Andre Engels wrote:
Will it help? It only works when the spammers
think/know we have this
implemented. And it does also harm the 'valid' links that are created.
We hope it will help. It's one of those things that will only work well
if everyone participates, otherwise spammers will just continue to spam
every wiki because they couldn't be bothered checking which ones are
using this feature. That's why it's important that we enable this
feature by default.
This may reduce the usefulness of blogs and wikis as a means of ranking
sites, but they're not particularly useful as it is, because they are
easily spammed. Hopefully this initiative will improve the quality of
search rankings, allowing good sites to rise above the spam, rather than
harm that quality by ignoring useful information. The major search
engines obviously think it will.
Wikipedia has mirrors which will probably not implement this feature.
That reduces both the usefulness and side effects of this for us.
However most spam doesn't seem to be specifically targetted at us --
search google for a spam link you see on Wikipedia and you'll usually
get thousands of hits from wikis, blogs and guestbooks. Spam on
Wikipedia is usually cleaned up quickly, so the incentive for them to
target us is already questionable. The most important thing is that this
feature is implemented in MediaWiki by default, because that reduces the
incentive for them to spam everything with a <textarea>.
-- Tim Starling