[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Wed, 25/5/11, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wednesday, 25 May, 2011, 7:53
> On 23/05/2011, geni <geniice at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Google's search results are entirely their business.
> 
> Actually not entirely, we do have quite a bit of control.
> 
> In an absolute worse case we could noindex the entire
> article (I'm not
> suggesting it, in fact I strongly recommend against it).
> 
> But google pay attention to how many articles link to it,
> and there's
> an enormous 'political neologism' template at the end of
> the article,
> which makes them all mutually link.
> 
> I can't estimate how much link juice that pushes into the
> article, but
> it may well be substantial, there's probably relatively few
> Wikipedia
> articles that link to the term otherwise, terms don't
> usually get that
> many links, but I don't know how many external links in
> there are, or
> how much link juice they supply.
> 
> There is probably a reasonably strong argument for
> nofollowing
> internal 'link farms' like that, I don't see that one term
> should
> inherit another's link juice, but I couldn't see any
> obvious way to
> nofollow internal links when I checked briefly.


Okay, now we are getting somewhere. There are actually three templates at
the bottom of the article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Dan_Savage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Political_neologisms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Sexual_slang

The sexual slang one in particular is massive, listing more than 100
terms.

These templates are all new creations by Cirt, the Santorum article's main
author. They were created between 10 and 15 May, shortly after Santorum 
announced he might run for President, and then added to all the other 
articles listed in the templates, thus creating a couple of hundred incoming
links, and enhancing the article's Google ranking.

Now, *that's using Wikipedia for political campaigning.*

By the way, Cirt's GA articles include this highly flattering portrait of
a gay porn company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Fisher

Andreas