On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:57:02 -0600, Kevin Puetz <puetzk(a)puetzk.org> wrote:
The best proposal I've seen so far is to apply it
to all recently-modified
pages (with 'recent' determined per project by how fast you think the
editors will get it cleaned up - probably a day or so is reasonable). That
assumes that it will get cleaned up before the timeout expires, and
prevents it from being visible to a robot in the interim. But links that
survive for a while still become rankable. And it's fairly simple, unlike
tracking, per-link, whether or not it has been verified.
Although this *seems* simple, the database request needed to determine
"how old is this page" is not, I suspect, a quick one, and server
effeciency is a *BIG* issue with the Wikimedia sites. Add to that the
complications to do with the cache - the simplest solution might be to
block "nofollow" pages from being cached at all, which is an
additional waste - and it begins to look like an imbalanced
compromise. It would be better to determine more precise circumstances
under which the attributes are appropriate, and at least the costs
would be well spent.
Personally, I think a combination with new validation or edit patrol
features would be a better route to go down - if a state could easily
be associated with the article to say "this version has been approved
by a trusted user", that would seem a good criterion for removing the
"nofollow"s. Of course, you still get some cache awkwardness, but
unlike "age of this version", the software could explicitly purge the
cache when the approved status changed (since someone would have done
that action), so you could have the version with the "nofollow"s in
cached until that happened. So you get less cost, and a better match
with the general intentions.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]