[WikiEN-l] a few new wrinkles in the external link issue

[Stephen Bain]

On 1/22/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:
>
> 1) If we're going to blindly attach "nofollow" to all the external
> links, why are we allowing Wikia links to be propped up artificially?
> Are we in the business of conflict of interest now?

I'm not completely sure what you mean, but I think you're asking why
nofollow is applied to links to pages hosted at Wikia. The answer to
that is that MediaWiki treats external links [1] differently to
interwiki links, and nofollow is only applied to external links.

So if my wikitext had [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite] I
would get an external link, with nofollow, but if I had
[[w:de:Hauptseite]] I would get an interwiki link without nofollow.

This is sort of a bug, since there are many many sites which can be
linked to this way: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com