Michael Snow wrote:
Or instead, we could look at this dispassionately. I notice that the interwiki map includes World66 and Wikitravel, two travel guide wikis owned by a commercial enterprise called Internet Brands. Thus links to these sites can avoid the nofollow attribute, even though they would be direct competition for World Wikia, the travel guide Wikia launched to some fanfare last year. World66 even carries Google ads just like Wikia. On the basis of the evidence, what reason is there to think that Wikia has taken advantage of its founders' relationship with Wikimedia to get preferential treatment? Maybe somebody will think they can still make that case, but please look at the full picture instead of leaping to conclusions from a single piece of information.
Because of the nature of the request to have nofollow turned off for interwiki links, and the denial of the patch to fix the problem. The competing wikis were more of an oversight, I'd assume, than anything else, given the evidence.
-Jeff