[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Mon May 1 16:36:22 UTC 2006

On 5/1/06, Arne Klempert <klempert at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 ;)

No one is proposing all our externals be nofollowed. Only ones
submitted by users.

But when talking about gains in readership, ... we get more by simply
failing to do a good job (i.e. incorrect bioagraphies) ...  So to that
extent, I can agree with you: perhaps no follow will bring us lots of
attention some day, when the actions of some spammer end up causing
the next media-blitz. :)

But really, what is the goal of Wikipedia?  It is to make a free
content encyclopedia.  It is not to be most popular website, or even
the most read encyclopedia. It's not to help SEOs or search engines...

> > 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.

Yes, it's not a complete solution.. no one suggested that.  De Wiki's
external density is 1/2 that of enwiki (De has an average of 1.3409
externals per article, while en has 2.4671 externals per article).