On 5/1/07, Michael Snow wikipedia@att.net wrote:
Wow, that's a breathtakingly broad thesis. Apparently the Wikimedia Foundation has an ethical obligation to actively prevent remote downstream commercial activity, because it could be a conflict of interest for us if completely independent outside parties somehow benefit.
No, it's doesn't. The licensing lets people do whatever they want, and as I said, I could care less *who* makes the money. It's a question of the appearance of conflict. There's no harm in template/interwiki linking. There's a problem with deciding that x people can get nofollow turned off, but y people can't.
It simply needs to be all or nothing so that there is no possible risk of ethical issues or COI. Either nofollow needs to be turned off (not a good idea), everyone who asks for it needs to be granted the priviledge of bypassing it via the Interwiki Map (again, probably not a good idea), or it needs to be uniform on all WMF sites.