On 28/04/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 27/04/07, Joe Szilagyi
<szilagyi(a)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.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk