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Wikipedia Adds No Follow to Links
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jan 22, 2007 02:29 PM
from the things-that-shouldn't-matter dept.
from the things-that-shouldn't-matter dept.
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.
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Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
The situation is a classic tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org]: 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.
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Insightful)
I bring up the point about the Tragedy of the Commons because the parable has been used as an excuse to privatize communally managed resources, when such resources do not fall prey to the Tragedy. Reasoning such as yours could be used to justify the 'privatization' of wikipedia, turning it into an experts-only publication where the public has no input. This would be as bad a misapplication of the lessons of the Tragedy parable as it is when governments and industry collude to privatize such things as water cooperatives, which are public but managed resources and not vulnerable to the Tragedy at all.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The current problem with Wikipedia is more of an offshoot from Tragedy of the Commons. In the grand tradition of Slashdot analogy-stretching:
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Interesting)
...
In general, any obvious objection to the idea of a wiki encyclopedia already happens and is already dealt with day to day. We have a ridiculous array of spambots and vandalbots already attacking Wikipedia and trying to turn it to their use, never mind our work trying to write an encyclopedia. So we have an EQUALLY ridiculous array of antivandalbots to deal with these things as needed. Our immune system is quite frightening to contemplate at timesYou will be utterly unsurprised to know this happens already
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, we could argue all day as to whether the system of management wikipedia has in place is effective or not, but we cannot argue that it has such a system. Imagine, would there be a tragedy of the commons if everyone felt free to simply kill all the cos of the offenders? If there weas, it would certainly be a different tragedy. That is akin to the management system of wikipedia. No overgrazing because any one person can nuke every single cow on the planet, and any other person can resurect every dead cow on the planet.
An experts only publication would not be a bad idea. Why don't you start one up and tell me when you get say 1/1,000 the number of articles wikipedia has, or 1/10,000 the readers. But don't do it to wikipedia, start your own. Wikipedia already has a system that works well enough. Sorry if you don't like it, but in this free market of ideas, enough people find it useful, as is, to make it one of the most popular sites on the Internet.
uncommonly tragic? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:uncommonly tragic? (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sick and tired of this particular beef with wikipedia. Just because you can't quote wikipedia in your thesis for your doctorate doesn't mean its useless. If you want reliable source material look elsewhere, if you want an exorbitant quantity of information, Wikipedia has that. It's the quick and dirty resource for people who might just need to know a few things about a subject without having to fact check and such. That's what it should be treated as. The fact that non-experts are allowed to edit entries is what made it grow to be the resource it is today.
If some of the information is inaccurate, so what? It's not like heart surgeons are looking up how to conduct an operation on Wikipedia. People need to stop beating on its potential for inaccuracy and instead see it as what it is, a great resource for learning about topics or at least a starting point given no other resources. The Internet as a whole tends to have a large amount of inaccurate information, but that doesn't make the Internet useless. The quantity of information largely and fully outweighs the risk of inaccuracy. Everything has inaccuracies anyway, and Wikipedia's usefulness makes any mistakes it has well worth the benefit of having it versus not having it. It's a mighty powerful resource, and I'm tired of hearing it bashed just because some random vandal could and sometimes does screw up a few entries (even though they are usually fixed in a pretty timely manner). It's an online resource, take it for what it is and quit bitching about how one entry out of 10,000 is inaccurate, and just be thankful you have the 10,000 entries. Or better yet, just don't use it if you find it offensive.
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Insightful)
A encyclopedia will, even if written by experts, rarely be either authoritative or reliable. It will be at best a rough, selective summary, and usually one which misses much of what is current. An encyclopedia is, at best, a good starting point.
Only if misused. The average library is full of half-truths and errors, and yet no (sane person) says libraries are dangerous. If you are using information you cannot directly evaluate from Wikipedia for any important use, you should be checking the sources cited (and discarding the information if it isn't cited), and evaluating the credibility of those sources and consulting them more fully.
No, its not. It's only "propaganda" if its all written to advance the interests of the same faction. Otherwise, it might contain propaganda (and Wikipedia no doubt in some cases does.) But as a whole it is not a work of propaganda.
A free tertiary reference source is neither a surgeon nor a college textbook. Applying the standards applicable to either of those is inappropriate. Also, its not a ham-and-cheese sandwich, so you shouldn't eat it and expect it to taste like one. It's not inappropriate "special pleading" to suggest that things which are unalike in kind from other things should not be evaluated by the standards applicable to the other, unlike, things.
Wikipedia is, in practice, useful to me for things I care about (even though I have found, and corrected, errors.) I therefore think it has value, in many cases unique value for which no comparable resource of would offer a suitable, reasonable substitute.
Is it perfect? No. Are there other tools which are better for some uses? Certainly. Is it as inappropriate as any encyclopedia as an ultimate source? Certainly.
Is it valuable, and in some cases uniquely so? Yes, I'd say so.
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience as a forum webmaster, there is simply no other choice. Any place where the unverified public can put up links, spammers will put up links to their crap, which do more than just use your resources for their ends. If Google notices that your site seems to have become a spammer link-farm, you're entire site will very likely be removed from Google, with all of the bad mojo that entails. So, any page where the unverified public can put up links, those links must be "nofollow", or else...
Personally, I'm astonished that Wikipedia hasn't done this from the beginning.
Ross
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Interesting)
All the Wikipedias other than English have had this in place already. It's just that the flood of spammers has been so bad on English Wikipedia we've finally had to put it on there too.
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (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 sear
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:5, Insightful)
False premise. Wikipedia is not a "semantic mediator between alien but related nodes". Wikipedia is just a free encyclopedia.
The only reason why an external link should be placed in Wikipedia is because that external link is already significant in some way. Wikipedia does not exist to make those external links any more significant than they already are. It seems to me that is the essential point of the Wikipedia policy, Wikipedia is not a soapbox [wikipedia.org].
So, since there is no such "tragedy of the commons", Wikipedia is free to tag their links "nofollow" if they want to. If it raises Wikipedia's search results over the external links in Google, good for them. That's the way it should be. These bloggers who nitpick about Google PageRanks 24/7 strike me as a bunch of whiners, frankly.
Re:Wikipedia and Internet-Topology (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither good nor bad. It's immaterial. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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...).
Re:Neither good nor bad. It's immaterial. (Score:5, Insightful)
More like meta tags never worked. Much better to judge the content of a page by...looking at the content. Only a fraction of pages included meta tags, anyway.
Re:Neither good nor bad. It's immaterial. (Score:5, Interesting)
In a nutshell: the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Neither good nor bad. It's immaterial. (Score:5, Funny)
Jimbo...who are the founders? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yesterday, after reading and noting glaring inconsistencies in the Wikipedia articles and talk pages for Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Larry Sanger [wikipedia.org], and Jimbo Wales [wikipedia.org], as well as Jimbo Wales' user page [wikipedia.org], 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!
Re:Jimbo...who are the founders? (Score:5, Informative)
Now if only someone can unprotect this article [wikipedia.org]...
"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.
pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Better for Google, not Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Idea for a New Search Engine with Unique Ranking? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Idea for a New Search Engine with Unique Rankin (Score:5, Interesting)
Not invisible (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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:Wikia is not Wikipedia - please correct story! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the complaints that 'Wikipedia isn't reliable' appear to be complaints that we haven't saved them the trouble of thinking. I have to say: too bad. It's useful or it wouldn't be a top 10 site. But it's just written by people. Keep your wits about you as you would reading any website. We work to keep it useful, but if you see something that strikes you as odd, check the references and check the history and check the talk page.
Wikipedia does not save the reader from having to think.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some people misunderstand what Wikipedia is, definitely. But I think we differ on the importance of reliability: I see an unreliable
Call this version 1.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I like this idea. nofollow is more useful for the unmaintained or rarely-main
I doubt it'll stop wiki spamming (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Let the search engines do this themselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Overlooking the reason for this change (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Could be a tax issue for Wikipedia (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Overlooking the reason for this change (Score:4, Insightful)
The "official" announcement... (Score:3, Insightful)
... is here [wikimedia.org]; 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.
Overkill (Score:3, Insightful)
Could they not do it smarter? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [cafepress.com]. I don't think, it is unfair for me to expect links to my shop from the contributed images to be followed...
Re:Could they not do it smarter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia administration, and no, this is not good (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [wikitruth.info] 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.
Re:Search Strategy (Score:5, Informative)
Your method of searching wikipedia through google is safe.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So, to recap: