On 28/04/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 27/04/07, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
Why aren't links to all *.Wikia.com links covered by nofollow? A quick
Presumably for a lack of coding. Go write some MediaWiki code rather than whining. Thanks!
Wow, that's a helpful comment.
Given taht it seems to be a deliberate issue with how the code was set up, it's a legitimate question. One we likely know the answer to, but one that should be addressed nonetheless.
I'm sure this has been explained at length before on the list...
The code has, historically, recognised three kinds of links.
1) Wikilinks 2) Interwiki links 3) External links
It takes the link syntax and produces appropriate links in the HTML from these.
Class 2 is interesting, because "interwiki" covers both internal and external projects - a link to a Wikia site is wikia:foobar:link, whilst a link to the French wikipedia is fr:wp:link or to Commons is commons:link. External is not just Wikia - there are other external wikis linked to via interwiki as well - but a large proportion of our "external interwikis" are to them.
What we did was slap "nofollow" on all links in class 3, all ones that go to external websites. Slapping it on class 2 would obviously be "fair" insamuch as it would no longer exempt sites from the nofollow simply through being wikis - but it would also be silly in that it would penalise things which are, effectively, normal class 1 links, like linking to Meta or Commons. At a guess, this is why it didn't go on class 2. We could make it penalise Wikia by splitting class 2, having "internal" and "external" interwiki links, but that would require altering the code.
I'm not claiming I know Brion's mind, but it is worth emphasising that the situation as it stands does not require any deliberate favouritism to Wikia... just a common-sense decision to solve a problem now without a long and picky process of patching the code and then manually deciding which interwikis were good and which were bad.