Monday January 22, 2007
Wikipedia Decides Its Outgoing Links Can't Be Trusted?
I find this sad. By adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to the outgoing links in all articles, the Wikipedia seems to be wavering in its trust of volunteers. Yes, link spam is a problem. And with its combination of high visibility and open authoring, the Wikipedia is a prime target. But why not deal with this problem the same way it deals with other inaccurate and abusive content? Count on the volunteer base to detect and correct issues quickly (and give the administrators tools to lock certain articles which are repeated targets).
Until yesterday, that's exactly how the English-language Wikipedia dealt with link spam. But now the project has thrown up a white flag and said that its volunteers and tools aren't adequate to police the situation. Instead, the equivalent of martial law has been declared and everyone suffers.
The Wikipedia is the closest thing we have to a collective and collaborative voice in describing our world. When an external URL is referenced in a Wikipedia article, it must pass the editorial "litmus test" of all Wikipedians watching that article (who will presumably have high interest and expertise in the subject). With the blanket inclusion of the nofollow attribute on these links, search engines such as Google will no longer use these links as part of their determination of which URLs are most important. So we end up with slightly poorer search results and one less way to register our "votes" for improving them. Sad.
On the bright side, the original announcement does note that "better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super." Presumably, this means that when such tools are made available, the blanket application of nofollow will be removed. Let's hope that happens. Soon.
Tags: nofollow pagerank search spam wikipedia
Posted at 10:12AM Jan 22, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0 | Comments[4]
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
Posted by Greg on January 23, 2007 at 11:10 AM MST #
Posted by Jamey Wood on January 23, 2007 at 12:30 PM MST #
Posted by Dustin Wallace on February 14, 2007 at 01:59 PM MST #
Hi Dustin. I don't think it's accurate to say that the Wikipedia has lost all trust in its content. It still serves content which is authored by its community and gets indexed by Google and other search engines. Stopping the indexing of content would be an entirely different move (requiring the use of a robots.txt).
The use of rel="nofollow" attribute for outgoing links is different. Wikipedia is essentially telling Google: "please keep indexing our pages, but ignore any of our links to non-Wikipedia pages." If I remember correctly, another blogger described this as putting the Wikipedia into the position of "taking" without "giving back" (at least in terms of PageRank-style scoring of search results). They benefit from the hyperlinks which everyone else points in their direction, but never give back via the hyperlinks directed out of the Wikipedia.
Again, I just find that sad and at odds with the basic ideals of meritocracy and community participation underlying the Wikipedia. Hopefully they'll get some tools-based approach in place soon and get rid of the blanket rel="nofollow" setting.
Posted by Jamey Wood on February 14, 2007 at 02:16 PM MST #