Eric wrote:

...

How does turning on nofollow punish anyone? Nobody is entitled to free pagerank just because they've been listed on Wikipedia.

I see two possibilities:

1. 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.

OR

2. Due to mirrors, enabling or disabling nofollow has hardly any

visible effect on search engine rankings. In that case, it would be a placebo effect.

As I said, I think timing the addition of external links and enabling nofollow only for recent additions might be a reasonable compromise.

Erik

I think we need to start asking another question, and not from Wikipedia or any Wikimedia project. My question is: *why* is Google making mirrored content from Wikipedia appear so high up in their search results? Surely that is killing off the effectiveness of their own search tool? I have always wondered why critics blame us for this, when we are only giving away free information.

Surely with Google's super smart workforce they would have worked out how to exclude or give less weight to Wikipedia mirrors by now?

Chris