[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Mon May 1 14:11:45 UTC 2006

On 5/1/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> But isn't that a "they did it so I will" argument that we all rv over the
> whole of WP already? If we are serious about sorting some of our problems
> - and over-use of external links is but one of those - then we need to
> start somewhere and put downa marker that we are dealing with the issue.
> We ahve to start somewhere ...

True. I remain unconvinced that indiscriminate use of the nofollow tag
is the best way to do that, though. "If all you have in a hammer,
everything looks like a nail." If all you have is a spam blacklist and
a nofollow option .. I think Gregory's systematic queries point in the
direction of the right solution. Perhaps a few new special pages could
help us deal with external link issues more systematically. Hmm .. I
think this is a job for Magnus or Rob! ;-)

Erik