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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.
From TFA:
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.
"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...).
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
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
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!
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
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
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.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
This won't solve the problem, since humans may still follow the links, so it's still worthwhile for spammers to have links in Wikipedia. Even if it doesn't up their pagerank, Wikipedia can still serve them as a spam delivery system.
However, it helps Google by not uping spammer's page rank. And less noise in the search results is good for the users of Google.
Loose lips lose spit.
Will Wikipedia face the same fate of the Open Directory Project -- where marketeers have spammed the site to render it useless. Check out the ZDNet post...
How about creating a new Google-style Ranking system that only ranks sites based on the number of no-follow links heading towards them?
which renders those links invisible to search engines.
Uh, not really. The big search engines choose to not follow those links.
Using nofollow reduces the incentive for spammers, but in this case it will hurt search engines. Google wants to provide the most worthy links at the top of search results. Being linked from wikipedia is supposed to denote reliable sources or very relevant information. Therefore Google is slightly more accurate for having those links to follow in wikipedia. The nofollow will make search engines slightly less useful.
Developers: We can use your help.
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
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.
If this is of benefit to the search engine operators, then it should be simple enough for the search engine operators to follow or not follow external links from wikipedia, with or without NOFOLLOW. Wikipedia has a high enough profile that search engines already treat it differently from Average John's Incredibly Boring Blog, and they will know if it is of benefit for them to follow those links, without wikipedia putting some policy in place.
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?)
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.
You can keep your precious italics. Wikipedia encourages me to be bold!
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
So, to recap:
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Wales' behavior may be an issue for Wikipedia. If the same person is involved with a profit-making venture and a nonprofit in the same area, the tax status of the nonprofit becomes questionable. When a US nonprofit files their tax return, they have to list any officers or directors involved with profit-making ventures in the same field.
The IRS is concerned because if you have a nonprofit and a for-profit organization under the same management, it's often possible to structure things so that the for-profit corporation shows a phony tax loss.
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)
... is here; they seem to be concerned about a "search engine optimization world championship".
Personally I think we can all do our bit and stop linking to Wikipedia so much, because Google is starting to give the impression that Wikipedia is the fount of all knowledge - to the detriment of pages which contain better information but which don't happen to have WP's massive net presence.
Wouldn't a better approach be to figure out the average longevity of a spam link on the site, and tag links with 'nofollow' for slightly longer than that period of time? After that they can remove the 'nofollow' because, presumably, if it was spam the link would have been removed already.
For example, auto-add the "nofollow" only to the links added in recent edits (for some definition of recent). Once a particular link was part of the page long enough (and survived other people's edits), it can be followed by the search engines...
I, for one, contributed a number of wild-life pictures to Wikipedia, but am also selling them in my own shop. I don't think, it is unfair for me to expect links to my shop from the contributed images to be followed...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think Wikipedia's decision to "no-follow" their links is quite reasonable. The Internet has seen enough of the manipulators and astroturfers who try their best to distract us, and it shows the worthiness of the Wiki leadership that they'd take this step.
The notion that the Internet is going to organically solve such problems smacks of the magic "free-market" economics that are supposed to make the world a paradise, but end up tilting the field in favor of the most powerful. There is no magic that's going to keep the Internet free. If it's going to stay viable it's only going to do so with careful management by some wise and generous souls. I count the Wikifolk as wise and generous, until they do something to warrant a reevaluation.
And I second the emotion that spun has been just such a wise and generous voice here at Slashdot
You are welcome on my lawn.
IMHO this is part of what's wrong with Wikipedia. They claim to be open to all and to have a community, deciding many things by consensus.
Except when Jimbo, or another well-known admin overrules everyone else.
They've even sneakily formalized this policy in renaming Votes for deletion to Articles for deletion, suggesting that while a discussion can take place about an article's fate, it can generally be ignored if an admin (typically the one placing it up for deletion) disagrees.
There's some interesting information over at WikiTruth about this (like everything else, taken with a grain of salt; there's some obvious bias there).
Anyway, I personally believe this is a bad thing for the overall health of the internet. Wikipedia is a huge site. Making it irrelevant to search engines will probably affect Google quite a lot, and give a *huge* boost to whoever figures out how to get around the nofollow restriction.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I am exhausted. The first 5 comments where all +5 interesting or insightful. I didn't get a troll, link spam or random offtopic rant to catch my breath on.
/. might get a reputation as a place for on-topic discussion about technology.
Somebody needs to ban these people. If this trend continues, then
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
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.