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

[Anthony]

On 5/1/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia at att.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
An interesting concept which was actually part of the original plans
for Gnupedia.  But we digress.  Joe Szilagyi seems to be the only one
going to such an extreme here.

> 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.
>
All the evidence points to the conclusion that this preferential
treatment was accidental.  But it's still there, and it's most likely
quite significant.  If you think it's perfectly OK for a charity to
accidentally give its founder such a windfall, then I really can't say
anything against that.  My intuition is that it's very wrong, but
maybe my intuition is wrong.

Anthony