Andre Engels wrote:
I think that the solution should be to remove many more links than are done now. When I read that Gregory Maxwell removed 45 links from a page and kept another 45, in my opinion he has been rather reserved - rare is in my opinion the page that needs more than 3 links. Wikipedia is not a link collector.
I'll be going through pages on my watchlist and see whether there are any inappropriate links and remove them, then check whether they exist elsewhere on Wikipedia if they appear to be not on the most likely page (which would make it seem they have been spammed).
Perhaps this is a good time to push reenabling rel="nofollow" on en.wikipedia.org.
Domas and I visited the Google campus last week after the MySQL users conference, and chatted a bit with some folks from the search quality team. They assure us that, yes, rel="nofollow" *does* help prevent linkspam from having its intended effect and that, yes, at least some of the SEO folks end up giving up on sites because of it (though of course not all, and not immediately).
While this automated protection doesn't prevent eyeballs from seeing or following links, it does keep them from autospamming the search engines that we all rely on in our daily surfing.
The argument for turning it off centered on the idea that "good internet citizens" help "good sites" by linking to them, and that on en.wikipedia.org there's enough eyeballs to immediately remove linkspam.
Apparently that's just not so. Good internet citizens need to recognize this and keep our communal resources clean. Wikipedia is not a link farm!
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)