Steve Bennett wrote:
On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the article in a significant way.
Depends on the field. Very frequently a stub with a couple of well chosen links is incredibly useful. Far more than the stub without the links would be.
That's why I qualified my statement with "most of the time" and "significant diminishment", I knew there would be exceptions like this. But any article that qualifies as just a stub is pretty much by definition low quality to begin with, so it doesn't take much of a contribution by external links to boost its relative quality by a lot. Once an article has grown into something more than a stub I think it's safe to say that the value of the external links will pale in comparison to the content itself.
And in any event, nobody's arguing that external links should be forbidden. The purpose of the nofollow attribute is just to reduce the incentive to add external links for reasons not directly related to improving the article itself.