[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Mon May 1 17:29:25 UTC 2006

On 5/1/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hairsplitting? Okay, then let's say "almost all".

> 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...

Let's try it the other way around. Links (real ones, without nofollow)
are essential for the WWW. Does it comply with our goals to sabotage
the web, only because we're too lazy?

-- Arne (akl)