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Wikipedia takes but doesn’t give
By Martin English | January 23, 2007
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.
Topics: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
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January 26th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Isn’t there a better way to fight spam? If a site is linked from Wikipedia and the links stays up, the site ought to be able to benefit! This seems to contradict Wikipedia’s stated goal of spreading knowledge.
January 26th, 2007 at 6:44 am
By the way, why does your comments section “take without giving?”
January 26th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Hi Anush, after months / years of manually controlling spam, the fact that I’ve got a comment from a real person who wanted to know why I moderated my comments has finally convinced to start using , and stop moderating.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Hey, good deal! It was the “external nofollow” I was talking about, actually, but Akismet is certainly a step in the right direction