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

[Joe Szilagyi]

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


No, it's doesn't. The licensing lets people do whatever they want, and as I
said, I could care less *who* makes the money. It's a question of the
appearance of conflict. There's no harm in template/interwiki linking.
There's a problem with deciding that x people can get nofollow turned off,
but y people can't.

It simply needs to be all or nothing so that there is no possible risk of
ethical issues or COI. Either nofollow needs to be turned off (not a good
idea), everyone who asks for it needs to be granted the priviledge of
bypassing it via the Interwiki Map (again, probably not a good idea), or it
needs to be uniform on all WMF sites.
-- 
Regards,
Joe
http://www.joeszilagyi.com