On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 11:54:12 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
Therefore, it seems best to me if nofollow is on by
default in the
software distribution (since most small wikis are victimized by spam)
and that nofollow is turned off in all the busy wikipedia sites.
I didn't take part in the original vote, since it was a very scattered
discussion and a simple "nofollow v. no nofollow" choice was hard to
make; but the above sounds like a fair short-term compromise.
It would also be great for editors to have the option of forcing
"nofollow" for a link
(and for setting other attribs like "title").
Wikipedia provides an enormously high value set of
hints to search
engines to help them find sites that don't suck.
In the longer term, we should start treating external links, and other
bibliography entries and references, like first-class citizens -- with
their own discussion pages, watchlist entries, and attributes.
A reference is a lot more than just another sentence in a 10k article.
It forms part of the core of a good encyclopedia -- doubly so for one
which prides itself on not hand-picking its editors. References
should have histories, should become more precise over time (which
edition of that book? on what date was that website visited [and
where's the permalink to it via the Internet Archive]? what do other
people say about this reference? is this advertising? zealotry?
spam?), should give off more of a signal when added, modified, or
deleted. When a link changes (as most of the web does), all uses of
that reference should change as well.
Perhaps we could design a system where there is a 'right' way to
insert or call an external URL, so that a URL that is just pasted in
would have ref=nofollow, but one which is called correctly (and has
its own discussion space and history somewhere) would not.
I will write something about this at [[m:References]], once the wiki
is back up...
--
+sj+