related to improving the article itself.

On 1/24/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: Here's a stupid suggestion. Code it so that *NEW* links are nofollow by default (thus stopping linkspammers from being rewarded for linkspamming), but allow a process (request to an admin or something) whereby a link can simply be followed and then the "nofollow" tag removed from it if it's verified to not be a spam link. Wouldn't that be better than uniformly tagging all links Nofollow? Unless of course the goal isn't really about stopping spammers, but about trying to game Google's algorithm because someone got jealous that someone else's site came up before en-wikipedia's in a google search somewhere. I'll note that Nofollow was uniformly rejected by the community in previous discussions. Parker

On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:04:52 +0000, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote in reply to "Parker Peters": More to the point, how come he's still here after being put on mod under two successive addresses? I thought he was leaving anyway? Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Parker Peters wrote: Hey, remember when I said that would be welcome and people interested in this should come help out? I'm awaiting your patch. But I guess it's easier to spread wild conspiracy theories then to get involved. - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 George Herbert wrote: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversion http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Quick_and_dirty_guide_to_development Drop by #mediawiki on Freenode and hang about if you have questions. We bite, but not too much. - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

On 26/01/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: See, Brion does stuff like this as part of a CUNNING PLAN to recruit new devs. THAT's the CONSPIRACY. - d.

You shouldn't judge a group based on the rantings of a single clueless individual. Mgm On 1/24/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: