[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 5/1/06, Jan Kulveit <jk-wikifound at ks.cz> wrote:
> On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 04:40:23PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > I see two possibilities:
> >
> > 1) Wikipedia specifically has a very high influence on a site's
> > ranking. In this case, turning off nofollow will alter the shape of
> > the web in search engines which respect it. If the average quality of
> > links in Wikipedia is higher than the average quality of links outside
> > Wikipedia, the quality of these search engine results as a whole will
> > deteriorate. This is not about entitlement, it is about using the
> > influence we have responsibly.
> >
>
> The quality of Wikipedia should be given more weight than to task
> of  responsibly influencing search engines. If turning nofollow on leads
> to decrease of spammers effort, it would be good for Wikipedia quality.
>
Ultimately Wikipedia is big enough that the search engines could
easily manually override its nofollow suggestion anyway.

Which leads to a question - what would Google and the other search
engines *want* Wikipedia to do?  Anyone think they'd have a good shot
at getting an official answer?

Anthony