On 5/1/06, Jan Kulveit jk-wikifound@ks.cz wrote:
On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 04:40:23PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
I see two possibilities:
- Wikipedia specifically has a very high influence on a site's
ranking. In this case, turning off nofollow will alter the shape of the web in search engines which respect it. If the average quality of links in Wikipedia is higher than the average quality of links outside Wikipedia, the quality of these search engine results as a whole will deteriorate. This is not about entitlement, it is about using the influence we have responsibly.
The quality of Wikipedia should be given more weight than to task of responsibly influencing search engines. If turning nofollow on leads to decrease of spammers effort, it would be good for Wikipedia quality.
Ultimately Wikipedia is big enough that the search engines could easily manually override its nofollow suggestion anyway.
Which leads to a question - what would Google and the other search engines *want* Wikipedia to do? Anyone think they'd have a good shot at getting an official answer?
Anthony