I don't get it (or at least understand it that way). The article says wikipedia (with nofollow) generates lots of traffic and is very valuable. So nofollow doesn't put people off spamming. Everytime we ask at Project Wikispam everyone agree adding nofollow hasn't helped at all. All it does is give a false warming feeling to people "at least these SoBs aren't getting pagerank from us". And nofollow is a 6m Neon sign saying "our content cannot be trusted" so the true warming feeling goes to Britannica.
BozMo
================== David Gerard wrote:
http://www.osworld.biz/816/wikipedia-a-source-of-traffic/
- d.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 27/04/07, Andrew Cates andrew@catesfamily.org.uk wrote:
I don't get it (or at least understand it that way). The article says wikipedia (with nofollow) generates lots of traffic and is very valuable. So nofollow doesn't put people off spamming. Everytime we ask at Project Wikispam everyone agree adding nofollow hasn't helped at all. All it does is give a false warming feeling to people "at least these SoBs aren't getting pagerank from us". And nofollow is a 6m Neon sign saying "our content cannot be trusted" so the true warming feeling goes to Britannica.
There are two forms of spamming. One is spamming links to get traffic; the other is spamming links simply to get the attention of search engines. Nofollow makes no impact on the former, but does mess up the latter, and that's what we were aiming to deal with...
There are two forms of spamming. One is spamming links to get traffic; the other is spamming links simply to get the attention of search engines. Nofollow makes no impact on the former, but does mess up the latter, and that's what we were aiming to deal with...
I wouldn't call those different forms, they are just different goals. The spamming is the same in both cases - adding inappropriate links to articles.
On 4/27/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Except the link isn't that bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LeechFTP&diff=119465233&ol...
On 4/27/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/27/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Except the link isn't that bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LeechFTP&diff=119465233&ol...
-- geni
You know, while I despise spammers as much as the next person, it's worth remembering that the "power of Wikipedia links" can be used for good, as well. For instance, there was recently a project by librarians at the [[University of Washington]] libraries to add relevant links to their online special collections -- like collections of WWII photographs -- to the appropriate Wikipedia articles. Surprise, surprise, their traffic skyrocketed -- always a good thing for libraries looking for funding, and a bonus for us as we get good, curated, non-profit links to collections people might not find otherwise. Of course *we* know this but people at institutions might not; libraries and museums and the like should always be encouraged to add relevant links to their collections if they can.
-- phoebe
On 4/28/07, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/27/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/27/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Except the link isn't that bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LeechFTP&diff=119465233&ol...
-- geni
You know, while I despise spammers as much as the next person, it's worth remembering that the "power of Wikipedia links" can be used for good, as well. For instance, there was recently a project by librarians at the [[University of Washington]] libraries to add relevant links to their online special collections -- like collections of WWII photographs -- to the appropriate Wikipedia articles. Surprise, surprise, their traffic skyrocketed -- always a good thing for libraries looking for funding, and a bonus for us as we get good, curated, non-profit links to collections people might not find otherwise. Of course *we* know this but people at institutions might not; libraries and museums and the like should always be encouraged to add relevant links to their collections if they can.
Yup. I don't see how this is more than tangentially related to the issue of nofollow, however; we don't discourage people from adding valuable links to their sites. We just don't want to encourage people adding links because they want the pagerank of their pages to increase.
Johnleemk
phoebe ayers wrote:
You know, while I despise spammers as much as the next person, it's worth remembering that the "power of Wikipedia links" can be used for good, as well. For instance, there was recently a project by librarians at the [[University of Washington]] libraries to add relevant links to their online special collections -- like collections of WWII photographs -- to the appropriate Wikipedia articles. Surprise, surprise, their traffic skyrocketed -- always a good thing for libraries looking for funding, and a bonus for us as we get good, curated, non-profit links to collections people might not find otherwise. Of course *we* know this but people at institutions might not; libraries and museums and the like should always be encouraged to add relevant links to their collections if they can.
And, of course, the nofollow tags screw these institutions, as well. Even though they're getting the traffic through us, they aren't seeing the results in their Google hits, even though they might have great material we (bone-headedly) can't use.
It's too bad we can't have a meta-list regarding what should and should not have nofollow on it, similar to the spam blacklist. Not that the list wouldn't be abused the same way the spam blacklist is now, but it would at least work the best of both worlds.
-Jeff
It's too bad we can't have a meta-list regarding what should and should not have nofollow on it, similar to the spam blacklist. Not that the list wouldn't be abused the same way the spam blacklist is now, but it would at least work the best of both worlds.
It could be done as a whitelist - that's less open to abuse. It's not as efficient, of course.
On 4/27/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
And, of course, the nofollow tags screw these institutions, as well. Even though they're getting the traffic through us, they aren't seeing the results in their Google hits, even though they might have great material we (bone-headedly) can't use.
If you have good content traffic tends to turn into links which tends to turn into appearing higher on search results.
Wikipedia tends to racnk rather badly on google images searches though (often ranking below answers.com)
It's too bad we can't have a meta-list regarding what should and should not have nofollow on it, similar to the spam blacklist. Not that the list wouldn't be abused the same way the spam blacklist is now, but it would at least work the best of both worlds.
We are not interested in being DMOZ
On 27/04/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
It's too bad we can't have a meta-list regarding what should and should not have nofollow on it, similar to the spam blacklist. Not that the list wouldn't be abused the same way the spam blacklist is now, but it would at least work the best of both worlds.
We can. But someone needs to code it.
- d.
On 4/27/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We can. But someone needs to code it.
We have a whitelist of sorts:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map
I tend to feel this is a spectacularly bad idea. It is not part of out mission statement to help people find things on google.
geni wrote:
On 4/27/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We can. But someone needs to code it.
We have a whitelist of sorts:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map
I tend to feel this is a spectacularly bad idea. It is not part of out mission statement to help people find things on google.
Just because something is not on the mission statement is no excuse for not doing it. The principle of free content to me implies taking advantage of every opportunity to free the material. Under those circumstances one needs to avoid proprietary attitudes.
Ec
On 4/27/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Just because something is not on the mission statement is no excuse for not doing it. The principle of free content to me implies taking advantage of every opportunity to free the material. Under those circumstances one needs to avoid proprietary attitudes.
I fail to see how helping google rank websites free's material.
geni wrote:
On 4/27/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Just because something is not on the mission statement is no excuse for not doing it. The principle of free content to me implies taking advantage of every opportunity to free the material. Under those circumstances one needs to avoid proprietary attitudes.
I fail to see how helping google rank websites free's material.
One valuable part of the material is its structure and the relationship of that structure to the rest of the web. Reading an article is a good way to use Wikipedia, but it's far from the only way.
And I'm sure that Google is not the only outfit page relationships as part of their ranking algorithms these days, so it's not just Google that we're helping. Indeed, I'd guess that Google's massive datasets means that Wikipedia's info means much less to them than other people trying to figure out which bits of the web are most useful.
That said, I'd rather we kept nofollow on for now, as I think reducing the incentives for abuse substantially outweigh the the potential gain.
William
On 4/27/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
And I'm sure that Google is not the only outfit page relationships as part of their ranking algorithms these days, so it's not just Google that we're helping.
True we most not forget the titian of the free content community that is MSN.
Anyone who wants to ignore the nofollow tag is free to do so any free content project that wishes to use wikipedia's external links is free to do so.