Slashdot Mirror
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
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)
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
What Jimbo did was remove his previous objection to nofollow, rather than dictate its presence. Slight distinction.
http://rocknerd.co.uk