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

Wikipedia and Internet-Topology

[P(0)(!P(k) P(k 1))]

From TFA:

Although the no-follow move is certainly understandable from a spam-fighting perspective, it turns Wikipedia into something of a black hole on the Net. It sucks up vast quantities of link energy but never releases any.

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.

Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology

[spun]

Read the wiki article you link to. The tragedy of the commons only applies to unmanaged resources. Wikipedia is a communally managed resource, so the analogy is less than apt. Your speculation regarding the impact of a no-follow wiki on the rest of the Internet is interesting, though.

I bring up the point about the Tragedy of the Commons because the parable has been used as an excuse to privatize communally managed resources, when such resources do not fall prey to the Tragedy. Reasoning such as yours could be used to justify the 'privatization' of wikipedia, turning it into an experts-only publication where the public has no input. This would be as bad a misapplication of the lessons of the Tragedy parable as it is when governments and industry collude to privatize such things as water cooperatives, which are public but managed resources and not vulnerable to the Tragedy at all.

Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology

[rossifer]

Should Wikipedia transition to leaf from cut-point, it may have significant and unforeseen effects on internet-topology.

Wikipedia will remain a node-cluster in the larger web. The only difference is that for Google ranking, they no longer contribute to the ranking of outside websites. This will not stop people from putting relevant external links on Wikipedia pages, it just reduces the benefit to the linked site.

In my experience as a forum webmaster, there is simply no other choice. Any place where the unverified public can put up links, spammers will put up links to their crap, which do more than just use your resources for their ends. If Google notices that your site seems to have become a spammer link-farm, you're entire site will very likely be removed from Google, with all of the bad mojo that entails. So, any page where the unverified public can put up links, those links must be "nofollow", or else...

Personally, I'm astonished that Wikipedia hasn't done this from the beginning.

Ross

Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology

[spun]

Why don't you read the original essay? The tragedy of the commons happened when a common ground was abused because no effective method of management was in place to ensure the integrity of the common land. That method of management could be a single stakeholder, or a communal system of management. The original essay was very clear in regards to the fact that there is more than one way to effectively manage a resource.

Now, we could argue all day as to whether the system of management wikipedia has in place is effective or not, but we cannot argue that it has such a system. Imagine, would there be a tragedy of the commons if everyone felt free to simply kill all the cos of the offenders? If there weas, it would certainly be a different tragedy. That is akin to the management system of wikipedia. No overgrazing because any one person can nuke every single cow on the planet, and any other person can resurect every dead cow on the planet.

An experts only publication would not be a bad idea. Why don't you start one up and tell me when you get say 1/1,000 the number of articles wikipedia has, or 1/10,000 the readers. But don't do it to wikipedia, start your own. Wikipedia already has a system that works well enough. Sorry if you don't like it, but in this free market of ideas, enough people find it useful, as is, to make it one of the most popular sites on the Internet.

Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology

[Lazerf4rt]

...outweigh Wikipedia's rôle as a semantic mediator between alien but related nodes?

False premise. Wikipedia is not a "semantic mediator between alien but related nodes". Wikipedia is just a free encyclopedia.

The only reason why an external link should be placed in Wikipedia is because that external link is already significant in some way. Wikipedia does not exist to make those external links any more significant than they already are. It seems to me that is the essential point of the Wikipedia policy, Wikipedia is not a soapbox.

So, since there is no such "tragedy of the commons", Wikipedia is free to tag their links "nofollow" if they want to. If it raises Wikipedia's search results over the external links in Google, good for them. That's the way it should be. These bloggers who nitpick about Google PageRanks 24/7 strike me as a bunch of whiners, frankly.

Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology

[danpsmith]

Oh the horror. Just imagine if Wikipedia was written only by people who knew what they were talking about. Terrors like that keep me up at night.

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.

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.

Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology

[DragonWriter]

There appears to be a neverending conveyorbelt of excuses for Wikipedia's acute failure to be authoritative or reliable.

A encyclopedia will, even if written by experts, rarely be either authoritative or reliable. It will be at best a rough, selective summary, and usually one which misses much of what is current. An encyclopedia is, at best, a good starting point.

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.

Only if misused. The average library is full of half-truths and errors, and yet no (sane person) says libraries are dangerous. If you are using information you cannot directly evaluate from Wikipedia for any important use, you should be checking the sources cited (and discarding the information if it isn't cited), and evaluating the credibility of those sources and consulting them more fully.

An information resource that is unreliable as history IS PROPAGANDA.

No, its not. It's only "propaganda" if its all written to advance the interests of the same faction. Otherwise, it might contain propaganda (and Wikipedia no doubt in some cases does.) But as a whole it is not a work of propaganda.

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.

A free tertiary reference source is neither a surgeon nor a college textbook. Applying the standards applicable to either of those is inappropriate. Also, its not a ham-and-cheese sandwich, so you shouldn't eat it and expect it to taste like one. It's not inappropriate "special pleading" to suggest that things which are unalike in kind from other things should not be evaluated by the standards applicable to the other, unlike, things.

Wikipedia is, in practice, useful to me for things I care about (even though I have found, and corrected, errors.) I therefore think it has value, in many cases unique value for which no comparable resource of would offer a suitable, reasonable substitute.

Is it perfect? No. Are there other tools which are better for some uses? Certainly. Is it as inappropriate as any encyclopedia as an ultimate source? Certainly.

Is it valuable, and in some cases uniquely so? Yes, I'd say so.

Neither good nor bad. It's immaterial.

[XorNand]

"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...).

Re:Neither good nor bad. It's immaterial.

[RAMMS EIN]

``Google is where it is today because they recognized that the web had evolved past META tags (and other techniques of self-describing content).''

More like meta tags never worked. Much better to judge the content of a page by...looking at the content. Only a fraction of pages included meta tags, anyway.

Jimbo...who are the founders?

[dreddnott]

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!

pointless

[nuzak]

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.

Overlooking the reason for this change

[Distan]

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.

Re:Overlooking the reason for this change

[Bluephonic]

Sorry, that doesn't make sense. As other people have mentioned, nofollow is not a magic incantation that search engine crawlers have no choice but to obey. Google can do whatever it wants with any link (they could choose to completely ignore the nofollow attribute when it's on wikipedia pages, for example).

Re:Wikia is not Wikipedia - please correct story!

[David Gerard]

We're not 'reliable' and we don't claim to be. This is important: we don't save the reader the trouble of having to think when reading.

Most of the complaints that 'Wikipedia isn't reliable' appear to be complaints that we haven't saved them the trouble of thinking. I have to say: too bad. It's useful or it wouldn't be a top 10 site. But it's just written by people. Keep your wits about you as you would reading any website. We work to keep it useful, but if you see something that strikes you as odd, check the references and check the history and check the talk page.

Wikipedia does not save the reader from having to think.