David Gerard wrote:
Presumably because they're very unlikely to be spam links that search engine spammers would insert to try to get Google rank.
Most links aren't.
Personally I think it's in fact good to give Google rank to external links if doing so doesn't constitute an attractive nuisance to spammers. That links on Wikipedia are editor-selected is a reason the en:wp community objected to default nofollow when it was first added to Mediawiki. What we need is some way to make it less binary. That means coding. Which I can't do either. Pfeh!
Or, you know, stop pretending there's a crisis. That could work, too.
Skeptical as always,
-Jeff