Saturday, January 20, 2007, 5:08:52 PM, Steve wrote:
Right. But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank. (But the problem, of course, is that there's no way to differentiate those external links of ours that have this quality, versus those that are as-yet-undetected linkspam.)
Wikipedia's primary objective is to build an encyclopedia, not to help the search engines to have better results.
Without the "nofollow" tag, we'd have much more spam, which is detrimental to that objective.
Wikipedia also should always be neutral and it should try not to directly influence the events outside of it.