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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the problem is in the "metrics" themselves. Perhaps we should stop assigning a quality value to something because it has lots of links. It's no more valid than the notion that a piece of music is better than another because it has been played lots of times on the radio, or even because more people buy it.
Which is why Wikipedia is a pretty good way to add value to the vast information of the Internet, using the collective judgment (and a little bit of enlightened meritocracy thrown in for good measure).
You are welcome on my lawn.