On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 04:40:23PM +0200, Erik Moeller
wrote:
I see two possibilities:
1) Wikipedia specifically has a very high influence on a site's
ranking. In this case, turning off nofollow will alter the shape of
the web in search engines which respect it. If the average quality of
links in Wikipedia is higher than the average quality of links outside
Wikipedia, the quality of these search engine results as a whole will
deteriorate. This is not about entitlement, it is about using the
influence we have responsibly.
The quality of Wikipedia should be given more weight than to task
of responsibly influencing search engines. If turning nofollow on leads
to decrease of spammers effort, it would be good for Wikipedia quality.
Ultimately Wikipedia is big enough that the search engines could
easily manually override its nofollow suggestion anyway.
Which leads to a question - what would Google and the other search
engines *want* Wikipedia to do? Anyone think they'd have a good shot
at getting an official answer?
Anthony