On 5/1/07, Michael Snow wikipedia@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