On 1/22/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
- 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