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.

Comments

Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology

[DiamondGeezer]

I'm sick and tired of this particular beef with wikipedia. Just because you can't quote wikipedia in your thesis for your doctorate doesn't mean its useless. 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.

I love this. Let me translate: "Never mind the quality, feel the width" or "Never mind the stench, the answer's in the cesspit somewhere"

There appears to be a neverending conveyorbelt of excuses for Wikipedia's acute failure to be authoritative or reliable. We get this on slashdot all the time, and it still stinks.

Let me make it clear - if Wikipedia is not reliable, but full of half-truths and errors, then its not simply useless, it's potentially dangerous. An information resource that is unreliable as history IS PROPAGANDA.

Let's see if the special pleading continues...

If some of the information is inaccurate, so what? It's not like heart surgeons are looking up how to conduct an operation on Wikipedia. People need to stop beating on its potential for inaccuracy and instead see it as what it is, a great resource for learning about topics or at least a starting point given no other resources. The Internet as a whole tends to have a large amount of inaccurate information, but that doesn't make the Internet useless. The quantity of information largely and fully outweighs the risk of inaccuracy. Everything has inaccuracies anyway, and Wikipedia's usefulness makes any mistakes it has well worth the benefit of having it versus not having it. It's a mighty powerful resource, and I'm tired of hearing it bashed just because some random vandal could and sometimes does screw up a few entries (even though they are usually fixed in a pretty timely manner). It's an online resource, take it for what it is and quit bitching about how one entry out of 10,000 is inaccurate, and just be thankful you have the 10,000 entries. Or better yet, just don't use it if you find it offensive.

You have no idea whether 1 out of 10,000 is inaccurate or 1 in 100 or 1 in 2. You have no idea whether the article has just been vandalized or whether key information is missing. I'm willing to bet that you don't expect surgeons make the same excuses that their work is generally acccurate apart from occasional slips which kill patients, or your college textbooks to have key formulae wrong after someone at the printers decided to improve an equation for the good of Mankind. It's the special pleading for Wikipedia that amazes me.

And no-one is responsible. That's the tragedy of the Wikipedia commons. The good work by some is undone by the ignorant majority.

I'd rather have an encyclopedia of one completely accurate, scholarly, well-written and complete article than a million articles written by ignoramuses. That's where I beg to differ.