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