[Wikipedia-l] Parasitic behaviour. We loose more than money by it.

Mon Apr 12 03:01:35 UTC 2004

ErikZ-
> Could we not strike a deal with Google similar to the one with Yahoo by
> which Google favours the original content instead of outdated copies, should
> be in their interest too.

That seems like the most reasonable course of action. Note, however, that  
Google is notoriously unresponsive to any queries regarding search result  
ranking (and who could blame them). Taking this from the bottom up could  
be difficult. Do we have anyone who has contacts to reasonably high level  
Google personnel? Has anyone at Google ever said something about  
Wikipedia?

There are other options aside from downranking Wikipedia mirrors. Google  
does have a deal with reference.com, whereby when you enter a word like  
"elephant", it provides a link to a dictionary [definition]. I'm not sure  
if reference.com pays them for that, and if so, how much. I could imagine  
a similar link [encyclopedia article] for searches which match Wikipedia  
titles.

We do need to enforce the FDL requirements more systematically.  
phatnav.com, for example, leeches our images, but does *not* provide a  
backlink to Wikipedia articles and even calls itself "a Wikipedia". This  
is a violation of the FDL and of our trademark.

While these mirrors do hurt our rank, they have the effect of getting  
multiple Wikipedia articles into many search queries. I hope this will not  
be perceived as search engine spamming.

Regards,

Erik