[WikiEN-l] Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org articles for now

[Oskar Sigvardsson]

On 1/20/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> Saturday, January 20, 2007, 5:08:52 PM, Steve wrote:
>
> > Right.  But some of the sites we link to are good sites, and
> > do deserve our "vote" in terms of increasing their pagerank.
> > (But the problem, of course, is that there's no way to
> > differentiate those external links of ours that have this
> > quality, versus those that are as-yet-undetected linkspam.)
>
> Wikipedia's primary objective is to build an encyclopedia,
> not to help the search engines to have better results.

I agree, which is why this move was necessary. I just think that if
good, relevant links didn't have nofollow on them it would improve the
overall "health" of the internet (that is, promotion of good, quality
sites, versus drowning in bad ones). I think that that is a goal we
should ALL care about.

> Without the "nofollow" tag, we'd have much more spam, which is
> detrimental to that objective.

Again, I agree that the move is necessary, I'm just saying it's a damn shame.

> Wikipedia also should always be neutral and it should try not to
> directly influence the events outside of it.

Excuse me? Are you saying that when google uses wikipedia links to
determine relevance in a search, it's detrimental to the neutrality of
wikipedia? How exactly would that go?

--Oskar