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Wikipedia Adds No Follow to Links
netbuzz writes "In an attempt to thwart spammers and search-engine optimization mischief, Wikipedia has begun tagging all external links on its site "nofollow", which renders those links invisible to search engines. Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or simply unavoidable has become a matter of much debate." This topic has come up before and the community voted to remove nofollow back in 2005. This new round of nofollow comes as a directive from Wikia President, Jimbo Wales.
From TFA:
The situation is a classic tragedy of the commons: does the interest of malificent spammers outweigh Wikipedia's rôle as a semantic mediator between alien but related nodes?
Should Wikipedia transition to leaf from cut-point, it may have significant and unforeseen effects on internet-topology.
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
Slashdot has also added NoFollow to this article.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
"nofollow" only exists because Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a (at the time) brillant idea of ranking webpages according to how many sites linked back to it... and now that method of determining relevance is broken. Prior to this innovation, most search engines relied upon META tags... which also eventually broke. Google is where it is today because they recognized that the web had evolved past META tags (and other techniques of self-describing content).
My point is that the Internet as a whole souldn't be tripping over ourselves because Google's invention too is now obsolete. The "nofollow" attribute is just an ugly hack created to accommodate the frequently-gamed PageRank algorithm. We should instead find new ways to determine relevance. Hey, if your idea is good enough, you might even find yourself a billionaire someday too. Who knows, maybe the next wave will also wash away all those god-forsaken AdSense landing pages and domain squatters (oh please, oh please, oh please...).
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
RTFA - This only affects external links.
Your method of searching wikipedia through google is safe.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
While I don't necessarily disagree with the reinstatement of Wikipedia's nofollow policy, I do have to say one thing: Jimbo Wales is a tool.
Yesterday, after reading and noting glaring inconsistencies in the Wikipedia articles and talk pages for Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, and Jimbo Wales, as well as Jimbo Wales' user page, I have lost a bit of respect for Wikipedia and a lot more for one of its cofounders. I can't believe he's trying to manipulate his encyclopedia project this way!
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
How does the link="nofollow" attribute render links invisible to search engines? It's up to the search engines to ignore or to regard them.
If you don't want search engines to follow links on your website(s), you could rely on them to give you a proper agent string so that you can serve pages that don't include hyperlinks. But that's ugly nonetheless.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Nofollow doesn't work if you just put the URL directly in the text, and google will treat them more or less as links (to the site at least, though possibly not the path).
The way to fix this is with stable versions -- you don't let search engines see unstable versions at all. But having looked at the craptastic mediawiki codebase, I can sympathize with them not wanting to bother with adding such a major feature.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Since it can be edited by everybody, it is prone to abuse. Nip it in the bud!
On the other hand, the nofolow attribute doesn't take away anything from Wikipedia's semantic (and only relevant) value.
Ergo: No problemo!
How would it be unavoidable? They could have avoided it by...simply not doing it...couldn't they?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This won't solve the problem, since humans may still follow the links, so it's still worthwhile for spammers to have links in Wikipedia. Even if it doesn't up their pagerank, Wikipedia can still serve them as a spam delivery system.
However, it helps Google by not uping spammer's page rank. And less noise in the search results is good for the users of Google.
Loose lips lose spit.
Will Wikipedia face the same fate of the Open Directory Project -- where marketeers have spammed the site to render it useless. Check out the ZDNet post...
How about creating a new Google-style Ranking system that only ranks sites based on the number of no-follow links heading towards them?
If the sole purpose of nofollow is combatting wikispam, it's solving the wrong problem. The fact that spammers adding links to undesirable sites increases the search engine ranking of said sites is merely a symptom. The _problem_ is that spammers can add the links in the first place. Or, really, that anyone can add any undesireable content. The symptoms this problem causes are much wider than search engine gaming alone. Attacking the symptoms one by one, instead of solving the problem at its root, seems the wrong approach to me.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
which renders those links invisible to search engines.
Uh, not really. The big search engines choose to not follow those links.
Using nofollow reduces the incentive for spammers, but in this case it will hurt search engines. Google wants to provide the most worthy links at the top of search results. Being linked from wikipedia is supposed to denote reliable sources or very relevant information. Therefore Google is slightly more accurate for having those links to follow in wikipedia. The nofollow will make search engines slightly less useful.
Developers: We can use your help.
I don't think this would really affect your search strategy. Wikipedia gets a high score on pagerank because so many site link to it. What spammers etc. have done is then alter existing Wikipedia articles to add links to their own sites. Since Wikipedia has a high pagerank, any links out from Wikipedia will be higher rated than from many other websites. Altering Wikipedia pages in this way allows spammers, spoofers, phishers, etc to get their pages ranked higher on Google. These alterations were probably done in the links section on the bottom, so wouldn't be directly followed by people visiting Wikipedia. Making the link too visible would also make it more prone to reversion by a benevolent Wikipedia user.
I agree... when I want to look something up on Wikipedia I usually just do a Google search to find it if my initial search term doesn't come up with what I want. Chances are that it is a simple misspelling, as topics I am going to look up on Wikipedia are probably topics that I am not entirely familiar with. Google will then make suggestions based on it's vast knowledge (probably based on a dictionary created from crawling various web sites combined with data from what people followed from google after actually doing a search.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Speaking as a Wikipedia press volunteer, it's a goddamn nightmare keeping them separate in press perception. Because Jimbo is Mr Wikipedia, so even though Wikia is COMPLETELY UNASSOCIATED with Wikipedia, they keep conflating the two.
I ask that Slashdot not perpetuate this. Jimbo asked this as the founder of Wikipedia and the Final Authority on English Wikipedia, and Brion (the technical lead and Final Authority on MediaWiki) switched it on.
May I say also that we've been watching the spamming shitbags^W^WSEO experts bitch and whine about it, and it's deeply reassured us this was absolutely the right decision. We would ask Google to penalise links from Wikipedia, except the SEO experts^W^Wspamming shitbags would just try to fuck up each other's ranking by spamming their competitors.
To the spammers: I commend to you the wisdom of Saint Bill Hicks: "If you're a marketer, just kill yourself. Seriously."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I hear that. The number of times I've searched and the article titled with my exact search phrase comes in at 5th place astounds me. Of course, this is when search is actually working and they don't just redirect you to the 'try Google or Yahoo' page.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
This should be considered a step in an evolving policy. The next step should be that old links, ones that have survived many edits and time as well as links added or edited by known and trusted editors should omit the no-follow tag. Then wikipedia can continue to serve as an interpreter of the WWW.
I sent my spider to RTFA for me, don't tell me you do that yourself! How primative.
But it seems the link: all external links on its site "nofollow", had a no follow on it!
Mu ha ha ha... okay that is bad, where is my anonymous checkbox?
I don't think this will do much to stop Wikipedia link spamming for several reasons:
Many spam links on Wikipedia aren't commercially motivated spam, but just people who've naively put external links in articles without properly understanding or caring about the editing policy. They're not thinking so much about search engines as about pointing people to their website (or their favourite website) because they think it's more important than it probably is. If it's a relatively obscure article, it might stay there for months or longer before someone goes through and reviews the links.
Wikipedia is only one of the websites that publishes Wikipedia content. There are lots of other sources that clone it, precisely as they're allowed to under the licence, and re-publish it. They usually add advertising to the content, or use it to lure people to some other form of revenue. These sites are easy to find by picking a phrase from Wikipedia and keying it in to a search engine like Google, and I doubt they'll add the nofollow attribute to their reproductions of the content.
Wikipedia is probably treated as a more important source of links by search engines, but whatever's published on Wikipedia will be re-published in many other places within the weeks that it takes for the new content to be crawled and to propagate. And links on any Wikipedia articles will propagate too, of course.
Even if you ignore search engines, having external links from a well written Wikipedia article that gets referenced and read a lot is probably going to generate at least some traffic to a website. Wikipedia articles are often a good place to find good external sources, probably because they get audited and the crappy ones get removed from time to time. This is exactly what provides motivation for spammers to try and get their links added, though.
Good on them for trying something, but I don't think it'll stop spammers very much.
If this is of benefit to the search engine operators, then it should be simple enough for the search engine operators to follow or not follow external links from wikipedia, with or without NOFOLLOW. Wikipedia has a high enough profile that search engines already treat it differently from Average John's Incredibly Boring Blog, and they will know if it is of benefit for them to follow those links, without wikipedia putting some policy in place.
Wikipedia has begun tagging all external links on its site "nofollow"
Dude! it's called 'Labeling' now.
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
NOFOLLOW isn't something needed for all sites, only for those places where spammers will attempt to inject links.
And it's not a broken concept--Google still works, last I checked. The spammers will always be seeking new targets to harass. Google didn't start that, they just changed a few rules, and I don't expect spam to ever end, unless we start taking draconian measures to fight spam.
Yahoo Mindset lets you search for sites that are more commercial, or more informational. Sites with the most nofollow incoming links may fit into the "more commercial" group. (by the way, does anybody know how Mindset actually works?)
I think the article noted that the last time this came up for vote by the community, the community voted it down. I think it also notes that this is something that Jimbo Wales dictated, and not something that went through the normal community approval process.
Why?
Why would Wales simply dictate this change be made?
Because Wikipedia is a source of high-quality links. Editors have increasingly been making sure to put high-quality references in articles, mainly as links to other web sites. A single Wikipedia article can often contain links to the best websites related to that subject.
So ask yourself why would Wales want to make those links private, and no longer harvested by Google.
Is it that hard to figure out?
If you still don't know, then ask yourself what business Wales has announced that he wants to pursue with his new for profit company, Wikia?
Search Engines.
In the words of Paul Harvey, now you know the REST of the story.
Wikipedia does plenty to raise the search results of quality sites that are linked to. How? Increasing traffic by people interested in the topic at hand. If the page in question provides meaningful and interesting content, some of those people will link to it. There's no reason the large link count of the site should be wielded by anyone who wants to boost their search rating. I think this is probably the right decision. There's a big difference between not moving robots and not moving people.
This new round of nofollow comes as a directive from Wikia President, Jimbo Wales.
Anyone else find that as funny as I did?
SleepyHappyDoc added italics to his Slashdot post today. An unnamed source decryed this move as "unnecessary" and strongly implied that this action was not noteworthy. Film at eleven.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
To clarify - google's page rank algorithm doesn't care as much about who you link to, but who links to you. Therefore, this will only affect the page rank of the sites wikipedia was linking to, not the wikipedia pages themselves.
Wales' behavior may be an issue for Wikipedia. If the same person is involved with a profit-making venture and a nonprofit in the same area, the tax status of the nonprofit becomes questionable. When a US nonprofit files their tax return, they have to list any officers or directors involved with profit-making ventures in the same field.
The IRS is concerned because if you have a nonprofit and a for-profit organization under the same management, it's often possible to structure things so that the for-profit corporation shows a phony tax loss.
Besides that the nofollow attributes are only for external links, here is Wikipedia/Google/Firefox smart keywords magic.
e n.wikipedia.org&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky&meta=
Create this bookmark and assign a keyword to it (mine is 'w')
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%25s+site%3A
Now type "w einstein" in the address bar and you reach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
With practice, you'll be getting a positive hit almost all the time and the times you get a different article, the article you want is just one click away (which is how it is with the way you are doing it anyway)
On further reflection, this would be a means for wikipedia to communicate to search engines and browsers the trust level of link. A more general solution would be to introduce link signing. Allow people to create a "linker id" and a private linker key. They could then sign links with their id and a signature.
The search engines are then free to decide who they trust and how much. Link spammers should be obvious by making huge numbers of links to the same content. People who make consistently good links can be more trustworthy in the ranks.
The network infrastucture could be fairly simple. Use DNS for mapping the "linker id" to their key. That way any organization can allocate ids without stepping on each others toes.
It would be possible to keep a registry of each linker id's reputation, much like realitime spam block lists are kept now, but that would likely be a spot for gaming the system and other people whining that they were unjustly ranked. It would be better to just leave it up to each search engine to figure out who the good linkers in the world are and adjust them accordingly.
Given the spammers are stupid and will probably still spam places with NOFOLLOW links, I wonder if this wouldn't be a useful way to tag worthless spam sites?
(At the moment, the thing MediaWiki most lacks is good coders - people who can do database programming to a MySQL database in PHP, efficiently enough to run a top-10 website which is nonprofit and hence broke by definition. CODERS WANTED!)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
... is here; they seem to be concerned about a "search engine optimization world championship".
Personally I think we can all do our bit and stop linking to Wikipedia so much, because Google is starting to give the impression that Wikipedia is the fount of all knowledge - to the detriment of pages which contain better information but which don't happen to have WP's massive net presence.
Your totally right about the reduction in inventive for spammers and that it's a somewhat odd choice for Wikipedia to make.
Why not let search providers be responsible for their own results? It is ultimately their choice how they let links from wikipedia.com domains influence their results, nofollow or otherwise. This is like an admission that the community can't handle the spam and is surrendering; and that won't work anyway.
Some search engines give extra weight to wikipedia links. Wikiseek.com results start with wikipedia pages and works down. They're unlikely to honor nofollow links.
Wouldn't a better approach be to figure out the average longevity of a spam link on the site, and tag links with 'nofollow' for slightly longer than that period of time? After that they can remove the 'nofollow' because, presumably, if it was spam the link would have been removed already.
For example, auto-add the "nofollow" only to the links added in recent edits (for some definition of recent). Once a particular link was part of the page long enough (and survived other people's edits), it can be followed by the search engines...
I, for one, contributed a number of wild-life pictures to Wikipedia, but am also selling them in my own shop. I don't think, it is unfair for me to expect links to my shop from the contributed images to be followed...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
User Norm from Wikipedia is the vandal Willy on Wheels!
I put on nofollow on my blog some time ago, and there is a simple turing test to post comments, and it explains to people that links in the comments will not be counted by search engines like Google.
They still try to comment spam. And not simply spams where they hope people will click on the links. They just are pretty thick, and never stop doing something once they heard it was useful.
So it will be several years before the spammers back off due to nofollow.
Nofollow, in effect says, "This link was not approved by the owners of this site." That doesn't always mean it's not a valid link, and in fact there are tons of user generated links that are totally valid.
Wikipedia, however, should consider not putting nofollow onto links which have received some vetting by somebody with appropriate cred, though admittedly they try to keep their set of users will privileges very small so this may not be enough.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
In other news Slashdot is now part of the Wikimedia Foundation.
I'm not quite sure this "no follow" evolution is so dramatic...
:)
Afterall, what's really important are the INBOUND Wikipedia links. I really like to see Wikipedia results ranked first, especially for one-word queries. From there, one can follow the Wikipedia links.
In other words, it's fine for me if Google links to the combined authority-hub system Wikipedia has become. The rest is up to me.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
As the Wikipedia dev said in the linked e-mail, anyone that wants to help Wikipedia reward good, informative sites without the risk of abuse of Wikipedia with linkspam is quite welcome to help. If somebody wanted to help them out by writing "better heuristic and manual flagging tools", they would appreciate that and this issue would be resolved in the best way.
I think Wikipedia's decision to "no-follow" their links is quite reasonable. The Internet has seen enough of the manipulators and astroturfers who try their best to distract us, and it shows the worthiness of the Wiki leadership that they'd take this step.
The notion that the Internet is going to organically solve such problems smacks of the magic "free-market" economics that are supposed to make the world a paradise, but end up tilting the field in favor of the most powerful. There is no magic that's going to keep the Internet free. If it's going to stay viable it's only going to do so with careful management by some wise and generous souls. I count the Wikifolk as wise and generous, until they do something to warrant a reevaluation.
And I second the emotion that spun has been just such a wise and generous voice here at Slashdot
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem with your statement is that operators of so-called "small websites" - i.e., non-notable ones - attempt to list their sites on Wikipedia in an effort to become notable. Talk about advertorializing - and talk about putting the cart before the horse. Make your website noteworthy on its own merits, and then come to Wikipedia to write about it.
Why is this only a bad thing? Why not change things to nofollow for now to recognize that there IS in fact a problem, and challenge the folks who're complaining to come up with a solution? If they actually care, they will.
If you want reliable source material look elsewhere, if you want an exorbitant quantity of information, Wikipedia has that. It's the quick and dirty resource for people who might just need to know a few things about a subject without having to fact check and such. That's what it should be treated as. The fact that non-experts are allowed to edit entries is what made it grow to be the resource it is today.
Maybe we should be calling it the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"????
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Dude, you're grasping at straws. That system would be exploited by the spammers the minute it goes online. You need a way of measuring authority, not a way of measuring mass-approval. I can't send 1000 mails a day. A spammer can send millions of mails a day. In that kind of world, any scheme which relies on counting votes without real-life identification is doomed.
Thanks. You explained the 'ugly' part of the solution. I did not think of that. What would you say does 'significantly different content' mean in this context? Should a search engine penalize web sites that strip out links (and only that)?
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Wikipedia's purpose is not to be a web directory, but to be an encyclopedia and it describes things that are notable enough to have an impact on the world. Your "small websites" certainly don't.
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
Many thanks for the tip, but verbum sapienti: I find I have to replace the %25 and the %3A with a % and a : respectively.
Because all the major search engines have agreed to respect "nofollow". In other words, it works the same way robots.txt does.
Read my blog.
The only site on the net that links to mine and gives me a couple of drops of sweet, sweet Google love, and they're going to shut me off. :(
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
I think being served a "no links" page could be seen as significant since it could be used for bad as well as good i.e. getting the good content indexed by the search engine, but when a user goes to the page they get a page full of spam links.
To be honest I'm not sure what algorithms are used (and I'd expect them to be proprietary to prevent people working around them) but I'm sure I've read of sites trying to subvert search engines by serving them different content, and then the search engines discovering this. But thinking about it some more maybe that's changed with sites becoming more dynamic and changing their content very frequently, or indeed with sites using lots of client-side script to partially/fully rewrite their own content (e.g. those Intellitxt links that underline half the words on a page.)
No, that was taken by another collaborative web encyclopedia.
IMHO this is part of what's wrong with Wikipedia. They claim to be open to all and to have a community, deciding many things by consensus.
Except when Jimbo, or another well-known admin overrules everyone else.
They've even sneakily formalized this policy in renaming Votes for deletion to Articles for deletion, suggesting that while a discussion can take place about an article's fate, it can generally be ignored if an admin (typically the one placing it up for deletion) disagrees.
There's some interesting information over at WikiTruth about this (like everything else, taken with a grain of salt; there's some obvious bias there).
Anyway, I personally believe this is a bad thing for the overall health of the internet. Wikipedia is a huge site. Making it irrelevant to search engines will probably affect Google quite a lot, and give a *huge* boost to whoever figures out how to get around the nofollow restriction.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Actually, that could be very interesting. Perhaps someone could propose a standard prefix or something along those lines which can't happen easily without being intentional, and flags the link as 'this is a crap link' so that there is a counterbalance to inbound link ranking? This should work in plaintext as well, in fact be part of the contents of the ie: thisbit.
It certainly would change the shape of the spamdexing scenario because people could then counter-attack by deranking their enemies, and I for one like the idea of being able to post a link that is detected as being a link to a site I don't like, since at present even mentioning a link no matter what your opinion about it is, adds something to pagerank, even if it's trivial, that still amounts to a contribution to their place on google that they don't deserve. Admittedly one has to note that bad linked sites will get a lot of other nasty terms linked to them but not only, and at present google has no way of determining what the reputation value of a link is with a simple textual statistical breakdown. Users should be able to add a robot-readable significator of despising.
Then which wiki is intended as a web directory?
I am exhausted. The first 5 comments where all +5 interesting or insightful. I didn't get a troll, link spam or random offtopic rant to catch my breath on.
/. might get a reputation as a place for on-topic discussion about technology.
Somebody needs to ban these people. If this trend continues, then
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Supposedly - Wikipedia already *has* a cast iron defense against spammers. Supposedly - Wikipedia articles are defended by hordes of users ready to correct errors and vandalism within seconds or minutes of it happening.
This is a tacit admission that Wikipedia's immune system is failing. Wikipedia is no longer able to defend itself.
It's also fascinating that the community (supposedly part of the heart and soul of the Wikipedia) can be overridden by dictate.
Actually the situation you're describing gets dangerously close to Wikipedia's prohibition of "original research." If you wrote an article, whether for the Journal of Applied Physics or the New York Times, you probably should not use it as a source while editing Wikipedia. Someone else could use it as a source, or you could go into the discussion page and suggest that it be used as a source, but adding information to the article itself and then providing your own article as a reference, strikes me as a conflict of interest.
Otherwise, everyone and their cousin who's ever had a paper published on anything, would be editing their point of view into Wikipedia and using their own research to back up their edits. While that might be interesting, and appropriate for another kind of Wiki (say a wiki dedicated to new findings in that particular subject), it's not in Wikipedia.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you are only interested in pages within wikipedia, using the site:wikipedia.org or site:en.wikipedia.org will guarantee that all of your results land in the wiki, not a page discussing your topic and wikipedia.
p edia.org
Ex. If entered in the address bar your url would look like:
http://www.google.com/search?q=slashdot+site:wiki
So why not just eliminate them completely in the first place thus saving time and aggravation for all parties?
Because having external links in WP articles is helpful to readers of said articles.
If I go to a Wikipedia article on a particular subject, I expect a general overview of the topic, with some links that I can follow if I want more in-depth or primary-source information. This isn't a new concept, it's the same kind of thing you'd find in the back of any non-fiction book, usually called "Further Reading."
I think adding 'nofollow' is the solution here. It just takes WP out of the PageRank game. Having your site linked to in Wikipedia doesn't help your rank, but it doesn't hurt it either. It makes sense: why should a link that anyone can add be worth anything? It shouldn't. In that same vein, it shouldn't be worth a negative value either, because otherwise you could suppress a site's PageRank at will, just by creating WP links to it. Both positive and negative values would create an incentive to linkspam. A value of zero doesn't, and thus seems like a fairly safe path to take.
If an article in Wikipedia benefits by having an external link to some site, then the link ought to be there; "what makes the article better" ought to be the only motivation anyone should have for adding links. The closer WP and Google can get to that, the better.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The goal has nothing to do with spammer/"search engine optimizers"; the goal is to make it so that Wikipedia doesn't give anyone else a bump in search engine rankings.
Wikipedia's already a gigantic linkfarm inside itself, and why Google somehow doesn't treat its links like every other linkfarm is something of a mystery. By not "reciprocating" the goodness (giving credence to a linked site on, say, breast cancer by their own link) they can ensure that the Wikipedia site on a given search is that much more likely to be the #1 search, rather than - say - a major hospital's cancer research center or a dedicated cancer information site.
That way, Jimbob gets that much more money when he institutes ads this summer, too.
So? I keep seeing this argument repeated and I don't know why it matters. Did Jimbo Wales have the moral responsibility to turn over the reins to the community when he started the encyclopedia? And did you do anything towards starting a community-edited encyclopedia?
Just as a clarification, in addition to what was already said: the tragedy of the commons is _not_ a generic wildcard for any tragedy in any kind of communal resource.
The essay is on a very specific scenario: over-utilization of an unmanaged resource.
The original example was this: you have an unmanaged piece of grassland, where all the villagers can bring their cows to graze. For each of the individual farmers, adding one more cow means more profits. Unfortunately the same applies to everyone, so everyone will keep adding just one more cow until that pasture can't possibly support them all and is even over-grazed into uselessness. Essentially the incentive is there for a course of action which will be very detrimental in the long run, but in the short run the pressure is to stay the course and keep doing it.
Real tragedies of the commons do spring in all sorts of places, some even in the last places you'd expect to find them. But some tragedies are an entirely different scenario. Again, "tragedy of the commons" is _not_ a generic all-size-fits-all wildcard for any tragedy on any common resource. If a resource is managed to start with, it's pretty much by definition not a tragedy of the commons. If it's not possible to "overgraze"/saturate it, it's also not a tragedy of the commons.
That's not to say it can't be a tragedy anyway, but then it's another kind of tragedy altogether. Lumping everything together in the same "tragedy of the commons" pot, is about as useful as starting calling all car malfunctions a "transmission problem" or starting caling all diseases "flu".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Did Jimbo Wales have the moral responsibility to turn over the reins to the community
When you claim that WP is a community-driven encyclopedia, it is immoral to overrule the community. He didn't have to pretend that WP is a democracy, but he did, so he should practice what he preaches.
This is a serious and important issue, and needs to be explored.
Sure, unspamming a search engine is a serious offence! :)
I've just hacked up a quick plugin that adds rel nofollow to all Wikipedia links!
Mainly because that was the suggestion I was going to make. ;) (Basically make new or recently edited external links nofollow until either a decent amount of time has passed or they're vetted by a trusted admin.)
I wash mah-self with a rag on a stick.
When you claim that WP is a community-driven encyclopedia
He claimed it is a community-written encyclopedia. There's a difference.
it is immoral to overrule the community.
Which community? The few dozen active people or the ten thousands of contributors?
And you are free to fork Wikipedia and make one that defers to the community more. And forking Free projects certainly works; EGCS is the most notable example. X.org is the second. If the community (as opposed to a few vocal whiners) wants changes, they will leave and go elsewhere if it offers them something better.
He didn't have to pretend that WP is a democracy, but he did
He did not. He claimed it was run by consensus. He was calld "benevolent dictator" often and "god-king" occasionally, in the early days of the project.
The situation is a classic tragedy of the commons: does the interest of malificent spammers outweigh Wikipedia's rôle as a semantic mediator between alien but related nodes?
What pretentious bull.
"malificent"...? "rôle"...? "semantic mediator between alien but related nodes"...? This has to be one of the most annoying, pedantic, self-impressed posts ever on slashdot - and that's really saying something. Oh, and I forgot nauseating.
Matt Cutts, Google's link spam expert, supports the decision:
"for the present, I think it's the right call: the incentive to create spammy links on Wikipedia has been massively reduced"
Take a look at wikipedia pages, you will not find any "nofollow" external links.
I'm surprised no one actually checked. This entire discussion is moot.
There's already one Wikipedia based search engine up or proposed http://wikiseek.com/ - obviously they aren't going to honor the no-follow rule or they're out of business. The all-no-follow move will only make this new engine more popular. It might even put it over the top, fast.
Wikipedia is so big and so popular (pagerank 8, relevant to almost every query) that even the fact that some people will learn of links there, making its links indirectly valuable, is more than enough to keep the spammers happy. All-No-Follow will not significantly reduce spam there, or not for long. Sorry. Better, would be for Wikipedia to use No-Follow only for all new links that haven't been checked by a more trusted user/editor. I ain't saying perfect, just better. Even better, let trusted sites like Wikipedia tag links as spam (after commenting them to make them invisible), so that Google can then ruthlessly ignore similar links wherever they appear. That might actually scare spammers away, since they would know Wikipedia and other trusted sites could hit back - hard.
Think about it - if the simple All-No-Follow worked and Wikipedia became much freer of spam links than the rest of the web, then Wikipedia would by the same token become simply irresistible as a source of reliable information to competitive or up-and-coming Search Engines - which as they gain customers due to their higher quality of search results, again makes Wikipedia a premier place to spam, with or without "no-follow" links. Unless we dump capitalism entirely, uniformly using No-Follow can't work for Wikipedia the way it might for smaller sites. A modest reduction is the very most Wikipedia can hope for, and the downside to All-No-Follow is that their present massive positive contribution to my searches and yours is lost forever. Not good!
In this way - "If it works, it doesn't" - the all-no-follow policy reminds me of one of the most popular, and hilarious invention submissions to the USPO before computers existed - the automatic car headlight dimmer. Everyone and his dog had the brilliant idea that a photocell detecting an oncoming car's headlights could automatically dim your headlights. But now... imagine two cars with this feature approaching each other! Strobe city! The re-invention of the electric doorbell! Funny, and a little ironic perhaps, since with computers we can do this much now, given that spam isn't a problem with headlights... yet. (I'm just waiting for the first headlight virus.) It seems that some things seem like a great idea until you've thought about it a little more...
Re other replies (and they're good ones):
As for Hardin, and the commons, this sort of applies, even though most medieval grazers were not grievously abusive in those days. The problem was everybody, not a few freeloaders. Still it's well worth mentioning, mostly cause it's cool and important, even if it doesn't fit quite exactly. Perhaps generations from now our descendants won't bother talking about the "Tragedy of the Commons" anymore, they'll just refer to "The Tragedy of the Web!"
The take-away lesson is that this is a struggle - or as an essay on Occam's Razor at http://logictutorial.com/ says, a "contested system." So things will never be simple, and no one rule or method will remain sovereign. That having been said, however:
Metatags are still used by the big search engines - only now more for priority of terms than mere mention, and in effect, as negative information. For example, if you don't think, say, "heatstoke" is among the most relevant terms on your page, believe me, Google is going to take your word for that.
As for Google's recursive insight (or re-application of old algorithms) it won't die, but it is certainly showing it's age. The new, more active and chatty kid on the block is taking over; but since it won't benefit the world (or my future searches) to discuss what Yahoo and Google are doing now, I won't elaborate. "First do no harm."
I totally agree with the ideas expressed in this post. There's no reason why MediaWiki software could not be updated to determine what links can reasonably be trusted.
Beyond this, I'm certain that Google could easily (and I mean **easily**) ignore "nofollow" on links in the Wikipedia sites. It would certainly be a very minor tweak to their spidering/ranking software. I would even encourage Google and other search engines to work against what Wikipedia is doing. It's anti-community and anti-web.
I say all this as three-year editor on Wikipedia. The spamming isn't *that* bad.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist