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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.
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
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
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
So, to recap:
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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)
You are a fool if you think that the stupidity stops there: When Wikipedia gives sysop priviliages to batshit insane people like this guy, and he somehow managed to keep said privilages for as long as he did (the only reason he lost said priviliages is because he picked a fight with another abusive admin), you know that there is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia.
Now if only someone can unprotect this article...
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Actually, nofollow predates Google. It dates back to at least HTML 2.0, so sometime around '94 or so. Google launched in 1998. It's original intent really was nofollow, not the 'don't index' that Google and some other engines mutated it into, which is what turned it into the ugly hack that you described it as.
I don't really subscribe to the Google==Good viewpoint commonly seen on Slashdot. I'm not saying Google==Evil, just that very little in this world is an unalloyed good, and that very much applies to Google. Most of my reasons are off-topic, but a bit of it is also abusing a standard for a temporary corporate gain. This is especially egregious when done by players who are so large that the original intent of a standard is completely lost. Which clearly is the case here.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
I'd really hate to be at google at the moment. Search results will be doing really funny things in the next month or so.
This is why I feel that Google needs to provide multiple indexing algorithms, where a user can decide how pages are ranked in their search results. This would make things a bit more complicated for Google, but even more complicated for the people try target deficiencies in the algorithm. The idea being if there are multiple algorithms, it is hard to know which one to target.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What Jimbo did was remove his previous objection to nofollow, rather than dictate its presence. Slight distinction.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.