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

[John Lee]

On 5/1/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia at att.net> wrote:
>
> 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.


Precisely. As I understand it, the reason interwiki links aren't nofollowed
is because we can be damn sure that they're not spam, since all these
domains have to be preapproved before you can link to them using the
interwiki format. If we could have this sort of certainty for normal links,
I'm sure we would (or ought to) remove the nofollow attribute.

Having said that, I still don't understand why the MediaWiki patch was
rejected. Why is it not sensible to allow MediaWiki installations to
nofollow interwiki links? It's a feature someone out there might conceivably
want.

Johnleemk