On 5/1/06, Matt Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
My personal opinion is that /currently/ I think
nofollow has merit; I
think we're extremely bad at handling linkspamming and website
promotion in Wikipedia, and thus reducing the benefit might help.
However, if we became better at keeping track of what Wikipedia links
to and getting rid of spam, I'd support turning nofollow off.
What would be useful steps to take to keep better track of these? Is
there anything that can be done in software? Or procedure/process?
External applications?
I've ductaped curl to spamassassin and can now rate the spammyness of
websites. :) Now I just need to replace all the email header centric
SA rules with web centric ones.
Because there are ~2,800,000 external links from the main namespace
alone on enwiki (there is now a patch to mediawiki to set nofollow per
namespace, I think no matter what we should nofollow outside the main
ns), I see automated scanning as the only reasonable step right now to
improve our link quality.
So I'm working on it..