On 10/10/07, Luca de Alfaro luca@soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
To discourage link-spamming, one way could be:
[snip]
The advantages of this scheme are:
- Link spamming becomes useless
[snip]
Why do you expect that the not vandalized flag would have any impact on link quality?
I have seen no evidence to suggest that we have a real amount of people trying to benefit from putting links in quickly in a race with the vandalism reverting. .. at least not any more. The link insertion captchas, blocking, and Wikimedia SBL appear to have stopped that kind of behavior very effectively.
Our external links are already no-followed which dampens the ability of marketers to use Wikipedia in order to influence their search position. As such, giving flagged revisions to search engines should have no effect with respect to linking, unless we also stopped using no-follow in which case it would only increase the value of links placed in Wikipedia.
On English Wikipedia, unscrupulous marketers seem to be work more frequently by taking advantage of our lack of editorial oversight on links (which measurable by the high durability of obviously broken links) and our huge amount of traffic to bring in actual eyeballs. For this what we send to the search engine is irrelevant.