[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 5/1/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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'd say it's more like saying "Don't assume this link is worth
spidering just because we link to it."  That's quite different from
what you're saying.

> 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.
>
Ultimately I think the search engines are in the best position to
determine how best to accomplish the goal of helping people find the
resources they're looking for.  And I think it's a very open question
whether treating links from a wiki differently from links on a site
with more tightly controlled access, helps a search engine guide
people to high quality educational resources.

Of course if Wikipedia had the time and resources to dedicate to such
a problem, a better solution would be to have a relatively small group
of individuals go through and mark links as followable or not
followable (high quality educational resource, or spam) manually.  But
I don't think that's reasonable.

Maybe putting a time-delay on the attribute is a good enough
compromise.  I don't know.  IANA search engine guru.

> 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.
> [snip]
Sure, Wikipedia is great for that.  But I really don't see how that's
relevant to the nofollow tag, which is a tag for bots, and more
specifically search engine spiders, not humans.

> 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.
>
On this point I agree.  Maybe Google or one of the search engines
looking to compete with them would be willing to consider a better
tagging system.  <a href=blah type=wiki firstadded=20060501195702> or
somesuch.  "Nofollow" is definitely a poor terminology.  The tag
should describe the link, not try to dictate to search engines what to
do with it.

Anthony