On 18 November 2013 11:47, Gabriel Wicke gwicke@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 11/17/2013 03:41 AM, Nathan Larson wrote:
Following the mediawiki-l discussion<
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2013-November/042038.html
about $wgNoFollowLinks and various other discussions, in which some discontent was expressed with the current two options of either applying
or
not applying nofollow to all external links, I wanted to see what support there might be for applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled (bug 42599https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42599 ).
Google and probably other search engines have a custom rule to ignore rel=nofollow in MediaWiki-powered wikis. It seems that our external links are too high quality to pass up. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52617.
Oh dear. This becomes a philosophical versus practical discussion. Practically, we have nowhere near enough spam-fighters to keep just the obvious spam off our projects, let alone the not-as-obvious spam.
People keep mixing up English Wikipedia (with thousands of active editors, many of whom do nothing but page patrolling) with the rest of the Wikimedia projects, many of which have only a handful of active editors, who then get stuck having to choose between spam-fighting or adding content. Software decisions should not be made based on the assumption that some editor somewhere will clean up the problems.
Given the ease by which all Mediawiki wikis can be infiltrated by useless and spam links, and the particular ease by which most Wikimedia wikis can be infiltrated, Google's pretty badly polluting their pageranks if they're given links to Wikimedia projects any significant rank.
To be honest, I suspect if the Google fellow said anything like this, it was that they might ignore nofollow on Wikimedia wikis, but I'm pretty certain that he didn't say Mediawiki wikis. There are thousands and thousands of them out there that have been completely abandoned to spam.
Risker