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

[Steve Summit]

Oskar wrote:
> 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.
>>
>> 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...

Indeed.

I should not have used the word "vote", even in quotes.  If we
were all straightforwardly creating websites, linking to other
sites based on their value to our readers, then Google's pagerank
algorithm would tick along there in the background, working just
fine.  It's when people start self-consciously thinking of links
as "votes", and trying to artificially skew Google's results
thereby, that all the troubles begin.  Some people start
introducing bad-faith links, and others therefore have to declare
*all* their links invalid, thus cutting off our own nose to spite
our face -- er, to spite those damn linkspammers.

If our objective is to build an encyclopedia, not to help the
search engines to have better results, then our objective is not
to help the search engines not to have worse results, either,
so perhaps we shouldn't be so concerned about nofollow at all.

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

No question at all.  (But this is an essentially selfish motive,
and neither the Internet nor Wikipedia works on selfishness.)