[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Mon May 1 17:41:18 UTC 2006

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

A little, but not really...  You talk about Wikipedia benefiting from
links, but most of the places places who link to us have linked to us
because the site operator has deemed Wikipedia to be useful.

This isn't the same as our links.

> > 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?

Oh, are you part of the misinformed who participated in the prior vote
on this thinking that setting no follow makes links useless?

In any case, sabotage is a very strong word. Can you provide evidence
that doing so would sabotage the web?  Or is this just random
conjecture?     I think that nofollowing on Wikipedia will actually
improve search results, but I can't support that with concrete
evidence. What I can say with confidence and back with evidence is
that nofollow will reduce the incentive to spam, it will mostly
eliminate some sources of spam, that it with not impact the search
rankings of already popular sites, and that it will reduce distrust on
enwiki to some extent.