On 5/2/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: "The InterWiki Map exists to allow a more efficient syntax for linking between wikis, and thus promote the cooperation and proliferation of wikis and free content. Sites considered for inclusion should probably (1) provide clear and relevant usefulness to the Wikimedia projects (2) be trusted not to encourage spam links being added to the Wikimedia projects (3) be free content (under a Commons-acceptable license) (4) be a wiki (5) be reasonably developed." If we're really going to rethink what should constitute an IW link, I'd suggest adding "(6) be free from advertising". "Sites included in the InterWiki Map are considered by the Wikimedia community to be trusted not to encourage spam links being added to Wikimedia projects, and thus "nofollow" is removed from InterWiki links." I strongly disagree with this, as it confuses the purpose of the IW links. If the only criterion for an IW link was number 2, then it might be reasonable, but this isn't the purpose of IW links. To quote Anthere: "Either all links (external and interwiki) should be nofollow. Or none of them should be. Or we can work on white lists together for both types of links." Anthony

David Gerard wrote: As I stated in the WikiEn thread, the main issue here is the perception of conflict of interest (or the reality of it, according to some). David's post suggests that we make it so that only links to site supporting free content be exempt from the nofollow attribute. This has some advantages, including being consistent with the goals of the project, and not be apparently arbitrary. Some issues remain with this approach. Of course, we'd need to agree to some definition of "free content." Would no-commercial-use sites be included? Another issue is the situation where parts of a site are "free content" by whatever definition we use, and other parts are not. Finally, it does not truly address the perception of conflict of interest. Now, we can't hope to eliminate everything that someone might consider to be a conflict of interest. It's a question of judgment; cost to benefit, where neither are quantifiable. As an aside: Given the volume of complaining that the nofollow policy has generated from the SEO community, the so-called "link juice" from Wikipedia must be valuable. Have we considered the possibility of this as a revenue stream? -Rich