On 5/1/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)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