[WikiEN-l] Gosh darn it, those spammers^Wmarketers will show us what for

[Steve Summit]

Mgm wrote:
> On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>> Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within
>> Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the
>> external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the
>> article in a significant way.
>
> I'm not talking about the content value of the links. I'm talking about how
> the traffic from the sites who link us in return got us where we are.

Sure.  And I agree: it is not fair to allow one's pagerank to
be increased by all the links to you which various people make,
without also increasing the pagerank of all the various pages you
link back out to.  But the spammers don't play fair, either, and
we're in a war with them.  I bemoan the collateral damage of the
non-followed, non-spammy external links as much as the next guy,
and I hope that better, more selective spam-control mechanisms
can be deployed in the long run, but in the short run, we'd be
crazy to let linkspammers run roughshod over our external links
sections, to allow them to hijack our high pagerank in promoting
their grotty little sites.

But with that said, I have to agree with Bryan: Wikipedia is not
great because it has high pagerank.  It is great because it has
great content.  Personally, I think Wikipedia's pagerank is too
high: Wikipedia results tend to swamp the first page of many of
the Google searches I do, to the detriment of the other sites
I might also want to find.  If the "boycott" as any effect, it
won't bother me, or hurt Wikipedia, at all.