[WikiEN-l] Why aren't *all* wikia.com links restricted under nofollow?

[Michael Snow]

Joe Szilagyi wrote:

> By allowing even a single
> non-Wikimedia Foundation site to reap any sort of financial benefit, a
> possible conflict of interest now exists.

Wow, that's a breathtakingly broad thesis. Apparently the Wikimedia 
Foundation has an ethical obligation to actively prevent remote 
downstream commercial activity, because it could be a conflict of 
interest for us if completely independent outside parties somehow benefit.

While we're at it, who needs external links in the first place? Let's 
just ignore the rest of the internet and be a walled garden, it's the 
only way we can be sure nobody will benefit.

Or instead, we could look at this dispassionately. I notice that the 
interwiki map includes World66 and Wikitravel, two travel guide wikis 
owned by a commercial enterprise called Internet Brands. Thus links to 
these sites can avoid the nofollow attribute, even though they would be 
direct competition for World Wikia, the travel guide Wikia launched to 
some fanfare last year. World66 even carries Google ads just like Wikia. 
On the basis of the evidence, what reason is there to think that Wikia 
has taken advantage of its founders' relationship with Wikimedia to get 
preferential treatment? Maybe somebody will think they can still make 
that case, but please look at the full picture instead of leaping to 
conclusions from a single piece of information.

--Michael Snow