Brion wrote:
...having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest...
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if that rumor was true. I have a high-pagerank website with an unremarkable submission form (c-faq.com/feedback.html) that usually receives one or two linkspams per week, but suddenly yesterday and today I've gotten about a dozen.
I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
Good. That's clearly the right stance for now, dismaying though it is.