On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 1:29 PM, Chris Steipp csteipp@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm opposed to this change. A site administrator with a big enough community to address spammy links, and wants to enable this feature, is likely savvy enough to change the preference from true to false.
I think setting this to false by default is going to encourage spam bot authors to target MediaWiki specifically, more than they currently do.
The available statistics http://www.wikirobot.net/wikibase_breakdown.aspxshow that most sites leave nofollow on. That could be because they carefully weighed the pros and cons and decided to leave it on, or (in my opinion more likely) they didn't think much, or at all, about it. When people don't have a strong opinion one way or another about what to do, or any immediate crisis impelling them to action, they often tend to get distracted by other priorities and leave the default in place.
You're right; if more wikis were to switch off nofollow, it almost certainly would encourage spammers to target MediaWiki more. That in turn would likely tend to prompt affected site owners to install more/better antispam tools, and would stimulate demand for development of such tools. Of course, there are costs associated with allocating labor to those activities; I'm just saying the problems can be mitigated from what they would be if the community could not adapt. Admittedly, there might be some attrition because some site owners will simply give up. In economics parlance, it's a question of how inelastichttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demandthe demand for the benefits of wiki site ownership is; if it's pretty inelastic, then site owners won't be deterred by the spammers.
Shutting off nofollow could encourage more editing in general, not just spambot editing. Sometimes there's a grey area of semi-spam, in which people make edits that are somewhat useful to the project's goals and also somewhat promotional. Arguably, much of Wikipedia's content was contributed by people pursuing some sort of personal agenda that happened to be enough aligned with Wikipedia's goals that the two were able to coexist. Sometimes, people who wanted to engage in promotional editing probably got involved in other parts of the community, and edited unrelated articles, in order to make their agendas less obvious.
If people realize that they can bring up the pagerank of sites pertaining to their favorite entities, activities, interests, etc. by editing wikis, they might get more interested in doing so. An increase in contributed wiki content can in turn attract more visitors (who typically find the sites by search engines); some of these visitors will become editors, and so on, in a virtuous cycle. The more visitors and contributors there are, the more resources (including editors' labor) become available for fighting spam, and thus the problem takes care of itself, and then some. It might be that with a more vibrant http://wikiindex.org/Category:Vibrant wikisphere, there will actually be less spam on wikis because it will get noticed and removed faster, and the larger wiki community will be able to support the allocation of more MediaWiki developer labor, some of which will go to developing antispam tools.
To use a gardening analogy, I think it's a question of whether the plants can outgrow the weeds and choke them out, or grow away from them (like a tomato plant whose tendrils climb a fence) if we stop applying a certain weed killer. Ideally, you don't want to apply an unnecessary weed killer. Some kinds of plants can handle the weeds on their own; some (e.g. corn, if I recall correctly) can't. I'm not sure if the wikisphere is more like a tomato plant or a cornstalk. I've operated several wikis and never had to rely on nofollow; Asirra and a reasonable level of diligence always took care of the spammers pretty well.
-Nathan