[Foundation-l] Interwiki map criteria and nofollow

[Anthony]

On 5/2/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I stated in the WikiEn thread, the main issue here is the perception
> of conflict of interest (or the reality of it, according to some).
>
> David's post suggests that we make it so that only links to site
> supporting free content be exempt from the nofollow attribute. This has
> some advantages, including being consistent with the goals of the
> project, and not be apparently arbitrary.
>
But it's obviously just retrofitting these consistent goals to fit the
status quo.  If we were really going to come up with a system from
scratch, to say which links should be nofollowed and which shouldn't,
I don't think anyone would suggest the 5 criteria that have been
listed.

> As an aside:
> Given the volume of complaining that the nofollow policy has generated
> from the SEO community, the so-called "link juice" from Wikipedia must
> be valuable. Have we considered the possibility of this as a revenue stream?
>
I thought about that, and I came to the conclusion that if Wikimedia
derived any significant revenue from such a thing the search engines
wouldn't like it.  As such they'd probably find a way to either take
away the benefit from the links or else lower the rank of Wikipedia
itself.

Anthony