Bogdan Giusca wrote:
Wikipedia has a *very* good rank on google (PR 9 on
main page), which
means that more and more webmasters want links from it. One way is to
add an external link, however, these are usually spotted by editors.
I'm not sure about "usually". But those links are a big problem,
because they let the linked-to site ride on the coattails of
Wikipedia's pagerank. And there's a solution to this problem:
tell google not to look at Wikipedia's outgoing links.
See [[Wikipedia talk:Spam]]. (Specifically, the currently-last
section, "Proposal: Enable rel="nofollow" outside the main
namespace". But soon enough we'll be discussing turning it off
in the main namespace, as well.)
I noticed a trend: on such articles about websites,
when I ask for reliable
references, according to our policy, the answer is often: "why would we
need references for this article? the website itself is used as a reference".
That's because it's extremely easy to confuse verifiability and
notability. A website reference might be a fine and reliable
verification that the website exists. But it obviously says
nothing about the site's notability. What you want to ask for
is not a "reliable reference", but rather an "outside reference
which demonstrates notability".