[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

Tue May 2 00:56:55 UTC 2006

On 5/1/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> My personal opinion is that /currently/ I think nofollow has merit; I
> think we're extremely bad at handling linkspamming and website
> promotion in Wikipedia, and thus reducing the benefit might help.
>
> However, if we became better at keeping track of what Wikipedia links
> to and getting rid of spam, I'd support turning nofollow off.
>
> What would be useful steps to take to keep better track of these?  Is
> there anything that can be done in software?  Or procedure/process?
> External applications?

I've ductaped curl to spamassassin and can now rate the spammyness of
websites. :) Now I just need to replace all the email header centric
SA rules with web centric ones.

Because there are ~2,800,000 external links from the main namespace
alone on enwiki (there is now a patch to mediawiki to set nofollow per
namespace, I think no matter what we should nofollow outside the main
ns), I see automated scanning as the only reasonable step right now to
improve our link quality.

So I'm working on it..