[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Erik Moeller]

On 5/1/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:

> None of Wikipedia's mirrors has anywhere near the pagerank weight that
> Wikipedia itself has.  With the exception of a small number of already
> high-prominence sites, Wikipedia linkage is almost certainly bound to
> substantially alter the rank of a given page in search engine results.

I agree with this now that it is also clear that mirrors are
deliberately reducing external links. It is clear that Wikipedia's
impact on the ranking of the sites it references must be significant.
I continue to maintain that tagging all links indiscriminately as
"nofollow" is essentially an admission of defeat; it is like saying:
None of our links are worth spidering. We're just a wiki. Please,
search engines, go to some other trusted sites, not to us.

I don't think our links are bad enough to justify such an explicit
statement with all the consequences it has. And the continual pounding
of "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" does nothing to change the fact that
it is a resource used by millions of people, that it is a resource
which is embedded into a larger network known as the WWW, a network
which itself is accessed by most people through portals and search
engines before they arrive at a content source. It is in our interest,
for our own project and for moral reasons, to help people to find high
quality educational resources, as opposed to those which are promoted
from within typically corporate, "trusted" frameworks such as AOL or
MSN.

The fact that Wikipedia maintains community-created lists of topical
links has always been, to me, one of its strongest points, one of the
best ways to further explore and find relevant information on a topic.
When I find an interesting and useful link, I often add it to
Wikipedia so I can look it up again later, no matter where I am. The
fact that any link to any resource has a chance and is treated,
hopefully, consistently and fairly according to community-drafted
policies distinguishes it radically from those "trusted" resources
which only allow links which benefit the owner of the resource, or at
least do not threaten to damage them or their advertisers.

Do we, essentially, want an invisible wall of separation between
user-generated content and content from "trusted" sites? Or do we want
a better solution? I don't like nofollow. It is a hack. It lacks
imagination.

Erik