[WikiEN-l] Re: Nofollow vote results on en.wikipedia

Sat Mar 5 23:54:07 UTC 2005

Tony Sidaway wrote:

> Absolutely not. We do things by consensus of en.wikipedia.

I completely agree with you. Consensus is entirely needed on such
important policy issues. That is exactly why nofollow should be
removed, following the debate and vote that was held. Implementing
nofollow was a big change in how wikipedia interacts with the outside
world and it was implemented in January without any debate
whatsoever, let alone consensus. The debate and vote on en.wikipedia
over this essentially endorsed the status quo prior to the unilateral
change. The vote was the first time the community had been asked
regarding the new implementation.

In the future, such software features "delay action" may be possible,
to allow editors to remove spamlinks. The issue at hand, however, is
how to proceed in the meantime. There was clearly no consensus to
change the policy of wikipedia that had existed for four years prior
to the unilateral change. On the contrary, the implementation of "no
follow" was supported by only a minority of users (39%) who voted.