[WikiEN-l] Citizendium on quality

[Ian Woollard]

On 19/12/2007, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 19/12/2007, Nathan Awrich <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Someone needs to propose to Google that they auto-expand [[Wikilinks]]
> > > to Wikipedia URLs ;-)
>
> I would join you in taking the suggestion too seriously (it's always
> fun), but I don't understand it. Auto-expand them *where*? Google is a
> search engine, not a web browser, it doesn't control how webpages it
> links to are parsed.
>

Oh yeah it does ;-)

If you look at it in a particular way, you could argue that the wikipedia's
policy of 'all links in, all no follow links out' policy basically amount to
massive SEO of our own articles. Basically, the wikipedia is engineering its
way to the top of the google rankings; or it could be argued that this is
so.

For example, if you search for 'rocket' in google, the top hit is the
wikipedia (or at least it is when I do it).

But there are no external links to it! (Or none I can find anyway, try this:
link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket -site:*.wikipedia.*)

So far as I can tell, a lot of articles are like this.

So should it really be the top hit? Well, the wikipedia is fairly
trustworthy and so gets lots of link juice as a whole and it sloshes around
and raises everything up, including the rocket article.

But if google decided that we really are SEOing ourself by 'no following'
all our out links, they could fairly legitimately set an implicit 'no
follow' on our internal wikilinks as *well*. At which point the wikipedia
would largely (but not completely where *an* article really is well linked
to by external references) disappear from the web 8-)

So google could pretty much kill us. But that would be evil; I mean our no
follow policy is probably in the best interests of the wikipedia, and
probably the web as well. But our lack of out-link juice is evil too in some
ways; many legitimate things the wiki references are probably linking a lot
lower than they ought to be; and that presumably is costing them potential
revenue from adverts and stuff.

So I don't think google would do this at all, or at least I hope not(!)-
it's just a thought experiment really; but I found it amusing ;-)
-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.