Andre Engels wrote:
Will it help? It only works when the spammers think/know we have this implemented. And it does also harm the 'valid' links that are created.
We hope it will help. It's one of those things that will only work well if everyone participates, otherwise spammers will just continue to spam every wiki because they couldn't be bothered checking which ones are using this feature. That's why it's important that we enable this feature by default.
This may reduce the usefulness of blogs and wikis as a means of ranking sites, but they're not particularly useful as it is, because they are easily spammed. Hopefully this initiative will improve the quality of search rankings, allowing good sites to rise above the spam, rather than harm that quality by ignoring useful information. The major search engines obviously think it will.
Wikipedia has mirrors which will probably not implement this feature. That reduces both the usefulness and side effects of this for us. However most spam doesn't seem to be specifically targetted at us -- search google for a spam link you see on Wikipedia and you'll usually get thousands of hits from wikis, blogs and guestbooks. Spam on Wikipedia is usually cleaned up quickly, so the incentive for them to target us is already questionable. The most important thing is that this feature is implemented in MediaWiki by default, because that reduces the incentive for them to spam everything with a <textarea>.
-- Tim Starling