[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 5/1/06, Arne Klempert <klempert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/1/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > But really, what is the goal of Wikipedia?  It is to make a free
> > content encyclopedia.  It is not to be most popular website, or even
> > the most read encyclopedia. It's not to help SEOs or search engines...
>
> Let's try it the other way around. Links (real ones, without nofollow)
> are essential for the WWW. Does it comply with our goals to sabotage
> the web, only because we're too lazy?
>
> -- Arne (akl)

That's an utterly misleading line of thought.  If everyone in the
world added nofollow to their links tomorrow, nothing terribly drastic
would happen to the web.  Maybe some search engines would break for a
day or two.  In the longer term, everyone turning on nofollow would be
equivalent to everyone turning it off.  The web got along just fine
before nofollow was invented.

Google invented nofollow to provide them with additonal information
about certain types of links.  Apparently they'd prefer Wikipedia to
employ it (which would also imply they don't think it's going to
"sabotage the web").  There doesn't seem to be any suggestion that
turning it on would hurt the encyclopedia, and some are suggesting it
would help the encyclopedia.

Anthony