Brion Vibber wrote:
>I think it's disingenuous to speak of "the will of the community"
>What do you suggest?
Brion, I apologize if I sounded a little too awkwardly pompous. Like
others, I was a bit confused about the right procedure to follow
during all this.
To clarify, I meant the "will" only in the Rousseauian sense of an
election result, which is always imperfect. Perhaps it would have
been better to state that: "it was *not* the will of the community to
implement nofollow, as it currently is available, until a better
option is available"
I agree with you, in that there is a wide range of opinion, but I
believe it is possible to reach a broad consensus with the right
engineering. My impression, shared and expressed by others, is that
if a software feature were available such that links could mature
into being "rewarded", then I think this would almost certainly gain
a broad consensus to implement.
There will certainly remain a group of users who are, on principle,
against sharing pagelink no matter what, but I think (this is just a
guess) this groups comprises maybe half of the "keep" voters in the
recent vote. Others opposed it purely on spam-related reasons, and
more than a few have expressed a desire for this kind of system. If a
software feature were available, it would become a matter of how long
to let links mature.
In regards to the software option, just thinking off the top of my
head, it would obviously necessitate the creation an additional
database field, say 'externallinks', and that the parser would pull
these links out, like it does category links right now. There would
obviously be a timestamp assigned for each new link, as well as
perhaps the user who added it (perhaps useful for quick rollbacks of
spamlinks). Perhaps interwiki links could be identified as such.
One can imagine right away such cases as a vandal blanking an
establshed page, which in the simplest case would reset the clock.
This is hardly ideal, of course, but dealing with such cases might
come down the road as the refined. A more sophisticated version might
pull out the domain name of the link, and that domains which mature
can be whitelisted for links across the board.
>From these database fields, there could obviously be searchable
special pages, where one could pull up external links and display
them, alphebetized, or by adding user, by namespace, or domain, etc.
This actually might be a very useful thing to have, overall, and
become a popular feature of the software. Just a hunch. Other
boutique-type special pages might display "most linked to domains",
etc., if there was a desire for it.
One benefit of having such special pages would be to allow easy
checking for stale external links across many pages.
I personally am a big believer in interwiki communication and
colloboration, and of having software features that enhances it, so I
would personally enjoy using and having such features in the
software, but I'm a nutcase, so I can't speak for others :)
Matt
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