Wikipedia now adds the Google “nofollow” attribute to all external links, for the usual reasons (fighting spam links). “Nofollow” was always controversial, with many detractors. Now here’s another example of the unintended consequences of thisattribute.

Wikipedia has become a website that takes from the communities but now they don’t give back. There’s the technical side, messing with tools like search engines, which analyze the web’s link structure, but there’s also the social side, where people will simply return the “favour” – finding other sites to link to.

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