-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
(Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Globalw....
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
(Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
This is a real shame since good external links help to vastly improve search :( Oh well, cost of doing business I guess.
--Oskar
On 1/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
(Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
This is a real shame since good external links help to vastly improve search :( Oh well, cost of doing business I guess.
The search engines are always free to ignore the "nofollow" tag, if they think that the external links are an overall positive on search results. Apparently they don't.
Anthony
On 1/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
This is a real shame since good external links help to vastly improve search :( Oh well, cost of doing business I guess.
Hang on, what do you think the downside of the nofollow tag is? All this change does is make Google not use the fact that we link to a site as evidence that it's a good site.
Steve
Hang on, what do you think the downside of the nofollow tag is? All this change does is make Google not use the fact that we link to a site as evidence that it's a good site.
Are they also used to calculate relevance - if our article links to lots of good pages about the search terms, will our article appear higher up in the search results? I have no idea how the Google search algorithm works, but that's how I interpreted Oskar's email.
Steve Bennett wrote:
Hang on, what do you think the downside of the nofollow tag is? All this change does is make Google not use the fact that we link to a site as evidence that it's a good site.
Right. But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank. (But the problem, of course, is that there's no way to differentiate those external links of ours that have this quality, versus those that are as-yet-undetected linkspam.)
If anyone is interested in helping to eliminate the spam problem, visit #wikipedia-spam on irc://irc.freenode.net
Saturday, January 20, 2007, 5:08:52 PM, Steve wrote:
Right. But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank. (But the problem, of course, is that there's no way to differentiate those external links of ours that have this quality, versus those that are as-yet-undetected linkspam.)
Wikipedia's primary objective is to build an encyclopedia, not to help the search engines to have better results.
Without the "nofollow" tag, we'd have much more spam, which is detrimental to that objective.
Wikipedia also should always be neutral and it should try not to directly influence the events outside of it.
On 1/20/07, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
Saturday, January 20, 2007, 5:08:52 PM, Steve wrote:
Right. But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank. (But the problem, of course, is that there's no way to differentiate those external links of ours that have this quality, versus those that are as-yet-undetected linkspam.)
Wikipedia's primary objective is to build an encyclopedia, not to help the search engines to have better results.
I agree, which is why this move was necessary. I just think that if good, relevant links didn't have nofollow on them it would improve the overall "health" of the internet (that is, promotion of good, quality sites, versus drowning in bad ones). I think that that is a goal we should ALL care about.
Without the "nofollow" tag, we'd have much more spam, which is detrimental to that objective.
Again, I agree that the move is necessary, I'm just saying it's a damn shame.
Wikipedia also should always be neutral and it should try not to directly influence the events outside of it.
Excuse me? Are you saying that when google uses wikipedia links to determine relevance in a search, it's detrimental to the neutrality of wikipedia? How exactly would that go?
--Oskar
On 1/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
Excuse me? Are you saying that when google uses wikipedia links to determine relevance in a search, it's detrimental to the neutrality of wikipedia? How exactly would that go?
In a sense, it is exactly that - because it increases the temptation to add links to Wikipedia, regardless of real relevance to the reader.
That's still the case even if those links do not adjust search engine results, of course.
-Matthew
On 1/20/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
Excuse me? Are you saying that when google uses wikipedia links to determine relevance in a search, it's detrimental to the neutrality of wikipedia? How exactly would that go?
In a sense, it is exactly that - because it increases the temptation to add links to Wikipedia, regardless of real relevance to the reader.
To me that is like saying that having a wiki increases the temptation for people to vandalise articles.
--Oskar
On 1/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
To me that is like saying that having a wiki increases the temptation for people to vandalise articles.
It most certainly does. Of course, one can decide that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but that doesn't mean one has to believe in no disadvantages.
-Matthew
Oskar wrote:
On 1/20/07, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
Saturday, January 20, 2007, 5:08:52 PM, Steve wrote:
Right. But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank.
Wikipedia's primary objective is to build an encyclopedia, not to help the search engines to have better results.
I agree, which is why this move was necessary. I just think that if good, relevant links didn't have nofollow on them it would improve the overall "health" of the internet...
Indeed.
I should not have used the word "vote", even in quotes. If we were all straightforwardly creating websites, linking to other sites based on their value to our readers, then Google's pagerank algorithm would tick along there in the background, working just fine. It's when people start self-consciously thinking of links as "votes", and trying to artificially skew Google's results thereby, that all the troubles begin. Some people start introducing bad-faith links, and others therefore have to declare *all* their links invalid, thus cutting off our own nose to spite our face -- er, to spite those damn linkspammers.
If our objective is to build an encyclopedia, not to help the search engines to have better results, then our objective is not to help the search engines not to have worse results, either, so perhaps we shouldn't be so concerned about nofollow at all.
Without the "nofollow" tag, we'd have much more spam, which is detrimental to that objective.
No question at all. (But this is an essentially selfish motive, and neither the Internet nor Wikipedia works on selfishness.)
On 1/21/07, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
Wikipedia also should always be neutral and it should try not to directly influence the events outside of it.
Unfortunately, the nofollow tag forces sites to make that decision. There's no avoiding it: whether we use nofollow or not, we are "influencing events" in the outside world.
It's like tipping or not tipping in a restaurant: You have to decide, and either way there is a consequence.
Steve
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.
On 1/20/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
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.
They've happened before they will happen again we have delt with them in the past.
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
(Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Globalw... .
Hi. What did you do? Pretend I'm, like, eight and/or stupid (because on this I are pretty stoopid).
Nina "Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work." - Abdul Kalam
On 20/01/07, Nina Stratton ninaeliza@gmail.com wrote:
Hi. What did you do? Pretend I'm, like, eight and/or stupid (because on this I are pretty stoopid).
Fortunately, I have this handy Internet encyclopedia in front of me. If I go to en.wikipedia.org and type "nofollow" into the search box, it takes me to an article that explains it and even has a paragraph about Wikipedia :-)
- d.
Nina wrote:
Hi. What did you do? Pretend I'm, like, eight and/or stupid (because on this I are pretty stoopid).
Once upon a time, websites were written and maintained by individuals, or by relatively small, closely-knit groups of people.
Once upon a time, and indeed even to this day, there has always been a need to try to figure out how "good" a website is. Now, of course, "goodness" is a terribly subjective and multifaceted concept, so trying to reduce it to a unidimensional metric or "rank" is a task fraught with peril and ultimately utterly impossible, but the need is strong enough that people are bound to try anyway. One area in which the need is real is: ranking search results. It's (comparatively) very easy to write a web search engine that returns links to every single page where a user's search terms are mentioned. It's much, much more difficult, however, to rig it up so that the user can easily zero in on the *interesting* or *useful* links first, without having to wade through all of the hundreds or thousands or millions of hits which a simpleminded brute-force search engine might yield.
Once upon a time, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a great idea. They were trying to get a handle on "goodness" as defined by the *users* of a page, *not* on the goodness that the authors of a page wished it had, or might try to assert that it had. Even more to the point: Larry and Sergey wanted to rank "goodness" in terms useful to the people doing the searching, not in terms useful to the owners of the websites where the hits might (or might not) be found. L&S realized that one way to get a handle on this user-perceived goodness was to look at how many people linked to a given page. Simply speaking, to first order, the more people link to webpage X, the "better" webpage X is, and the higher webpage X should appear in a list of search results.
As an additional, second-order wrinkle, the founders of Google realized that not all links are created equal. Among other things, links to an unknown site *from* sites that are known to be "good" count more towards ranking site X's "goodness" than do links from other, random, unknown or not-so-good sites.
Needless to say, this strategy turned out to work very, very well. Google is now very, very successful, and its name has become literally synonymous with "to do a web search for".
However, fast-forward to today. There are now "social" websites which are most assuredly *not* written and maintained by "individuals or relatively small, closely-knit groups of people". Social websites, such as blogs and wikis, are by definition written and maintained by anybody and everybody out there on the whole world-wide internet. And that's a fine, wonderful, libertarian and egalitarian thing -- except that it collides head-on with Google's strategy. The collision wouldn't matter so much if there weren't social websites with high pagerank, or if Google and its pagerank algorithm weren't so successful. But in a world where Google is far and away the #1 search engine, and where the ever-so-social (or at least ever-so-wiki) site known as Wikipedia is a top-10 website with stupefyingly high pagerank, we have the makings of quite a fine little quandary.
Simply put, Wikipedia is an absolutely irresistible, boron-neodymium supermagnet for linkspam. The World Wide Web is no longer Tim Berners-Lee's theoretically interesting research lab thingy, it's an unignorable real-world phenomenon. If you're a commercial website operator, having high Google pagerank is money in the bank. So if you yourself can go in and create links from a high-pagerank site like Wikipedia to your grotty little commercial site, well, you'd be a fool not to.
So Google, like virtually all wildly successful and unignorable real-world phenomena, has had to compromise a bit on its principles. Links from high-rank sites contribute higher to a linked-to site's pagerank, *unless* the high-rank site is openly editable by anybody, in which case the links probably have to be ignored. So Google invented the new HTML link attribute "nofollow". (One of the nice things about open, extensible languages like HTML is that anybody can invent new extensions like this to it anytime.) Nofollow means, "don't weight this link by my site's pagerank when totting up the linked-to website's pagerank", or indeed, "don't follow this link in order to tot up pagerank at all". Google invented this attribute specifically for high-pagerank social sites such as Wikipedia, and encourages us to use it on our user-editable external links.
In terms of "what did specifically Brion do to turn on the "nofollow" attribute for Wikipedia external links?", that I can't answer. Probably some propellorhead computer weenie thing involving "property lists" or "php configuration variables" or suchlike. :-)
On 1/20/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Nina wrote:
Hi. What did you do? Pretend I'm, like, eight and/or stupid (because on this I are pretty stoopid).
Once upon a time, websites were written and maintained by individuals, or by relatively small, closely-knit groups of people.
Once upon a time, and indeed even to this day, there has always been a need to try to figure out how "good" a website is. Now, of course, "goodness" is a terribly subjective and multifaceted concept, so trying to reduce it to a unidimensional metric or "rank" is a task fraught with peril and ultimately utterly impossible, but the need is strong enough that people are bound to try anyway. One area in which the need is real is: ranking search results. It's (comparatively) very easy to write a web search engine that returns links to every single page where a user's search terms are mentioned. It's much, much more difficult, however, to rig it up so that the user can easily zero in on the *interesting* or *useful* links first, without having to wade through all of the hundreds or thousands or millions of hits which a simpleminded brute-force search engine might yield.....
That's like, deep. Thanks.
Well I think it's a good idea. In this weird way, the nofollow tag even supports Wikipedia's NPOV policy - if you look at it the right way. I tried to remove spam once and removed too much. It's hard to tell what's spam and what isn't in some articles.
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
(Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Globalw....
and the reviews start to come in:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224044&highlight=wikiped...
On 20/01/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
and the reviews start to come in: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224044&highlight=wikiped...
I was going to reply, but I would probably have said something like "Yes, we've gone nofollow. And it is entirely because of festering parasitical weasels like your own good selves. I find it hard to express the utter, utter contempt we have for your 'need' for backlinks. In the words of Saint Bill Hicks: just kill yourselves. Seriously." However, that would have been entirely too understated a response, and they still wouldn't have understood it anyway.
- d.
On 1/20/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 20/01/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
and the reviews start to come in: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224044&highlight=wikiped...
I was going to reply,
well rather a lot of them don't appear to have figured out that we read their forum.
but I would probably have said something like "Yes, we've gone nofollow. And it is entirely because of festering parasitical weasels like your own good selves. I find it hard to express the utter, utter contempt we have for your 'need' for backlinks. In the words of Saint Bill Hicks: just kill yourselves. Seriously." However, that would have been entirely too understated a response, and they still wouldn't have understood it anyway.
- d.
Eh there is worse:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=217145&highlight=wikiped...
Don't worry to much the opening posters links have been removed.
Saturday, January 20, 2007, 9:14:54 PM, geni wrote:
Eh there is worse: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=217145&highlight=wikiped... Don't worry to much the opening posters links have been removed.
Or even worse! http://www.bluehatseo.com/wikipedia-links-part-1/
"If PR is your concern please quit paying money for PR6's, Wikipedia is full of them and waiting for you to post your link."
"it only takes a couple hours to gain a good 50 or so one way PR6 links. I've had one site of mine gain over 150 PR6 links and 72 PR5 links this way."
Bogdan Giusca wrote:
Saturday, January 20, 2007, 9:14:54 PM, geni wrote:
Eh there is worse: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=217145&highlight=wikiped... Don't worry to much the opening posters links have been removed.
Or even worse! http://www.bluehatseo.com/wikipedia-links-part-1/
"If PR is your concern please quit paying money for PR6's, Wikipedia is full of them and waiting for you to post your link."
"it only takes a couple hours to gain a good 50 or so one way PR6 links. I've had one site of mine gain over 150 PR6 links and 72 PR5 links this way."
Somehow I can't imagine that Google's ranking algorithms are that simplistic these days, considering they have entire teams devoted to combating fellows like that. I would be extremely surprised if they don't already treat "link from Wikipedia" as its own category of link.
The use of "nofollow" is so Google doesn't have to manually figure out how to treat every page on the internet, by allowing site owners to give them some information. In Wikipedia's case, Google already knows who we are, and probably already treats us specially, and so adding or not adding "nofollow" gives them no new information---and I'd be surprised if changing it has any effect on rankings at all.
-Mark
On 20/01/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
them some information. In Wikipedia's case, Google already knows who we are, and probably already treats us specially, and so adding or not adding "nofollow" gives them no new information---and I'd be surprised if changing it has any effect on rankings at all.
Oh well. At least we know it's telling the spammers^Wsearch optimisers^Wspammers to Just Bugger Off.
- d.
On 1/20/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
(Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Globalw....
and the reviews start to come in:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224044&highlight=wikiped...
Hmm an I evil for enjoying this:
http://www.seorefugee.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4655 http://www.wickedfire.com/industry-news/7373-wikipedia-external-links-now-no...
geni wrote:
Hmm an I evil for enjoying this: http://www.seorefugee.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4655
No more so than I!
The outraged, "how *dare* they!" tone is just priceless.
skitzoo: | Son Of A *****! That freakin blows. So, I guess I'll be | deleting the articles I wrote for them.
He don't know us vewy well, do he?
eKstreme: | Question: did nofollows reduce blog spam? Answer: no. | Question: will nofollows reduce Wikipedia spam? Guess: no.
But his guess is contradicted by the lead post in the thread:
Sorvoja: | :-( :-( Wikipedia has added the fracking NOFOLLOW attribute to | all external links. There goes hours upon hours of editing and | link building down the drain. :-( :-(
(Those are little animated, pyrotechnic thumbs-down frownies, not simple three-char ASCII emoticons. The blog crowd, they do love their icons.)
On 21/01/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Sorvoja: | :-( :-( Wikipedia has added the fracking NOFOLLOW attribute to | all external links. There goes hours upon hours of editing and | link building down the drain. :-( :-(
Serious question:
Is it worth the Foundation approaching Google with a suggestion to *penalise* links from wikipedia.org? Not single links, but many links.
- d.
Serious question:
Is it worth the Foundation approaching Google with a suggestion to *penalise* links from wikipedia.org? Not single links, but many links.
I doubt it... It's quite hard to tell the difference between spam links and real links.
Stable Versions are the solution, yet again - have nofollow on unstable versions and allow the links to be indexed on stable versions, that way everyone gets the benefit of google indexing the links, without there being an incentive to add linkspam.
On 1/21/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Serious question:
Is it worth the Foundation approaching Google with a suggestion to *penalise* links from wikipedia.org? Not single links, but many links.
Google have long standing principle that it is imposible for anything not on your site to hurt your page rank or whatever. The logical responce to this would be to spam your oponent's links.
There is also the problem of site like www.findagrave.com who quite legitimately have rather a lot of links on wikipedia.
David Gerard wrote:
Serious question:
Is it worth the Foundation approaching Google with a suggestion to *penalise* links from wikipedia.org? Not single links, but many links.
So Google Maps, TerraServer, etc get penalized?
On 21/01/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Sorvoja: | :-( :-( Wikipedia has added the fracking NOFOLLOW attribute to | all external links. There goes hours upon hours of editing and | link building down the drain. :-( :-(
(Those are little animated, pyrotechnic thumbs-down frownies, not simple three-char ASCII emoticons. The blog crowd, they do love their icons.)
Not even thumbs-down frownies, but angrily-shooting-a-gun-dudes. Hold me, I'm frightened.
On 1/21/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm an I evil for enjoying this:
http://www.seorefugee.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4655 http://www.wickedfire.com/industry-news/7373-wikipedia-external-links-now-no...
Lots of fun. Anyone caught our friend MyWikiBiz posting in the first one?
-Matt
On 22/01/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/21/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm an I evil for enjoying this:
Lots of fun. Anyone caught our friend MyWikiBiz posting in the first one?
It gets better: http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1648&jump_to_comment=14979
Also, I noticed this on another site: a spammer admits spamming articles and gives a clue as to what they are. Anyone care to try tracking this down and nuking it?
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/10642#comment-60436
On 23/01/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
It gets better:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-01-22-n21.html
"ZOMG WIKIPEDIA IS STEALING OUR LINKS!!!1!1one"
When did people start believing there was some sort of moral obligation for a site that they link to to give them some sort of kickback via a third party's link-rating system (i.e., PageRank)?
Note to J. Random Nobody (who may well be reading this list via links to the archive from similarly outraged windbags^Hbloggers), we didn't *ask* you to link to us, ergo we owe you nothing.
In amusement,
Earle
On 1/23/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
Also, I noticed this on another site: a spammer admits spamming articles and gives a clue as to what they are. Anyone care to try tracking this down and nuking it?
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/10642#comment-60436
Done. Rember http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch makes this fairly easy.
On 23/01/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Done. Rember http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch makes this fairly easy.
Thanks. I need to peruse [[Special:Specialpages]] a bit more, it seems.
On 1/24/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
Thanks. I need to peruse [[Special:Specialpages]] a bit more, it seems.
See also: [[m:Help:Special page]], which gives a bit more detail on the various pages.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_page
On 1/23/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On 22/01/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/21/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm an I evil for enjoying this:
Lots of fun. Anyone caught our friend MyWikiBiz posting in the first one?
It gets better: http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1648&jump_to_comment=14979
Also, I noticed this on another site: a spammer admits spamming articles and gives a clue as to what they are. Anyone care to try tracking this down and nuking it?
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/10642#comment-60436
-- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/
I like this one: http://www.smomashup.com/how-wikipedia-killed-the-internets/2007/01/23/
The complaint is that, once the (barely notable) entry on [[Social Media Optimization]] stops giving PageRank value to the blog-post origin of the term, then the Wikipedia article will surpass the blog entry as the first Google result for "social media optimization". Breaks my heart.
-Sage
On 1/23/07, Sage Ross sage.ross@yale.edu wrote:
I like this one: http://www.smomashup.com/how-wikipedia-killed-the-internets/2007/01/23/
The complaint is that, once the (barely notable) entry on [[Social Media Optimization]] stops giving PageRank value to the blog-post origin of the term, then the Wikipedia article will surpass the blog entry as the first Google result for "social media optimization". Breaks my heart.
It's not quite that simple. It is true that our actions are likely to be mildly dissruptive on the wider net but even our more power mad admins generaly don't think we should be policeing the web.
We are not a links directory which is one of the problems with various ideas to selectively turn off no follow. If we do that we are basicaly admiting we are a links directory and we would gain very little for doing so.
It's not quite that simple. It is true that our actions are likely to be mildly dissruptive on the wider net but even our more power mad admins generaly don't think we should be policeing the web.
I don't know... we have some pretty power mad admins...
geni wrote:
On 1/23/07, Sage Ross sage.ross@yale.edu wrote:
I like this one: http://www.smomashup.com/how-wikipedia-killed-the-internets/2007/01/23/
The complaint is that, once the (barely notable) entry on [[Social Media Optimization]] stops giving PageRank value to the blog-post origin of the term, then the Wikipedia article will surpass the blog entry as the first Google result for "social media optimization". Breaks my heart.
It's not quite that simple. It is true that our actions are likely to be mildly dissruptive on the wider net but even our more power mad admins generaly don't think we should be policeing the web.
We are not a links directory which is one of the problems with various ideas to selectively turn off no follow. If we do that we are basicaly admiting we are a links directory and we would gain very little for doing so.
Indeed, the argument "Wikipedia is not a web/links directory" has always been followed up with "...that's what DMOZ is for". Logically, we should check what they do, and do the exact opposite of it... :)
I would personally be very surprised if being linked to by Wikipedia adds much value to a site in the first place - I'm sure Google long-ago worked out that spammers spam Wikipedia with links. Wikipedia itself is high-ranked, but I doubt much magic gets passed on.
-Matthew
Google doesnt make any manual changes to their engine, or so they say. If you are linked to by people w/ high pagerank, your rank goes up. No matter what.
On 1/24/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I would personally be very surprised if being linked to by Wikipedia adds much value to a site in the first place - I'm sure Google long-ago worked out that spammers spam Wikipedia with links. Wikipedia itself is high-ranked, but I doubt much magic gets passed on.
-Matthew
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· Firefoxman wrote:
Google doesnt make any manual changes to their engine, or so they say. If you are linked to by people w/ high pagerank, your rank goes up. No matter what.
Well, they're a little more circumspect than that---they do explicitly say that they're always combating search-engine-gaming techniques, though of course they don't give any details on what they're doing to combat them. They've occasionally mentioned specific things they were targeting, like trying to downrate the effects of mass-blog-linking.
-Mark
On 1/24/07, · Firefoxman enwpmail@gmail.com wrote:
Google doesnt make any manual changes to their engine, or so they say. If you are linked to by people w/ high pagerank, your rank goes up. No matter what.
Surely you're oversimplifying, because such a simple system would just...suck. Some sites have good content, but link to bad content. It doesn't take a genius to realize that, and it doesn't require any manual tweaks to recognize those sites and ignore links from them automatically.
On 1/24/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I would personally be very surprised if being linked to by Wikipedia adds much value to a site in the first place - I'm sure Google long-ago worked out that spammers spam Wikipedia with links. Wikipedia itself is high-ranked, but I doubt much magic gets passed on.
Now that nofollow is turned on this might very well change, though. Nofollow only makes sense if you apply it to *some* links and not to others, which is exactly what Wikipedia is now doing (sister sites aren't nofollowed, for instance).
Anthony
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
What about links to sister projects, like Wikinews? It seems some of those projects could benefit greatly from the links not being nofollowed.
Anthony
What about links to sister projects, like Wikinews? It seems some of those projects could benefit greatly from the links not being nofollowed.
That double negative took me two attempts to get right... words shouldn't have negatives included within them, it just confuses me...
Sunday, January 21, 2007, 12:06:04 AM, Anthony wrote:
What about links to sister projects, like Wikinews? It seems some of those projects could benefit greatly from the links not being nofollowed.
I checked it and links to Wikinews do not have Nofollow, if you use the {{wikinews}} template.
On 1/21/07, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
Sunday, January 21, 2007, 12:06:04 AM, Anthony wrote:
What about links to sister projects, like Wikinews? It seems some of those projects could benefit greatly from the links not being nofollowed.
I checked it and links to Wikinews do not have Nofollow, if you use the {{wikinews}} template.
Internal links, interwiki links and external links are treated separately in the code. Brion has turned on nofollow for all external links by changing a setting in the site configuration, but this only affects external links. The setting can be applied only to certain namespaces; before now, for example, nofollow was enabled for all namespaces except the main namespace.
Here's the code that does it all: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/Linker.php?r...
If you look closer at the HTML for a page you'll see there are all different classes on the links, "extiw" for interwiki links, "external" for a link to an external page, "image" for links to images and so on. The short answer is that nofollow only applies to external links.
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
Does Jimmy have that authority? Should this have gone through the board? Did it?
On 1/22/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
Does Jimmy have that authority? Should this have gone through the board? Did it?
Where have you been for the last few years? The board tends to stay out of micromanaging Wikipedia. Jimmy doesn't.
Anthony
On 1/23/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
Does Jimmy have that authority? Should this have gone through the board? Did it?
You know very well that the board lets Jimbo run wikipedia. If they have a problem with his actions, they can do something about it, but lets face it: for the first half-decade that Jimbo's been in control, he's done a pretty darn good job.
This is just wikilawyering.
--Oskar
On 1/22/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/23/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
Does Jimmy have that authority? Should this have gone through the board? Did it?
You know very well that the board lets Jimbo run wikipedia. If they have a problem with his actions, they can do something about it, but lets face it: for the first half-decade that Jimbo's been in control, he's done a pretty darn good job.
This is just wikilawyering.
That's not what wikilawyering is. I wasn't questioning whether Jimbo was doing a good or bad job, and I seriously doubt he needs people to leap to his defense and resort to namecalling to attack questioners.
I asked three specific questions, which so far as I know Anthony and Oskar can't directly answer except through (reasonable) surmisal.
Is it explicit policy that Jimbo continues to have a free hand to make policy decisions for Wikipedia by fiat? I think that would be perfectly fine, but I'm still trying to grasp what Jimbo's role is becoming as the Foundation becomes more established and formal.
On Jan 22, 2007, at 23:20, The Cunctator wrote:
Is it explicit policy that Jimbo continues to have a free hand to make policy decisions for Wikipedia by fiat? I think that would be perfectly fine, but I'm still trying to grasp what Jimbo's role is becoming as the Foundation becomes more established and formal.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_issues See number 5?
--keitei
Keitei wrote:
On Jan 22, 2007, at 23:20, The Cunctator wrote:
Is it explicit policy that Jimbo continues to have a free hand to make policy decisions for Wikipedia by fiat? I think that would be perfectly fine, but I'm still trying to grasp what Jimbo's role is becoming as the Foundation becomes more established and formal.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_issues See number 5?
That was written before the first Board of Trustees election even took place, though, so is somewhat out of date these days.
-Mark
On 1/22/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/22/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/23/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/20/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
Does Jimmy have that authority? Should this have gone through the board? Did it?
I asked three specific questions, which so far as I know Anthony and Oskar can't directly answer except through (reasonable) surmisal.
Why ask the list, if you think we can't answer the question? Because the 4 or 5 people who can answer happen to be on the list?
Moreover, what is the question? Does Jimmy have the authority to request something of someone else? Of course he does. We all do. Free speech and everything. Was Brion required under his employment contract to do it? I doubt it, but that one I guess you'd have to ask him for the answer. Should this have gone through the board? That's really a philosophical question, which anyone could answer, but I don't really know if I think it should have or not. Did it? I guess only the board knows for sure, but I haven't seen any resolutions passed over it.
Anthony
On 1/24/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Should this have gone through the board? That's really a philosophical question, which anyone could answer, but I don't really know if I think it should have or not.
On second thought, in my opinion no it shouldn't have gone through the board. The Wikimedia board should handle the much larger mission-critical issues, not whether or not nofollow is enabled on Wikipedia.
Anthony
On 1/24/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 1/24/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Should this have gone through the board? That's really a philosophical question, which anyone could answer, but I don't really know if I think it should have or not.
On second thought, in my opinion no it shouldn't have gone through the board. The Wikimedia board should handle the much larger mission-critical issues, not whether or not nofollow is enabled on Wikipedia.
Makes sense to me.
On 20/01/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
(Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
Quick question (since I haven't seen it addressed below) - is this temporary for the duration of the current optimisation contest, or indefinite?
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Andrew Gray wrote:
On 20/01/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a "search engine optimization world championship" contest targeting WP[1], I've gone ahead and switched rel="nofollow" back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org's article namespace.
(Better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super; anyone interested in working on integrating such support into MediaWiki should swing on by the tech channels and give a shout.)
Quick question (since I haven't seen it addressed below) - is this temporary for the duration of the current optimisation contest, or indefinite?
Indefinite. I'd prefer to see actual improvements (whitelisting, fading, flagging and approval system, etc) rather than just turn it off one day, though.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
Brion Vibber wrote:
Indefinite. I'd prefer to see actual improvements (whitelisting, fading, flagging and approval system, etc) rather than just turn it off one day, though.
Why aren't we treating nofollow like the spam blacklist?
-Jeff
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Jeff Raymond wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Indefinite. I'd prefer to see actual improvements (whitelisting, fading, flagging and approval system, etc) rather than just turn it off one day, though.
Why aren't we treating nofollow like the spam blacklist?
To be useful it needs to function on a whitelist approach, and the further details of whitelisting (explicit, implicit, exceptions, approvals, flagging, moderation, visibility, logging) have yet to be worked out.
If you intend to actually work on this issue, please step up in the tech channels.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
Also, who would be able to modify it? I don't think that we should make it publicly editable, but I don't think we should have to bug admins every time I want to add a link to a site not already in the list. Maybe we should have somthing like the auth we have for the #wp-v channel, or semiprotect the page.
On 1/23/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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Jeff Raymond wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Indefinite. I'd prefer to see actual improvements (whitelisting,
fading,
flagging and approval system, etc) rather than just turn it off one
day,
though.
Why aren't we treating nofollow like the spam blacklist?
To be useful it needs to function on a whitelist approach, and the further details of whitelisting (explicit, implicit, exceptions, approvals, flagging, moderation, visibility, logging) have yet to be worked out.
If you intend to actually work on this issue, please step up in the tech channels.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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Brion Vibber wrote:
Jeff Raymond wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Indefinite. I'd prefer to see actual improvements (whitelisting, fading, flagging and approval system, etc) rather than just turn it off one day, though.
Why aren't we treating nofollow like the spam blacklist?
To be useful it needs to function on a whitelist approach, and the
Oh, and also the current spam blacklist system is dreadful. It's hard to maintain, very fragile (easily breaks due to not-quite-right regular expressions) and tends to combine "really obvious spam that no one wants" with "annoying stuff that we're tired of seeing on Wikipedia", making sharing of the blacklist with other wikis difficult.
Volunteers for reworking the blacklisting system are also welcome over in the tech channels. :)
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
How would I go about doing that?
On 1/23/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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Brion Vibber wrote:
Jeff Raymond wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Indefinite. I'd prefer to see actual improvements (whitelisting,
fading,
flagging and approval system, etc) rather than just turn it off one
day,
though.
Why aren't we treating nofollow like the spam blacklist?
To be useful it needs to function on a whitelist approach, and the
Oh, and also the current spam blacklist system is dreadful. It's hard to maintain, very fragile (easily breaks due to not-quite-right regular expressions) and tends to combine "really obvious spam that no one wants" with "annoying stuff that we're tired of seeing on Wikipedia", making sharing of the blacklist with other wikis difficult.
Volunteers for reworking the blacklisting system are also welcome over in the tech channels. :)
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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On 23/01/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Indefinite. I'd prefer to see actual improvements (whitelisting, fading, flagging and approval system, etc) rather than just turn it off one day, though.
Why aren't we treating nofollow like the spam blacklist?
The spam blacklist failed to disincentivise spammers in general; nofollow is already making them feel like their hard work was wasted. GOOD.
- d.