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.
Actually this sort of flow model was well documented in IR, AI, and mathematic research for a period long before Google. While credit should be delivered for implementing this scheme in a world of already-entrenched search engines, it falls into the category of age-old computer science. This same scheme is also used to compute the final likelihood of states in Markov models -- a technique at least 30 or 40 years old.
In a nutshell: the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix.
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 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.
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?)
...
In general, any obvious objection to the idea of a wiki encyclopedia already happens and is already dealt with day to day. We have a ridiculous array of spambots and vandalbots already attacking Wikipedia and trying to turn it to their use, never mind our work trying to write an encyclopedia. So we have an EQUALLY ridiculous array of antivandalbots to deal with these things as needed. Our immune system is quite frightening to contemplate at timesYou will be utterly unsurprised to know this happens already
http://rocknerd.co.uk
All the Wikipedias other than English have had this in place already. It's just that the flood of spammers has been so bad on English Wikipedia we've finally had to put it on there too.
http://rocknerd.co.uk