[Foundation-l] WMF as publisher as in GFDL

Wed Dec 8 06:12:36 UTC 2004

Tim was relaying speculation of mine. Two of Google's problems are marketing companies which use very similar affiliate sites linked to a parent company and companies which use real content with marketing junk added, using the key words in the real content to artificially raise ranks. Again, such things commonly point to a master site somewhere.

It's speculation as to whether this has tripped Google filters in some way or not. There are alternative possible reasons in many cases, with some mirrors providing more internal links and possibly spreading rank around within their site better. Some simply offer nicer or more features.

Personally, I think that it is a factor, but only Google knows.

I'm not keen on any great attempts to interpret the GFDL. It's best left as close to that document and nothing else as possible, to avoid the possibility of arguments and upset if an interpretation proves to be wrong or someone argues that some particular interpretation is an implied contract of some sort. This is close to the approach taken by MySQL, which the head of the company says deliberately avoids trying to interpret what the GPL means when applied to their software.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 13:04:00 +1100
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] WMF as publisher as in GFDL

> Wikipedia's policy (not Wikimedia's) has been to coerce mirrors and
> forks into providing a link back by huffing and puffing about license
> violations, even though a link back is not required by the license. All
> you need to do to fulfill 4-I is create a "History" section like this:
> 
> HISTORY
>     * Some Mirror, 2004, John Copier, http://somemirror.org
>     * Wikipedia, 2000-2002, Wikipedia contributors, http://www.wikipedia.org
>     * Marxists Internet Archive, 2002, MIA volunteers,
> http://www.marxists.org
>     * Nupedia, 2000-2001, Nupedia contributors, http://www.nupedia.org
> (see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia for a list of articles this applies to)
> 
> That's taken from [[Wikipedia:GFDL History (unofficial)]]. Since it's
> unofficial, you could assume it doesn't exist and just start your own
> section, omitting the 3rd and 4th entries.
> 
> Wikimedia doesn't have any policy on this. The link back policy appears
> to have destroyed our Google ranking, triggering spam heuristics. In
> many cases we are ranked below the mirrors. This has forced Google to
> consider a change to their ranking algorithm.

what? sorry, why has the link back destroyed our ranking? isnt it that
the more places that link to us the better our rating, and also what
do you mean by spam heuristics? Why are we ranked below our mirrors?

gah, im confused,

paz y amor,
rjs

-- 
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