[Foundation-l] Interwiki map criteria and nofollow

[Anthony]

On 5/2/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> (This is not wikien-l asserting dominion over meta and the interwiki
> map :-) It's because en:wp is most of the reason wikipedia.org has a
> stupidly high Google page rank, and so the SEO spammers whine that
> it's our job to make the spammers look good to Google, and never mind
> us or our editors or readers. But anyway.)
>
"The InterWiki Map exists to allow a more efficient syntax for linking
between wikis, and thus promote the cooperation and proliferation of
wikis and free content. Sites considered for inclusion should probably
(1) provide clear and relevant usefulness to the Wikimedia projects
(2) be trusted not to encourage spam links being added to the
Wikimedia projects (3) be free content (under a Commons-acceptable
license) (4) be a wiki (5) be reasonably developed."

If we're really going to rethink what should constitute an IW link,
I'd suggest adding "(6) be free from advertising".

"Sites included in the InterWiki Map are considered by the Wikimedia
community to be trusted not to encourage spam links being added to
Wikimedia projects, and thus "nofollow" is removed from InterWiki
links."

I strongly disagree with this, as it confuses the purpose of the IW
links.  If the only criterion for an IW link was number 2, then it
might be reasonable, but this isn't the purpose of IW links.

To quote Anthere: "Either all links (external and interwiki) should be
nofollow.  Or none of them should be.  Or we can work on white lists
together for both types of links."

Anthony