[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Alison Wheeler]

(ignore previous ... mail uissues! response was actually ....)

On Mon, May 1, 2006 15:11, Erik Moeller wrote:
> True. I remain unconvinced that indiscriminate use of the nofollow tag
> is the best way to do that, though. "If all you have in a hammer,
> everything looks like a nail." If all you have is a spam blacklist and
> a nofollow option .. I think Gregory's systematic queries point in the
> direction of the right solution. Perhaps a few new special pages could
> help us deal with external link issues more systematically. Hmm .. I
> think this is a job for Magnus or Rob! ;-)

ok. Let me come at this from the other direction then! What *benefit* does
it do the Wikipedia and WMF projects to supply 'free' link value to other
sites. It doesn't help us sfaict, indeed it probably harms us as we can be
seen as detrimental to the quality of search engine results as we - in
effect - promote spam and other sites.

No-one has a "right" to a link fom us, just as no-one has a "right" to an
article about them (or for that article to read the way they would like it
to read.) I see this growing use of external links as bad for WP and
something to be seen to in whatever way possible.

Alison