Wikipedia Adds No Follow to Links 264
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.
Re:Search Strategy (Score:5, Informative)
Your method of searching wikipedia through google is safe.
"renders those links invisible to search engines"? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Search Strategy (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Wikia is not Wikipedia - please correct story! (Score:5, Informative)
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."
Re:Solves the Wrong Problem (Score:3, Informative)
So, to recap:
Re:Search Strategy (Score:2, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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)
Re:Jimbo...who are the founders? (Score:5, Informative)
Now if only someone can unprotect this article [wikipedia.org]...
Re:Neither good nor bad. It's immaterial. (Score:2, Informative)
I don't really subscribe to the Google==Good viewpoint commonly seen on Slashdot. I'm not saying Google==Evil, just that very little in this world is an unalloyed good, and that very much applies to Google. Most of my reasons are off-topic, but a bit of it is also abusing a standard for a temporary corporate gain. This is especially egregious when done by players who are so large that the original intent of a standard is completely lost. Which clearly is the case here.
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:3, Informative)
This is why I feel that Google needs to provide multiple indexing algorithms, where a user can decide how pages are ranked in their search results. This would make things a bit more complicated for Google, but even more complicated for the people try target deficiencies in the algorithm. The idea being if there are multiple algorithms, it is hard to know which one to target.
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wikia is not Wikipedia - please correct story! (Score:3, Informative)
Some people misunderstand what Wikipedia is, definitely. But I think we differ on the importance of reliability: I see an unreliable source as not merely 'requiring people to think' but potentially deeply messing up someone's understanding of a topic. Once the brain learns something incorrect or biased, it often takes effort and attention to unlearn it.
There are all sorts of ideas on how to abstract a "reliable" subset of Wikipedia. Someone just has to bother, really.
I do think reliable things can probably come out of Wikipedia, and I look forward to them. That said, I'm helping pursue a slightly different model as part of the executive committee of Citizendium.
My hope is that there'll be some opportunity for complementarity between Wikipedia and Citizendium-- ultimately we're on the same side, after all. Maybe we can chat about it more after we've had some time to sink or swim (so far things look good).
Mike Johnson
Just as a clarification (Score:3, Informative)
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".