[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Mon May 1 15:24:58 UTC 2006

On 5/1/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> ok. Let me come at this from the other direction then! What *benefit* does
> it do the Wikipedia and WMF projects to supply 'free' link value to other
> sites.

If you take a look back in history, Wikipedia benefited (and still
benefits) extremely from links and their impact on our PageRank. So it
might be a little bit unfair to add nofollow tags to *all* of our
links, just because it seems to be a simple solution to one of our
many problems. The world wide web is not a one-way street ;)

> It doesn't help us sfaict, indeed it probably harms us as we can be
> seen as detrimental to the quality of search engine results as we - in
> effect - promote spam and other sites.

This might be true, but only if there are more bad links than good
ones. Without having counted them, I'm sure that this is not the case.

Btw, the German Wikipedia still has to deal with link spammers, even
though nofollow is activated.

-- Arne (akl)