On 2/19/06, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Where did you get that idea from? Did you read the
discussion at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Nofollow/Vote ?
Eh, several times in the last year I had the discussion in IRC with
several users. It was a frequent misunderstanding.
I'm against using it it because:
* Most of our pages are of high quality, and and as a result they
generally accumulate high quality links, I'd like those links to show
up more prominently in search engine results because it'll improve the
quality of the web in general. Nofollow harms that in a small way.
Yes, in a small way. The obvious solution is for people to use
Wikipedia rather than search engines. :) I'm not sure as sure as your
about the general quality of our links but in any case the goal is to
make a quality free encyclopedia, not improve search engines. ... And
leaving in a commercial incentive to crap on the encyclopedia doesn't
help our goals.
* It isn't actually accomplishing anything, or
very little. Since we
turned it on on all wikis except the English Wikipedia it seems to me
that the latter hasn't received any less linkspam.
Do you have any objective measurment of that. I know for a fact that
we've been targeted by at least one SEO group because of our lack of
nofollow.