Recently an open vote was held on the English wikipedia regarding
whether or not to use the 'rel="nofollow"' attribute in external
links. As many of you know, the attribute was recently created by
google as a possible means of controlling spam. As you know, use of
the attribute is controlled by a boolean flag in the MediaWiki
software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Nofollow
Following the advice of the developers, community vote was set up. It
was open for two weeks and had spirited debate about the use of
"nofollow". The result of the vote was
Remove "nofollow" -- 61% (85 votes)
Keep "nofollow" -- 39% (55 votes)
A strong majority of the voters would prefer that the attribute be
removed for the English Wikipedia.
I'm reporting this knowing that it's up the developers to implement
the will of the community. I know there is support among some the
developers for the continued use of this attribute on all the
wikimedia projects, but those of us who voted on the English
wikipedia did so in the belief that the decision in this case was up
to the community. As such, this is not meant as a discussion of the
attribute itself, only a notification fo the community decision for
the english wikipedia.
I've personally gotten ambiguous and imcomplete feedback from the
user who set up the vote, so I hope this can clear things up. As I
side note, some of the 'keep' voters expressed the desire to see the
attribute removed if the software could parse external links based on
an aging process. I know that since the software does not record
external links separately, this would be probably be a rather complex
modification of the code that would be a long time in development,
given other priorities. In the meantime, however, a strong majority
of the voters have voted "remove".
Best wishes and with great respect for your efforts,
Matthew Trump