[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Brion Vibber]

Andre Engels wrote:
> I think that the solution should be to remove many more links than are
> done now. When I read that Gregory Maxwell removed 45 links from a
> page and kept another 45, in my opinion he has been rather reserved -
> rare is in my opinion the page that needs more than 3 links. Wikipedia
> is not a link collector.
> 
> I'll be going through pages on my watchlist and see whether there are
> any inappropriate links and remove them, then check whether they exist
> elsewhere on Wikipedia if they appear to be not on the most likely
> page (which would make it seem they have been spammed).

Perhaps this is a good time to push reenabling rel="nofollow" on en.wikipedia.org.

Domas and I visited the Google campus last week after the MySQL users
conference, and chatted a bit with some folks from the search quality team. They
assure us that, yes, rel="nofollow" *does* help prevent linkspam from having its
intended effect and that, yes, at least some of the SEO folks end up giving up
on sites because of it (though of course not all, and not immediately).

While this automated protection doesn't prevent eyeballs from seeing or
following links, it does keep them from autospamming the search engines that we
all rely on in our daily surfing.

The argument for turning it off centered on the idea that "good internet
citizens" help "good sites" by linking to them, and that on en.wikipedia.org
there's enough eyeballs to immediately remove linkspam.

Apparently that's just not so. Good internet citizens need to recognize this and
keep our communal resources clean. Wikipedia is not a link farm!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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