On 5/1/06, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/1/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
I don't much like the idea of effectively punishing thousands of perfectly fine sites because of a few people who pee in the proverbial public pool.
How does turning on nofollow punish anyone? Nobody is entitled to free pagerank just because they've been listed on Wikipedia.
I see no good reason not to turn on nofollow for en. I also note that de has been nofollow for quite a while now.
Kelly
I tend to agree, though I don't think nofollow will have much of an impact either way. Maybe it'll slightly decrease the incentive for vandals to add links, but probably not much.
One definite advantage I did see during the times that nofollow was on was that there was less fighting over what links to include, what not to include, and what to include through some kludge where the link wasn't clickable. Some people are on a mission to make sure Wikipedia doesn't link to certain websites which they find socially unacceptable (diploma mills are one example). Anything that reduces the temptation for people to engage in these wars is a good thing.
In the end, nofollow has little impact on the goal of Wikipedia - to create an encyclopedia.
Anthony