geni wrote:
On 4/27/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Just because something is not on the mission statement is no excuse for not doing it. The principle of free content to me implies taking advantage of every opportunity to free the material. Under those circumstances one needs to avoid proprietary attitudes.
I fail to see how helping google rank websites free's material.
One valuable part of the material is its structure and the relationship of that structure to the rest of the web. Reading an article is a good way to use Wikipedia, but it's far from the only way.
And I'm sure that Google is not the only outfit page relationships as part of their ranking algorithms these days, so it's not just Google that we're helping. Indeed, I'd guess that Google's massive datasets means that Wikipedia's info means much less to them than other people trying to figure out which bits of the web are most useful.
That said, I'd rather we kept nofollow on for now, as I think reducing the incentives for abuse substantially outweigh the the potential gain.
William