The Gong Show - Latest Comments in Wikipedia Rel=NoFollow

Re: Wikipedia Rel=NoFollow

Stevewesting — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 13:13:45 -0000

It has nothing to do with spam. Wikipedia doe not want legitimate sites to get a boost from the links so that Wikipedia's own pages will out rank all the legitmate sites. Try Google searching "George Bush", the Wikipedia page out ranks George Bush's own website. If the Wikipedia page for George Bush had a link to George Bush's site without the no-follow tag it may be the other way around. Wikipedia itself has twisted and exploited Google's no-follow idea and turned into an advantage for Wikipedia.

Re: Wikipedia Rel=NoFollow

leafar — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:10:48 -0000

AGREE ! And i do like the proposition of willcole after a few vote from trusted users, the link will get its follow atribute. It will be a good incentive to the wikipedia community to actually review more the links at the end of the page. It will be a new ESP game.
I am a large contributor on wikipedia (mainly in french) and I am sure i will play that game. Furthermore wikipedia should allow only those with a good amount fo contribution to actullay vote. That's what we do on ulike.net with the "keeper" status and it's working fine. (I am happy that wikipedia is giving more and more credit to the old and good contributor, equality is good but filtering demand different level of trust).

Sincerely.

Re: Wikipedia Rel=NoFollow

andrewparker — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:24:35 -0000

I think the "upgrade a link" idea. I think that would work well in a
crowdsourced community like Wikipedia.
Regarding spammer motivation, despite making links nofollow on the average
blog comment thread, blog comments still get pounded by comment spam. By
12:21pm today, Akismat alone caught over 6.6MM spam comments. And, I'm sure
the vast majority of those spam comments, if they had gone through, would
have been on a comment thread that implements rel=nofollow. So, despite
having no PageRank incentive, spammers still pound the heck out of blog
comments. I think the same principle and incentives apply to Wikipedia
today.

Re: Wikipedia Rel=NoFollow

willcole — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:18:57 -0000

Not sure I agree. You make it seem like the direct traffic is the only reason someone would create a link. Of course page rank is an incentive, and no follow completely removes that incentive. The traffic fire hose is only really relevant on pages with huge amounts of traffic, which are usually the pages that are better maintained and less susceptible to spam in the first place. The articles with bad spam problems are usually the ones that receive less traffic, and therefore less attention from legitimate editors. These pages still receive some page rank, and were the primary problem that I remember on wikipedia prior to the nofollow implementation.

I do feel like there ought to be a way to award legitimate links in wikipedia by grading links or editor votes that could upgrade a link.