On 5/14/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)vyznev.net> wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
It's in bugzilla.
But I think the conclusion of the last discussion on this was that we
should enable no follow on all of enwiki like the others.
Have I missed that one? I've seen several people suggest that nofollow
should be enabled elsewhere on enwiki, but the idea of using it in the
main namespace seems to be controversial at best.
FWIW, I tend to agree. Enable it, yes, but only outside NS_MAIN.
Enwiki is the only wikipedia without it on the main NS.
If you go to the old vote and exclude the users who didn't make any
substantial contributions to English Wikipedia after the vote you'll
find that the results were overwhelmingly in favor of enabling
nofollow.
As for the recent discussion, see the thread here:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-April/006867.html
I agree that enabling it outside of the main ns is completely
uncontroversial and should be done immediately. I could argue either
way about use in the main NS, but there are two points which make up
my mind:
1) The evidence I posted in the above linked thread clearly
demonstrates that we are not executing editorial oversight of our
externals. Thus the fact that Wikipedia links to something isn't an
indication that the content isn't crap... we link to spyware, add
fodder, etc.. We have articles with more external links than the
number of edits they get per-month... If we could demonstrate that
we're making a good effort to insure that all our links are well
selected and not just SEO fodder, then the situation would be
different.
2) Google thinks we should enable it.