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

[Charles Matthews]

On 25/05/2011 15:23, Ian Woollard wrote:
> On 25/05/2011, Andreas Kolbe<jayen466 at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>> Okay, now we are getting somewhere.
>> 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.*
> To be fair, we don't actually know it's having any effect at all, and
> it could be *lowering* the ranking for the article by sending its
> juice off to other articles around, averaging and diluting it down.
>
> My point was only that we probably shouldn't be doing anything, even
> accidentally, that would be likely to change its link juice over what
> it naturally gets. If it's fairly naturally at the top of the google
> listings, and we haven't done anything odd, then that's perfectly
> fine.

As I said earlier in the thread, COI is possibly relevant here. Also the 
issue of whether a template should contain a certain linked entry, or 
not, is a legitimate discussion. "Slang" doesn't usually mean "words 
somebody thinks ought to be slang", but actual street language.

The alleged SEO is, I still think, primarily the problem of those 
running search engines. I can see that its discussion is a bit more 
complex than that if you include: giving a stick to those who want one 
to beat WP with; and alerting Google (and others) to the way our link 
"agriculture" might have artificial elements.

Charles