http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/campaign-to-reduce-wikipedias-pagera...
I'm quaking in my boots.
- d.
On 1/23/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/campaign-to-reduce-wikipedias-pagera...
I'm quaking in my boots.
- d.
Don't worry, it's not even the real Andy Beal. The real Andy Beal was in Berkeley in the 80s and 90s.
On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:27:49 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/campaign-to-reduce-wikipedias-pagera... I'm quaking in my boots.
So you should be. Wikipedia would be *nothing* without all the spam and backlinks from blogs. The content of the encyclopaedia is only to add stickiness, isn't it?
Guy (JzG)
I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the sentiment. It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made Wikipedia great just to get rid of a few spammers. We should develop more effective spam control rather than targetting all the links as one.
Mgm
On 1/24/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:27:49 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/campaign-to-reduce-wikipedias-pagera...
I'm quaking in my boots.
So you should be. Wikipedia would be *nothing* without all the spam and backlinks from blogs. The content of the encyclopaedia is only to add stickiness, isn't it?
Guy (JzG)
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 24/01/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the sentiment. It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made Wikipedia great just to get rid of a few spammers. We should develop more effective spam control rather than targetting all the links as one.
As noted, it's a Simple Matter of Coding ...
- d.
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the sentiment. It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made Wikipedia great just to get rid of a few spammers.
Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the article in a significant way.
We should develop more effective spam control rather than targetting all the links as one.
Internal links and interwiki links are still exempt from nofollow so we already don't target all links as one. Further refinement is of course possible but whether it's worth the effort is another question. If we had version flagging I could see a distinction being made on that basis, but other than that I can't think of anything that'd be particularly easy to code.
On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the
sentiment.
It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made
Wikipedia
great just to get rid of a few spammers.
Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the article in a significant way.
I'm not talking about the content value of the links. I'm talking about how the traffic from the sites who link us in return got us where we are.
Mgm
On 24/01/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not talking about the content value of the links. I'm talking about how the traffic from the sites who link us in return got us where we are.
Broke?
- d.
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I'm not talking about the content value of the links. I'm talking about how the traffic from the sites who link us in return got us where we are.
I don't see how that's going to change significantly, people will still link to Wikipedia articles if they find them useful. The threats of a handful of irate spammers aren't going to affect that.
Mgm wrote:
On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the article in a significant way.
I'm not talking about the content value of the links. I'm talking about how the traffic from the sites who link us in return got us where we are.
Sure. And I agree: it is not fair to allow one's pagerank to be increased by all the links to you which various people make, without also increasing the pagerank of all the various pages you link back out to. But the spammers don't play fair, either, and we're in a war with them. I bemoan the collateral damage of the non-followed, non-spammy external links as much as the next guy, and I hope that better, more selective spam-control mechanisms can be deployed in the long run, but in the short run, we'd be crazy to let linkspammers run roughshod over our external links sections, to allow them to hijack our high pagerank in promoting their grotty little sites.
But with that said, I have to agree with Bryan: Wikipedia is not great because it has high pagerank. It is great because it has great content. Personally, I think Wikipedia's pagerank is too high: Wikipedia results tend to swamp the first page of many of the Google searches I do, to the detriment of the other sites I might also want to find. If the "boycott" as any effect, it won't bother me, or hurt Wikipedia, at all.
On 24/01/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
But with that said, I have to agree with Bryan: Wikipedia is not great because it has high pagerank. It is great because it has great content. Personally, I think Wikipedia's pagerank is too high: Wikipedia results tend to swamp the first page of many of the Google searches I do, to the detriment of the other sites I might also want to find. If the "boycott" as any effect, it won't bother me, or hurt Wikipedia, at all.
Note that just a couple of years ago, we had the opposite problem: googling on stuff that should have brought up the Wikipedia page instead brought up three pages of Wikipedia mirror sites!
- d.
Steve Summit wrote:
Mgm wrote:
On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the article in a significant way.
I'm not talking about the content value of the links. I'm talking about how the traffic from the sites who link us in return got us where we are.
Sure. And I agree: it is not fair to allow one's pagerank to be increased by all the links to you which various people make, without also increasing the pagerank of all the various pages you link back out to. But the spammers don't play fair, either, and we're in a war with them. I bemoan the collateral damage of the non-followed, non-spammy external links as much as the next guy, and I hope that better, more selective spam-control mechanisms can be deployed in the long run, but in the short run, we'd be crazy to let linkspammers run roughshod over our external links sections, to allow them to hijack our high pagerank in promoting their grotty little sites.
Hmm! Sounds like a superpower rationalization for a net based war on terror or war on drugs. :-)
But with that said, I have to agree with Bryan: Wikipedia is not great because it has high pagerank. It is great because it has great content.
Yes.
Personally, I think Wikipedia's pagerank is too high: Wikipedia results tend to swamp the first page of many of the Google searches I do, to the detriment of the other sites I might also want to find. If the "boycott" as any effect, it won't bother me, or hurt Wikipedia, at all.
This is actually a perceptive point. Maximizing our page ranking is not a part of our mission, and being big is all the excuse that some people need for throwing stones. Big players affect their environment. Restraint helps to build the impression that we are a positive form in that environment.
Ec
On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the article in a significant way.
Depends on the field. Very frequently a stub with a couple of well chosen links is incredibly useful. Far more than the stub without the links would be.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the article in a significant way.
Depends on the field. Very frequently a stub with a couple of well chosen links is incredibly useful. Far more than the stub without the links would be.
That's why I qualified my statement with "most of the time" and "significant diminishment", I knew there would be exceptions like this. But any article that qualifies as just a stub is pretty much by definition low quality to begin with, so it doesn't take much of a contribution by external links to boost its relative quality by a lot. Once an article has grown into something more than a stub I think it's safe to say that the value of the external links will pale in comparison to the content itself.
And in any event, nobody's arguing that external links should be forbidden. The purpose of the nofollow attribute is just to reduce the incentive to add external links for reasons not directly related to improving the article itself.
On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 09:33:48 +0100, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the sentiment. It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made Wikipedia great just to get rid of a few spammers.
In what way is it punishing them? Authoritative sites don't need our help to get their pagerank up, and if being linked from the world's largest information resource is not enough of an endorsement then what is?
Guy (JzG)
On 1/24/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the sentiment. It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made Wikipedia great just to get rid of a few spammers. We should develop more effective spam control rather than targetting all the links as one.
Mgm
Here's a stupid suggestion.
Code it so that *NEW* links are nofollow by default (thus stopping linkspammers from being rewarded for linkspamming), but allow a process (request to an admin or something) whereby a link can simply be followed and then the "nofollow" tag removed from it if it's verified to not be a spam link.
Wouldn't that be better than uniformly tagging all links Nofollow?
Unless of course the goal isn't really about stopping spammers, but about trying to game Google's algorithm because someone got jealous that someone else's site came up before en-wikipedia's in a google search somewhere.
I'll note that Nofollow was uniformly rejected by the community in previous discussions.
Parker
On 1/24/07, Parker Peters parkerpeters1002@gmail.com wrote:
Here's a stupid suggestion.
Code it so that *NEW* links are nofollow by default (thus stopping linkspammers from being rewarded for linkspamming), but allow a process (request to an admin or something) whereby a link can simply be followed and then the "nofollow" tag removed from it if it's verified to not be a spam link.
Wouldn't that be better than uniformly tagging all links Nofollow?
DMOZ is that way
Unless of course the goal isn't really about stopping spammers, but about trying to game Google's algorithm because someone got jealous that someone else's site came up before en-wikipedia's in a google search somewhere.
Somewhat unlikely. Do you enjoy makeing random acusations like that?
I'll note that Nofollow was uniformly rejected by the community in previous discussions.
not quite true.
In any case I'm trying to keep my notes up to date. Are you still trying to pretend to be an admin or not?
On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:04:52 +0000, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote in reply to "Parker Peters":
I'm trying to keep my notes up to date. Are you still trying to pretend to be an admin or not?
More to the point, how come he's still here after being put on mod under two successive addresses? I thought he was leaving anyway?
Guy (JzG)
I accepted the bad-faith accusations, I've put up with your and others' rampant personal attacks.
I'm working under the onus of moderation, and apparently my messages were let through the moderation queue.
The fact that I have to work under that, and put up with your personal attacks and nonsense, is galling but I deal with it.
Oh, and I'm still an admin. Nothing, thankfully, that you can do will change that.
Parker
On 1/24/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:04:52 +0000, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote in reply to "Parker Peters":
I'm trying to keep my notes up to date. Are you still trying to pretend to be an admin or not?
More to the point, how come he's still here after being put on mod under two successive addresses? I thought he was leaving anyway?
Guy (JzG)
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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Parker Peters wrote:
Here's a stupid suggestion.
Code it so that *NEW* links are nofollow by default (thus stopping linkspammers from being rewarded for linkspamming), but allow a process (request to an admin or something) whereby a link can simply be followed and then the "nofollow" tag removed from it if it's verified to not be a spam link.
Hey, remember when I said that would be welcome and people interested in this should come help out?
I'm awaiting your patch.
But I guess it's easier to spread wild conspiracy theories then to get involved.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
On 1/25/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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Parker Peters wrote:
Here's a stupid suggestion.
Code it so that *NEW* links are nofollow by default (thus stopping linkspammers from being rewarded for linkspamming), but allow a process (request to an admin or something) whereby a link can simply be followed and then the "nofollow" tag removed from it if it's verified to not be a spam link.
Hey, remember when I said that would be welcome and people interested in this should come help out?
I'm awaiting your patch.
But I guess it's easier to spread wild conspiracy theories then to get involved.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
What's the accessibility of the current code base? How far off the 1.9.whatever which was released is it?
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George Herbert wrote:
What's the accessibility of the current code base? How far off the 1.9.whatever which was released is it?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversion http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Quick_and_dirty_guide_to_development
Drop by #mediawiki on Freenode and hang about if you have questions.
We bite, but not too much.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
On 1/26/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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George Herbert wrote:
What's the accessibility of the current code base? How far off the 1.9.whatever which was released is it?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversion http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Quick_and_dirty_guide_to_development
All good.
Drop by #mediawiki on Freenode and hang about if you have questions.
We bite, but not too much.
Can't do that from current work - SEC regulations would require it to be logged 8-P
Contract ends next week, though, so perhaps not too much later.
On 26/01/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/26/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
What's the accessibility of the current code base? How far off the 1.9.whatever which was released is it?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversion http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Quick_and_dirty_guide_to_development Drop by #mediawiki on Freenode and hang about if you have questions. We bite, but not too much.
Can't do that from current work - SEC regulations would require it to be logged 8-P Contract ends next week, though, so perhaps not too much later.
See, Brion does stuff like this as part of a CUNNING PLAN to recruit new devs. THAT's the CONSPIRACY.
- d.
On 1/24/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/campaign-to-reduce-wikipedias-pagera...
I'm quaking in my boots.
- d.
heh one of them has come right out and given a reason for this:
1. Wikipedia is a give / take thing. you give your effort and in return you are rewarded with something which will help you in the search engine rankings with Google and possibly the other major engines.
http://www.sepguy.com/2007/01/23/5-reasons-wikipedia-is-doomed.html
You shouldn't judge a group based on the rantings of a single clueless individual.
Mgm
On 1/24/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/24/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/campaign-to-reduce-wikipedias-pagera...
I'm quaking in my boots.
- d.
heh one of them has come right out and given a reason for this:
- Wikipedia is a give / take thing. you give your effort and in
return you are rewarded with something which will help you in the search engine rankings with Google and possibly the other major engines.
http://www.sepguy.com/2007/01/23/5-reasons-wikipedia-is-doomed.html
-- geni
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 1/24/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
You shouldn't judge a group based on the rantings of a single clueless individual.
I've seen the sentiment reflected elsewhere.
None of this appears to be moveing outside the SEO community mind.