[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Erik Moeller]

On 5/1/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> Perhaps this is a good time to push reenabling rel="nofollow" on en.wikipedia.org.

I don't much like the idea of effectively punishing thousands of
perfectly fine sites because of a few people who pee in the proverbial
public pool. How feasible would it be, in your opinion, to
 - add a timestamp to the externallinks table
 - only add nofollow to links which have been added recently (<7 days)?

That might be a reasonable middle ground. Yes, some spammers will get
through, but that's to be expected. If we can keep the quality of
links above the average on the web, then surely we should be treated
like any other site on search engines.

As for the present situation, I think that more closely cooperating
with existing link directories like DMOZ might help. If we can say, in
the style of sister project links, "DMOZ has more hyperlinks about
Foo", then we don't have to host these link lists on Wikipedia. I
often find even large link lists very useful, but I would prefer more
structured and carefully maintained ones than Wikipedia has, and that
is exactly what projects like DMOZ are for.

This is more relevant to en.wikipedia.org than some others; de:, for
example, has a guideline stating that five links should normally be
enough, and that all links should be of the highest possible quality:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Weblinks

As a more gentle alternative, a substitution policy of link lists vs.
links to link directories might make sense.

Erik