Recently an open vote was held on the English wikipedia regarding whether or not to use the 'rel="nofollow"' attribute in external links. As many of you know, the attribute was recently created by google as a possible means of controlling spam. As you know, use of the attribute is controlled by a boolean flag in the MediaWiki software. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Nofollow Following the advice of the developers, community vote was set up. It was open for two weeks and had spirited debate about the use of "nofollow". The result of the vote was Remove "nofollow" -- 61% (85 votes) Keep "nofollow" -- 39% (55 votes) A strong majority of the voters would prefer that the attribute be removed for the English Wikipedia. I'm reporting this knowing that it's up the developers to implement the will of the community. I know there is support among some the developers for the continued use of this attribute on all the wikimedia projects, but those of us who voted on the English wikipedia did so in the belief that the decision in this case was up to the community. As such, this is not meant as a discussion of the attribute itself, only a notification fo the community decision for the english wikipedia. I've personally gotten ambiguous and imcomplete feedback from the user who set up the vote, so I hope this can clear things up. As I side note, some of the 'keep' voters expressed the desire to see the attribute removed if the software could parse external links based on an aging process. I know that since the software does not record external links separately, this would be probably be a rather complex modification of the code that would be a long time in development, given other priorities. In the meantime, however, a strong majority of the voters have voted "remove". Best wishes and with great respect for your efforts, Matthew Trump