Joe Szilagyi wrote:
By allowing even a single non-Wikimedia Foundation site to reap any sort of financial benefit, a possible conflict of interest now exists.
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.
While we're at it, who needs external links in the first place? Let's just ignore the rest of the internet and be a walled garden, it's the only way we can be sure nobody will benefit.
Or instead, we could look at this dispassionately. I notice that the interwiki map includes World66 and Wikitravel, two travel guide wikis owned by a commercial enterprise called Internet Brands. Thus links to these sites can avoid the nofollow attribute, even though they would be direct competition for World Wikia, the travel guide Wikia launched to some fanfare last year. World66 even carries Google ads just like Wikia. On the basis of the evidence, what reason is there to think that Wikia has taken advantage of its founders' relationship with Wikimedia to get preferential treatment? Maybe somebody will think they can still make that case, but please look at the full picture instead of leaping to conclusions from a single piece of information.
--Michael Snow