[WikiEN-l] Why aren't *all* wikia.com links restricted under nofollow?

[Sheldon Rampton]

Andrew Gray wrote:

> I'm not claiming I know Brion's mind, but it is worth emphasising that
> the situation as it stands does not require any deliberate favouritism
> to Wikia... just a common-sense decision to solve a problem now
> without a long and picky process of patching the code and then
> manually deciding which interwikis were good and which were bad.

The interwiki table in MediaWiki already includes an "iw_local" field  
that indicates whether an interwiki link should be considered "local"  
or "not local." It is therefore easy to modify the code so that "not  
local" interwiki links get nofollow. No "long and picky process" is  
needed. This is a simple policy decision, not a situation where  
"changing this would be lots of work."

Peter Jacobi wrote:

> Actually, the InterWiki map is pile of trash links:

That's probably the result of the ad hoc way in which the map was  
compiled over time, combined with the relative difficulty of taking  
out interwiki entries once they're in. If you remove an entry from  
the interwiki map, all of the pages which use it will then have  
broken links that look like bad links to nonexistent namespaces. For  
this reason, the path of least resistance is to retain interwiki  
entries even if they're not very important. However, this shouldn't  
be a problem as long as editors don't use those entries to create a  
bunch of actual links. Applying a nofollow to non-local interwiki  
links would make it even less of a problem.

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
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